The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, published in 1962, details how news media in the 20th century transformed into a powerful engine generating pass

The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, published in 1962, details how news media in the 20th century transformed into a powerful engine generating passable stories and news, fueled only tentatively by developments in the real world. Conferences, interviews, panels of experts, reactions, leaks, behind the scenes peeks, press releases, debates, endless opinions and think pieces, so much else... We already live in the synthetic age. Is it about to get worse? It's hard to say. GPT may eventually be able to sling it with the best of them, but humans have a trillion dollar media culture complex in place already. In a sense, we are prepared for this. The question posed here is broadly the same as the issue we've been coping with since the invention of printing and photography. Is it real or is it staged? My parents both worked in a newsroom -- my father was an editor and columnist, and my mom a reporter. There is something called a "byline strike", where reporters collectively withdraw consent to have their names appear in the paper. It's not a work stoppage -- the product (newspaper) goes out just the same, just without bylines. Among other things, this is embarrassing for the paper because it draws attention to their labor problems at the top of every article. More fundamental, at least from my dad's perspective, was that it seriously undermined the credibility of the paper. Who are the people writing these articles? Do they even live in this city? Who would trust a paper full of reports that nobody was willing to put their name on? This paper went on to change hands in the 90s, fire its editors and buy out senior staff, then moved editorial operations out of the state entirely I am concerned about GPT but I don't think we are going into anything fundamentally new yet, in this sense. Media culture is overwhelmingly powerful in the west, and profitable. GPTs and their successors will massively disrupt labor economics and work (again), but not like... the nature of believability and personhood, or the ratio of real to synthetic. That ship is already long gone, the mixture already saturated.