“Future“ and the future of media

“Future“ and the future of media

First-party content and the case for smart propaganda

Matthew Yglesias

 Jun 18 

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(Liz Hafalia/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

For years now, I’ve been hearing rich technology industry people complain about the media — both its attitude toward their industry in particular and its approach to the world in general.

At the highest level, these complaints are no so different from what Joe Biden was complaining about on the tarmac when he said journalists’ questions always emphasize the negative. And while I think there are some good reasons for a tendency toward negativity among journalists, there is also real truth in this critique.

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But I’ve been frustrated for a long time by the tech-specific version of this criticism for two main reasons. One is that the technology industry itself, by greatly increasing the importance of “engagement” in the media landscape, has actually done a fair amount to ramp up negativism. But the other is that rich media people, unlike Joe Biden, are actually in a position to do something about this.

After all, digital technology in the 21st century has had two related impacts on the media industry. The first is that the cost of producing and distributing journalism content has fallen dramatically. The second is that in part because of those rapidly falling distribution costs, it’s much harder to actually make money than it used to be. That means that non-profit or loss leader models of journalism are much more appealing than they used to be.

This month the storied venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz finally stepped up and launched an online magazine called “Future” that doesn’t complain about tech-negativity in the media; it just makes tech-positive content. So you can read Caleb Watney on a Marshall Plan for global vaccinations or Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen bragging about how awesome their Fast Grants initiative was or Marc Andreessen arguing that technology saved the planet during Covid-19. This is, I think, exactly what rich people annoyed by the media should do. Spend money creating media they like better. But you could do much better than Future, and over time I hope Andreessen Horowitz will.

The double envelopment of ad-based media

Facebook and Google loom so large in the discourse today that I think people tend to underrate the extent to which the internet per se has been a disaster for media business models.

The old idea of an American media business was geographic segmentation. If you have a TV transmitter, it only goes so far. Within a given geography, only so many stations can broadcast. And the stations can’t really expand their range far outside of that geography. A newspaper, similarly, is at its root a manufactured product. You own a newspaper factory, and you own a logistical operation to deliver papers from that factory to surrounding areas. It would be very difficult to distribute papers beyond a certain radius, and also very difficult for a competitor to get in on your turf.

So even a paper like the Toledo Blade, whose audience wasn’t huge, was still the way to advertise to people in Toledo. Everyone got to charge high prices for their ads, and everyone got to mostly worry about not making anyone too upset.

The internet upends that logic. Not Facebook, not Google, not Twitter, just the basic idea of highly networked computers. In an internet world, it is very easy to distribute your product from anywhere to anywhere. So things are very, very, very competitive, and it’s going to be hard to make the kind of money you made in the segmented monopoly days. It’s also going to be particularly difficult to get by based on projecting a kind of staid respectability. You need to stand out and grab attention — more like in the UK tabloid newspaper market.

Conversely, though, if you just wanted to get articles in front of people’s faces back in the day, that would be very difficult and expensive. The media was lucrative because the barriers to entry were so high. Today, to make and distribute journalism you really just need to hire some journalists. That’s not nothing, but it is much much cheaper than building a printing plant and hiring a fleet of drivers. Right now, large companies spend pretty heavily on public relations, marketing, and corporate communications. But a very logical alternative is to supplement or replace that with first-party editorial content.

Future should think bigger

If I have a critique of Future, it’s that in a very non-VC way, they are not thinking big enough.

The purpose of the publication is to foster a tech-positive media niche. But if you read it, that purpose is much too obvious. If you disagree with the tech-positivity worldview, you’ll find it immediately off-putting. If you sympathize with the tech-positive worldview (as I do), you’ll find yourself constantly on guard for things to make fun of to prove you’re not a dupe. A lot of the content that is not cheerleading for tech positivity is like weird industry insider stuff. This is not the way.

What they ought to be doing is thinking like Rupert Murdoch, especially in his newspaper guise.

The whole deal with the New York Post or the Murdoch tabloids in Britain is that they’re mostly just fun, engaging newspapers. When I was a kid, my dad would read the Post because he thought they had the best sports section. Now my dad is also an upscale liberal who is subscribed to the New York Times. But if you want to wield political influence, the most important thing is to have the best sports section in town, not the best politics coverage in town. Persuadable people care less about politics than hard-core partisans do, and they’re likely to pick a paper on the basis of its sports coverage. Then you just slot the politics in here and there.

That’s why the Sinclair Broadcasting model of buying local TV stations and turning them into right-wing propaganda is so clever and so dangerous. Most of the programming isn’t news. Most of the news isn’t political. So you have an audience of people who are not self-selecting into wanting to watch right-wing political propaganda, and then you show them some propaganda.

The way forward is not to build a publication around tech positivity — it’s to build a publication that’s good and that weaves tech positivity themes into its coverage.

Highbrow propaganda

I think the best way to do that is to bring back the genre of media that’s been hardest hit by the internet — the earnest beat reporter.

My inclination is to say that old school “view from nowhere” style journalism was a genuinely bad way to cover the white-hot center of American politics. But it was actually really helpful to have things like city council budget hearings and school board meetings covered in a kind of blah, “just the facts, ma’am” kind of way. Obviously, school board meetings would be a bit of a weird thing for a venture capital firm to delve into. But if you think of them as especially wanting an audience of technology people, then making covering the bimonthly Santa Clara County School Board meetings would actually be a good idea. They happen on the first and third Wednesday of each month. Then the San Francisco School Board meets on the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month.

Maybe that’s the foundation of a Bay Area education beat that would be interesting to technology workers — no hot takes on the future of digital education, just earnest, thorough reporting on what is going on in the local school systems.

There could be a beat reporter following the federal Department of Energy or someone stationed on Capitol Hill covering the congressional science committees.

That stuff — the kind of good old-fashioned journalism they don’t make anymore, but with the topics skewed toward the likely interests of the intended audience — becomes the main scaffolding of the publication. Then the stuff that’s up there right now becomes the bells and whistles. My way would be more expensive than what they are currently doing. But we are talking about people who have a lot of money and who have a lot of money at stake in whether or not people embrace a kind of tech-positive worldview. It would be worth it.

But this isn’t a limited recommendation to Andreessen Horowitz. Lots of companies or trade associations could do this usefully. Imagine the airline trade association producing a smart, highly credible publication that covered transportation policy (which, after all, has overwhelmingly nothing to do with airlines) in a sober-minded way but then with a bit of a thumb on the scales when it comes to stuff directly touching on the airlines. Obviously, to people brought up with a certain understanding of journalism, this idea of media-as-propaganda is going to be scary. But propaganda is an inevitable element of a world where producing and distributing content is cheap but monetizing content is hard.

The traditional news model is dying anyway, if not dead already across significant swathes of geography. I think one of the best things we can do is nudge people in the direction of “constructive propaganda” — propaganda that gains its efficacy precisely from being a minority current in a sea of basically credible reporting.

First-party parties

Alex Pareene wrote a piece in The New Republic with a headline I really liked: “Here’s an Idea for Liberals: Propaganda.”

But Pareene’s idea is too small, like the current version of Future. He calls for Democrats to invest money in ad campaigns that boost the Democratic Party per se rather than any particular candidate. It’s a totally solid idea, and they should absolutely do it. The real win, though, would be to go all the way back to the 19th-century roots of American newspapers as partisan outlets and invest in creating a first-party content brand.

The crucial thing is this wouldn’t just be a news site with a left-of-center brand (there are plenty of those), but rather one that deliberately tried to elevate left-of-center ideas that are popular with swing voters. Conventional media, when it has a leftward tilt, tends to do so in a somewhat counterproductive way. Essentially you have young college graduates who live in big cities making stuff that appeals to their friends, who are also young college graduates who live in big cities. It gives a leftward spin on the news, but also a politically toxic framing of the main dividing lines of American politics.

An effective propaganda outlet would try to cultivate an older, more working-class audience — the kind of people who are supporting Eric Adams — and would mix straight news with coverage that focuses on the concrete material stakes in government. Jon Tester delivering for Montana public lands. Joe Biden delivering an expanded Child Tax Credit. ARP funding keeping cops and teachers alike employed. You could also do inverse-Fox and elevate the most unpopular right-wing ideas. Bring a well-connected Republican economist on to talk about how the minimum wage should be $0. Find a House backbencher who agrees and interview him. Get conservatives talking about how this is what they’d do if political considerations didn’t stop them.

I have my differences with both of them, but Bernie Sanders kind of took steps in this direction during his 2020 campaign with a David Sirota newsletter and a Briahna Joy Gray podcast. The key, though, is to hire people who practice and disseminate ruthless message discipline, not people like Sirota and Gray.

The platforms themselves

But to return to Andreessen Horowitz for a moment, something that I hope the Future venture will do is prompt some self-reflection in the technology community regarding the extent to which they have created the media climate that they hate.

By breaking down geographic silos, the internet was inherently going to be destabilizing to traditional media business models. But most content distribution these days doesn’t happen through direct access to websites; it’s mediated via Google and Facebook, and to a lesser extent, smaller networks like Twitter. All of these platforms, but especially Facebook, made an architectural decision that they want to give maximum visibility to content that is maximally engaging. This makes a certain narrow kind of sense — the designers of the Facebook app want to get people to use Facebook more which means ensuring Facebook is full of the most engaging stuff.

There’s a thought experiment in the AI community about the Paperclip Maximizer, an AI that is given the banal task of figuring out how to make more paperclips. It turns out to take this very literally (like a genie in a movie) and does something like deliberately unleash a deadly pandemic because killing off 90% of humanity will free up resources for paperclip production.

Facebook is kind of like that but for human society. Relative to the average person, tech people tend to have a more optimistic, more cosmopolitan, more positive-sum view of the world. But it turns out that engagement-maximization mostly boosts rightwing populists pushing pessimistic negative-sum worldviews while giving a secondary boost to leftwing populists pushing a different set of pessimistic negative-sum worldviews. Oops!

Peter Thiel, who is deeply involved with Facebook, has this view that billionaires can kind of ride in the slipstream of conservative populism, crush electoral democracy and political equality, and then keep the flame of technological progress alive as a kind of esoteric knowledge. I don’t think that works on a whole number of levels (I should spell this out in a post of its own someday). Future says “we are pro-tech, pro-markets, pro-innovation,” which I think is what a wide range of tech industry stakeholders would say. But I think to make pro-tech, pro-markets, pro-innovation sustainable, you need a public culture that reflects those values. That means publications that propound them. But it also means a distribution technology that isn’t constantly amplifying the most hysterical negative-sum overreaction to everything on the planet.

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