As Kanye buys Parler and Elon buys Twitter, as Jeff bought the Washington Post, and as the NYTimes has been owned by one family for generations, as the ‘free press’ is bought and sold by billionaires, you have to ask the question that’s not fit to print? If we have a free press, why is it so fucking expensive?

It’s easy to forget that media is a commodity, no different from sausages or bombs. I’ve worked in a newspaper and walked past the whirring assembly line, it was an enormous, expensive, machine, fed with rolls of expensive paper and ink. The trucks line up, distribution goes out, it’s an industrial operation. It’s a business.

Media is a business of huge machines and massive payrolls. It’s very capital-intensive. It’s very capitalist. Not only do you have to pay to play, the game itself is all about the money. The media is quite brazenly and openly bought and paid for by big business. Corporations literally put their names and logos all over the thing. It’s called advertising. The media openly publishes press releases from the CIA or whoever, effectively privatizing propaganda.

As any rapper would tell you, it’s all about the money. Media pretends it’s following every lead, but all you have to do is follow the money. There is no free press. It’s all bought and paid for. And that’s very troubling.

Real Free Speech

This is real free speech. Some schmuck on a keyboard talking to you. You talking to another parent and school. You talking to your football team, or the people at work. When rich people use machinery to drown out that speech, to use machines in every bar, in every living room, in every pocket to spew out a few voices saying the same few things, that’s not ‘free’ speech, It’s the privatization of speech. It’s the equation of speech with money. It’s the free speech rights of corporations more than people like me and you.

That’s important to understand. As I’ve discussed, corporations are legal people. Corporations are already sentient AI, they’re all around us. Have been for centuries. Corporations have Supreme-Court-given free speech rights in the heart of White Empire (America) and they have more power than most governments all over the world. People don’t understand how utterly banal the idea of corporate personhood is in law, and thus in the world we live in. It’s been established case law for centuries. The world makes much more sense if you understand us living with sentient corporations. The media thus makes more sense as the ‘free speech’ of corporations, to the enslavement of the human soul.

The human soul is not really meant for mass media. The power to see whatever is happening anywhere is godlike. The mistake we think is that seeing things makes us each democratic gods. The reality is that it’s all be beamed down for us from Oligarch Olympus, selectively and seductively. The real power is not seeing god. It’s owning him.

The reason the media sucks is not because humans are corrupt. I mean, they are, but you always have to follow the money. Who is doing the corrupting? And most importantly, cui bono, who benefits. If you admit the word ‘who’ into your vocabulary to include corporations, the answer becomes much clearer. We think the magnates are controlling the machines, pulling the strings, but it’s really the opposite. Or at the least, more symbiotic.

The machines are using us too. The DNA of a corporation is that it must seek more profit, it must consume and control more energy to exist. Like any living organism really. ‘Natural’ vs ‘artificial’ is really just a prejudice. These machines have to grow or die, and a media machine is no different from a sausage machine or a bomb machine. It just wants to eat, and if it makes money for shareholders, they’ll feed the machine whatever people, land, or resources it wants. It’s a symbiotic relationship which has directed massiveenergy flows to a few corporations and a few million human beings. Every corporation has the same desire for survival that we do. We all just want to make a buck.

Understood this way, it is banal that corporations are people. As far as they state is concerned, they’re just another set of property owners. Unlike those wretched homeless, or violent bedouins, or anybody without paperwork. We live in an age where masses of people are literally declared illegal while corporations are legal people. This all hides in plain sight. It’s the banality of evil.

The problem is not really Mr. West, or Musk, or Bezos, or the Ochs-Sulzbergers. These are just the digestive bacteria inside of much larger corporate beings. They have bought up a ‘right’ and privatized it, lobotomized it, and made it into just another commodity. Just another way to make money. All the stuff about ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ is just more advertising. The press is owned by fucking oligarchs. Obviously it upholds oligarchy.