Making Money Real

Spreading the News

We used to have town criers, and “newspapers” existed long before the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, or internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acta_Diurna

The important thing is that a larger population shares the news and is able to agree on some common reality, even if that shared reality is not actually real.

This isn’t sufficient for any enduring human society. For a nation to survive and thrive, it must, over time, pay attention to the truth. When it is a smaller group of fewer than 200 people, you already know which of them you can regard as good sources of information and who the best liars are.

Truth Matters

One problem with things that aren’t true becoming part of that reality is made clear in Voltaire’s quotation.

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

― Voltaire

The other problem is simply physics

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

— Philip K. Dick

So if the society, nation, or civilization uses agreed-on “facts” that are not true, it eventually ends up facing opposition from Mother Nature or its neighbors. Potentially fatal opposition. This is a social evolution that, to date, has not failed in its application.

If the society, nation, or civilization is not agreeing on “facts,” true or not, it is doomed to splinter into shards that agree with themselves and nobody else. So when different “news” organizations present alternative facts, they tear society apart. They can only manage NOT doing this (if they are indeed independent) by adhering to the truth, which remains singular no matter what a philosopher may argue. Truth is not a matter of opinion.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-cause-of-americas-post-truth-predicament/ via @sciam

Therefore: To have a society or nation larger than the limitations inherent in Dunbar’s number, we must disseminate factual and complete information to every citizen.

We have a word for the dissemination of facts; we call it the “News.”

We also have a word for the dissemination of non-factual or intentionally incomplete “facts”; we call it “Propaganda.”

But gathering and publishing news costs something, and the larger the civilization, the more expensive that publishing becomes. Yet the citizens have to be able to trust the media, and the news has to be provided to every citizen, no matter how wealthy or poor they may be.

Which leads us to the question that is the title of this post.

Who pays?

There are 3 sources possible: We, as subscribers; We, as consumers; We, as our government. If we are subscribers then the poorest cannot access the news equally to the rest of us. If as consumers the corporations selling us goods will also control, or if benign, merely influence, our news sources. If we pay through our government, the government will control those sources, and we know how that invariably works out in the end. We are the ones who have to pay for that information, but there are problems with each of these and they are serious.

This is not looking good.

The suggestion I offer here is the media voucher. The government must provide vouchers, and a generous lot of them as we are going to need serious media funding if advertisers are not to be involved. The vouchers are then used to subscribe to sources of news and to services that check the facts being offered by those sources and independently provide us with their “reputation.” The reputation is displayed in your browser in much the same way as the “https” in the corner of our screens gives us an indication of the security of our connections.

To manage the existing dominance of intentional ignorance, the subscriptions are offered to the Citizens and Residents of a country, its educational institutions, its research institutions, and its libraries. Individual citizens are perhaps 49%, Universities and other Educational institutions 25%, Research Organizations 16%, and Libraries 10%. The exact numbers may be adjusted but the goal is that the people who have an allegiance to the truth will influence the “commercial” interest of the news providers, giving them an incentive to check their stories and ledes.

There is more complexity underlying this suggestion of course. Ratings can be legally challenged. Rating agencies will themselves be rated, and the rating process, while different from news gathering, is not cheap either. But no democracy of any stripe can long survive without spending the effort and the money to keep its citizens well informed.