This is why powerful people have been striving to capture social media networks. Why Musk bought twitter, it's why Russia has blocked the internet, why China has a firewall.

It's doesn't matter if reporters are reporting your propaganda, somehow you need people to think those stories are important.

Social media suggests an organic and wildly democratic way of doing this and I think it scares some powerful people to death.

They have been mostly successful retaining control.

But, at the same time I see reason for hope. The fact that Russia has basically decided that it just can't deal with people having access to the internet anymore means that even the deeply propaganda filled and regulated internet was *still* having a destabilizing impact on the centralization of information and ideas.

This also applies to US media. And there was a time when many would scoff at this comparison. But I think people see what's happening to networks and they get it.

The nightmare of the powerful is a media landscape that is entirely organic. Where what is news is decided in the way that ants make decisions, every ant makes her own choice and the decisions are emergent.

Emergent editorial control.

So, it's important to me what articles you choose to share and what you have to say about them. It's helpful when you explain who the big actors in your local news are, who you identify, how you identify them.

I do still think there is a role for pundits, but now all pundits are freelance.

This is why so much money and power focused on Joe Rogan. He's essentially a kind of pundit and the hope is that here is one place where it's possible to centrally control what is and isn't "the news" -- but, even Rogan faces backlash if he can't keep it feeling authentic.

Sometimes my liberal friends say it makes them sad that in the US we don't all watch NBC and CBS news hour anymore. The chaos is scary.

I understand what my liberal friends are sad about when they are nostalgic about the media centralization of the past, but they are forgetting the way that massive lies were propagated and never questioned in that environment.

It is true that when Dan Rather did the news some things we see today would never fly... but I have spent my whole adult life unlearning the lies about US history that kind of news propagated.

We each must take some responsibility and 'Tell the news' ourselves.