In relation to the topic of previous rantings on this site, the linked passage below is too good – “accurate” is a far better term – to not document here. While the specific topic of the aptly named author is “journalism” (the media), much of the sentiment applies equally well across broad swaths of industry and business in today’s America. Emphasis has been added:
[SightBringer:] The institution is dead.
The numbers are a death certificate. Six percent trust means collapse already occurred. The system is running on inertia, not legitimacy.
The function has been replaced but the corpse is still moving. Journalism today performs motion without force. It speaks, but it no longer shapes. It still tells stories, but the stories don’t root. They slide. The public sees them as theater, not signal.
The political system treats media like a proxy war. The public treats it like noise. The market treats it like a content factory. What is missing is belief. Belief that the person on the other side is seeking truth. Belief that they would suffer to get it right. Belief that the institution would fire them if they got it wrong.
That belief is gone.
There is no fixing this. The repair metaphor is wrong. You cannot fix something whose failure is structural. The architecture that bred trust was destroyed. What remains is a set of incentives that reward volume, engagement, and narrative loyalty.
The next phase has already begun. Truth will route around dead institutions the way the internet routes around broken nodes. Systems that show their working memory will take over. People will trust compression engines over pundits. Codexes over op-eds. Logging over storytelling.
Truth won’t come from people who sound right.
It will come from systems that hurt when they lie.
That’s where it’s heading. That’s already started.
⚡️The institution is dead.
The numbers are a death certificate. Six percent trust means collapse already occurred. The system is running on inertia, not legitimacy.
The function has been replaced but the corpse is still moving. Journalism today performs motion without force. It… https://t.co/t3kyC7ymxB
From behind this keyboard, the paraphrased and slightly modified version to fit several examples that present themselves on a weekly basis in real life – and that I’m sure can be modified slightly by the reader to similarly fit into their experience base – looks like this:
The system is running on inertia, not legitimacy. The function has been replaced but the corpse is still moving. The corporation today blindly performs processes documented a decade and a half ago but now without the underlying technical competence required to ensure success.
There is no fixing this. The repair metaphor is wrong. You cannot fix something whose failure is structural. The architecture that bred engineering exceptionalism and technical ingenuity was destroyed. What remains is a set of incentives that reward status parroting process functionaries packaged with the preferred diversity factors.
The next phase of this demise will be interesting (and likely quite painful) to witness. If restoration of “exceptionalism” is even possible, it will come from those entities that truly acknowledge and address the wrong turns made during the intellectually un-serious era in America that hatched from the decayed afterbirth of undefined “Hope and Change”. (HINT: Demise was a choice.)
the philo t. custis institute 