Fox News Epiphany

Fox News Epiphany

I’ve come to an epiphany— The Fox News audience is a bonsai tree, and Fox News is this bonsai tree’s master.

Fox News tenderly cultivates and nourishes its own audience for its own pleasure and profit. Fox News carefully prunes the bonsai tree (i.e. its audience) in order to extract the advertising dollars that grow from the tree.

This tree must be forced to grow in a specific way that does not occur in nature because allowing it to grow free and unfettered would soon allow it to grow into a wilderness that Fox News would no longer be able to control. Should their audience grow into a wilderness, Fox News would not be able to package it into a palatable boxed product that they can sell to advertisers.

Commercial organizations other than Fox News, on the other hand, have to deal with this wilderness because they do not control their audience nor their market. Such is the devil in the free market— it is inherently free and unfettered!

It is for this reason (and not because of cancel culture) that many commercial organizations have decided to distance themselves from right-wing voter suppression policies— because their market demands it of them. Yet Fox News remains defiantly exempt from such market pressures.

Fox News is different from other commercial organizations, however, because they do not need to participate in the free market. Instead, they may cleverly choose to create their very own special market!

They can curate a special garden of their very own and grow just a single bonsai tree in the garden and tailor that tree for a particular garden that they wish to have. Thus, the tree and the garden and the master are one and the same.

For you see, the free market is wild and wooly and untamed. A lovely bonsai tree, instead, can be tamed by carefully pruning here and there and restricting its nutrients and the size of its roots. The reason Fox News is shallow is the very same reason the basin of the bonsai tree is shallow— to constrain the wild growth capacity of the tree itself. The entirety of the world that the bonsai tree knows or could ever know is strictly by the whim of the bonsai tree’s master. And so this is also true for the Fox News audience who is unwittingly fed an intellectual diet that intentionally stunts their growth in order for Fox News to package that viewer to a sponsor who pays Fox News for that finely curated audience of wealthy people.

Fox News and its audience and its sponsors are a closed ecosystem. Fox News has found a way to wrangle order out of the chaos of the free market by curating a bonsai tree garden.

I have no objection to this from a philosophical nor free market standpoint. They have found a perfectly valid exploit in human beings and have chosen to maximize profit from that exploit.

No. Rather, my objection is that Fox News is not satisfied with this small garden that they’ve tenderly raised. Their motivations are not for aesthetics as is the case for the bonsai gardener, but instead their motivation is (predictably) to maximize corporate profits. But their means of doing so is different than typical corporations who, in order to grow, must attract a more diverse clientele to its market because the market itself is diverse, and a narrow clientele such as the one that Fox News has cultivated, would necessarily narrow their potential market reach and thus limit their potential profits.

Because of this unique position in the market, Fox News is peculiar because they stand to benefit if the rest of the market and by consequence, the rest of the world, were less free and more similar to the curated garden of the bonsai tree. Rather than growing more diverse, Fox News stands to benefit financially if the entire world were less diverse and more similar to its curated garden. It is in Fox News’ interest to squash diversity and to prune wildness and to encourage an orderly and homogenous environment that is conducive to growing a specific kind of bonsai tree that continually bears the kind of fruit that has made Fox News so financially wealthy for all these decades.

And so in order to grow its market share while at the same time retain its present safe and successful business model, Fox News would prefer that our entire world to be most similar to the special ecosystem that it has fostered for its special bonsai tree.

And those preceding facts culminates in a special danger to our world. In a deadly cocktail, (1) the nature of human beings is that they are so easily influenced and (2) also that they are so easily and eagerly cultivated into pleasantly non-dissonant ecosystems that Fox News cultivates along with (3) the nature of Fox News as a widely broadcast information network, means that we are all in danger of being farmed by Fox News and placed into a tiny constricted basin for the rest of humanity’s existence.

Is it that far of a stretch to imagine that the weakness of most human minds is no match for the information/disinformation/misinformation behemoth of a network that Fox News is already/has already become? Now that I have clearly laid out the parts of the system and how they work, what alternatives would prevent Fox News from carrying out the above plan if they so chose? We have already seen the effectiveness of Fox News in cultivating human minds for profit and the myriad human minds who allow themselves to be molded and shaped in very much the same way as bonsai trees are shaped and molded according to their master’s wishes.

What will Fox News look like in 20 years? What will their audience look like? What will the world look like? Is the pattern I’ve outlined above a credible self-sustaining loop that Fox News may carry out for 20 years? Will other news organizations also adopt their own strategies for bonsai tree cultivation with the end result being that we are all separated by our own media ecosystems so that the big media corporations can each profit peaceably from the fruit from their little garden of stunted trees?

Story Engine first update 2021/04/21

I’ve been working on this Story Engine in stealth mode for several years now. As it turns out, it’s much harder than writing a 3D graphics engine. Basically, a graphics engine has a solid foundation of math and science that is stable for one to build structure on top of. Instead, a story engine has a spongy muddy foundation— because story and narrative content renders completely inside the player’s mind and not on the screen. Thus, you can’t easily capture it with science and math. Whereas you can compare CG rendering techniques to the actual real-life lighting and immediately identify the flaws to improve your rendering algorithms, there is no easy way to discover your flaws in a story engine in order to improve it.

This makes building an interactive narrative engine from scratch a very risky affair. You have to finish your whole game before you can see the flaws and mistakes, whereas in rendering algorithms you can look at particular rendering issues one at a time in isolation (for example, sub-surface scattering) and improve them independently and orthogonally of other rendering techniques. A narrative engine is judged as a whole by its finished content rather than the sum of its parts, so it’s difficult to build it piecemeal by perfecting independent chunks of it piece by piece. 3D render engines have strict separation of concerns throughout its entirety. A story engine is the opposite of that with everything dependent upon everything else by virtue of its very nature as a human artform. That makes it quite a challenge to build it coming from the experience I have had building 3D engines.

A graphics engine has pretty intuitive criteria for judging something to be “correct” or “incorrect” in terms of whether the code is working or not. You simply look at the thing on the screen and ask yourself if it basically does what you intend it to do. Sure, basic lighting techniques aren’t close to realistic lighting if you look with a trained eye. However, at a certain point, any rendering technique gets close enough and you’ll know fairly well that it will work for a large proportion of typical cases.

If it doesn’t look good enough, you can just keep going as you compare it to actual real lighting. You stop because you get diminishing returns for the amount of work required to improve how good it looks. And that will also be a function of what your competitors have put into the market and what the hardware is capable of. After a certain threshold in 3D rendering, most consumers will not notice the difference unless it’s rendering human characters too close to the edge of the uncanny valley. At that point you stop with realistic rendering styles and choose more abstract or cartoony styles and your art direction matters more than your render engine.

In the history of automobile manufacturing, this is akin to the point where top speed had become no longer the chief selling point of automobiles. Instead of top speed, the main selling points became such things as luxury and safety and aesthetics and other more “human” concerns. We are at this juncture in games, as well. However, AAA titles still must have outstanding rendering in the same way that for a while top speeds for automobiles were no longer a strong selling point, yet were still a prerequisite for selling cars for a long time even after driving 120 mph was not really something that anyone wanted to do or actually cared about to buy in a car.

Despite these challenges with writing the story engine, I believe that I have found some structural commonalities in interactive narrative design that can translate into a competitive edge over competitors’ offerings in the arena of interactive narrative design. I have, to the best of my ability, identified the areas in which my 3D graphics engine background allows me to recognize structure and patterns in narrative designs that can translate to a unique product that differentiates itself by virtue of the competitors not being able to politically nor financially afford the kind of random walk style of learn-as-you-go engine development that I can afford myself. This style of development for an engine is expensive and scheduleless that for a traditional studio is a nightmare to budget and staff. This is one small area where an indie one-person shop such as myself has a very minor advantage.

Because traditional studios can’t afford to wander and explore and to trust their people to come to some sort of profitable conclusion, what I am making will seem to come out of the nowhere from a nobody— namely me. However, what big commercial studios don’t understand is that I personally have always been overlooked by them throughout my career. Yet during all that time, I have been constantly honing and refining my skills as a game developer and programmer. So it is not entirely out of the blue, but has been a long time coming to fruition. I feel like I have reached a mastery of my craft and I am enjoying every day adding more capabilities to the story engine that still surprise and delight me.

Even so, I am still not ready to show anything. I keep getting closer and closer. But my instinct for what is a good cost-benefit slows me down because when I random walk into a feature that I think will save time or improve quality down the line, I work on it which halts my progress towards a showable demo. But it is progress in a different way. It’s very grindy, but I cannot ask (nor pay) anyone to do this grind for me. Only I know what the right balance of a good cost-benefit is to the features I’m adding. I have a pretty good vision and feel for the product now. At the beginning of this project, my scope was too wide and constantly expanding— because I am too curious about everything and all the possibilities are too intriguing to abandon for the sake of progress. I have a pretty good handle on the scope now, but alas I am still so easily distracted by cool features that I think will be useful later on down the line that it seems like I’m not moving forward.

As I do move forward, I must refactor and retrofit previous quick hacks to accommodate the more solid systems I put in. This seems like negative progress since the game content doesn’t make progress when I work on system features rather than adding content. But adding content on top of a shaky system just feels wrong, so when I come to a point where I find myself adding content on top of a system that could be improved, I can’t help but pause the adding of content to work on the system until it has a better chance of being production-ready.

This is quite a lot of info for a first update on the story engine. However, it is long overdue. I am not even a free range programmer anymore. I am tied to a place that allows me to spend more quality programming time on this thing now.

But I don’t like to talk or write about things until it’s done. I’ve had a history of people not believing me. So showing a finished concrete thing that demonstrates exactly what’s in a very abstract form in my head is how I’ve been able to communicate my ideas to other people. I’ve done this several times with 3D render engines. I believe that this story engine is the same kind of thing. It’s not really enough to talk about it in the abstract. It has to exist and function and be capable of doing things that you don’t see in other interactive narrative systems to be worthwhile to talk about.

Also, my personal problem is that I have way too many ideas that it distracts me from execution. So, it’s quite common to hear some crazy ideas from me that I’ll never get around to completing. And I’m kind of terrible at completing things because in some ways my imagination is too good— such that it makes them so concrete and real to me, that I lose interest in finishing it and making it real for everyone else besides me.

I seem to feel that if I can imagine it, it’s good enough because it’s real to me. Well, part of the exciting thing for me now is that as it becomes more and more real, I begin to discover more and more capability and freedom of expression within the system that I could not envision until I got to the point after I made it exist. So once it becomes real, it actually engenders more ideas and more imagination and that’s what keeps me going. That’s a key dynamo to keep me self-motivated that I had forgotten had occurred in the late development stages of my 3D engines. And that’s why I make this update now rather than after I’ve finished the thing which was the original plan. I have more confidence that I’m not going to give this up as some fanciful fever dream as I have with so many other ideas that have wandered into my brain and trickled out to die somewhere. I never ever had confidence that I would finish anything. It’s kind of a wonder that I finished any of those aforementioned 3D engines now that I have had a long couple of years trying to find self-motivation. But now I have discovered the secret— that late in development, this threshold can be crossed where I reach the turbo or dynamo stage where there’s enough solidity to all of the previous work that you can stand on top of the edifice of it all and see much farther out into the landscape and be excited about all of that unexplored territory to conquer.

So, I’m just grinding away at it, making it more and more real. I have gotten close to reaching my secondary goal which is to make the story engine so pleasant to create content in that I’m mostly writing content (which I kind of loathe doing) rather than writing systems. I think once I reach that point, it becomes worthwhile to show off to actual content creators who do this sort of thing for a living and ask them what I could do to really impress them and make their content creation more enjoyable. But first, I have to get to the point where I am enjoying writing content myself. I think once I reach that critical threshold, then I can begin considering polishing it up for other people to lay their eyes on it.

And so ends update 1. I don’t think I’ll make many more updates— I have lots more grinding to do. This pretty much sums up where I’ve been the last couple of years. I’m still going kind of slow, but I’m still going and haven’t gotten bored which I think is pretty amazing given my easily distracted brain.

-Ming
April 21, 2021

Trumpism is a Zero-Sum Culture

A zero-sum culture believes that in order for it to win, some other culture or persons must lose. Its inherent view of the world is that of a strict binary of predator and prey. If you are not predator, then you must be prey. There is no middle-ground in this world-view. Thus, it is preferable to be predator at all times, lest you be mistaken for prey by another predator. This is the central idea behind Trumpism. Cobra-Kai! Never show any weakness! Sweep the leg!

We know this view to be wrong through the lessons of World War 1 and World War 2 combined. But certain cultures will never let go of this idea. Trumpism seems to have captured the hearts and minds of those cultures under its political umbrella.

The domino effect1 theory of the cold war was seduced by this zero-sum idea of the free world versus the communist world2. It was a failure as a guiding political theory. Its predictive nature was nil, and its damage to America was considerable.

The greatest historical lesson from both World War 2 and the Cold War is that a culture that believes in the zero-sum game is doomed to lose to the cultures that help each other as allies in a positive-sum game. The success of the positive-sum game cannot be more stark than the difference between post-WW1 Germany and post-WW2 Germany.

Post-WW1 Germany was a zero-sum culture. But 1930s Germans had every reason to see it this way since the Treaty of Versailles punished them by saddling Germany with the costs of WW1 which directly “stole” from Germany and enriched the Allies during the post-war economy.

And this alienation of Germany after WW1 of course led to the humiliated and economically isolated Germany that ultimately gave rise to Hitler and Naziism.

Contrast that with post-WW2 Germany which is an economically and politically thriving leader in European affairs with over a half-century of peace, growth, and prosperity. That’s because true economic prosperity is not a zero-sum game; it is a positive-sum game. And post-WW2 Pax Americana is a direct consequence of that positive-sum game. If we want to make America great again, all we have to do is to dive back into that positive-sum game and lead it again.

Even during WW2, the positive-sum game of allies working together was the winning strategy over the predatory strategies of fascism and nationalistic expansionism.

And post-WW2, the allies working freely together during the cold war out-competed the communist-bloc allies who were forged artificially as a defense unit, but not as true cooperative allies. In 1989, as soon as the USSR allowed the freedom of the communist bloc countries to leave the coalition, they did so quickly with little hesitation because the USSR was predatory in their relationship with them.

And since WW2, global economies have become even more integrated and more efficient. So if it was clear that the world had become a positive-sum game during and after WW2, then it should be exponentially clear by now, in 2020, that modern national strength derives from greater interconnectedness and not from isolationism and brutal winner-take-all competitiveness.

Yet, that archaic attitude of vicious competitiveness is at the heart of Trumpism, which in itself is a relic of an imperialistic nation prior to WW2.

Trumpism is that ancient virtue of selfishness at the expense of others. It is outdated and wrong. It is a loser ideology. Nazi Germany tried it, and failed. Soviet USSR tried it and failed. America tried it in Vietnam and Korea, and failed.

But there is something still ingrained in our hunter-warrior cultures that exalts the zero-sum conqueror as a glorious hero. Winning in sports and war has only one winner and one loser, by the rules of the game. That’s why Trump’s favorite insult is “loser” because in his binary world, if the other is the loser, then he alone remains the winner by default. Winning and conquering is glory, and America is addicted to that feeling both in its sports and its war.

America is a fiercely competitive culture— in its love of sports and war. When you see the world only through the lens of winning and losing, then any third alternative such as “cooperation”, by virtue of it not being “winning”, is interpreted automatically as “losing” to you.

This is how to view the world through Trumpism. Everything is simplified down to the point-mass diagram of winning or losing on a single dimension. Anything and everything that is too complicated can be reduced to this single line and placed on the “losing” side of the ledger. There is nothing in the world that cannot be simplified to this single-dimensional explanation.

Trump, and by extension his supporters, cannot grasp the concept of a positive-sum world in which everyone can be winners. Such a multi-axis world is too confusing, so they simplify it down to the single axis of winning-losing.

This is why universal health care or climate change accords are so strange of a concept to them. Their thinking is that if they accede to any demands, then they are losing ground to someone, and thus are losing the war on their one-dimensional axis.

There is no way to explain the multi-dimensional aspects of complex topics to them that clarify how everyone can win in a net-positive-sum game. They will tend to reduce your argument down to the single dimensional axis of winner-loser because that’s what they’re comfortable with in their worldview.

In such a zero-sum worldview, they cannot comprehend the simple facts of a net-positive-sum economy such as that winning against a pandemic as a team not only saves lives but also will improve the economy faster.

The same concept is true of global climate change. We all win as a team if we maintain the environmental conditions that are best suitable for human industry and agriculture as we currently understand it. To do otherwise is simply making everything more difficult and more costly for every person as a whole.

When we’re all on the same team, we all win together. There isn’t even an enemy, except for ourselves and our inability to work together as a team. The zero-sum mentality prevents this crucial understanding about how the modern economy works. This mentality is what thwarts the pandemic response and will thwart the upcoming climate crisis response.

Rejecting immigration is also a foolish artifact of zero-sum culture. It is only looking at one side of the ledger to see what someone takes away from you. But it’s not looking at the full ledger of what immigrants contribute to America as a whole.

Considering that America has always been founded on the strength of its generous immigration, it’s naive and foolish to reject the tremendous boon that immigration offers to America. It should be obvious and clear by many objective measures that immigrants by far add a net positive contribution to America in many ways, both historically and currently.

However, to the zero-sum cultures under Trumpism, this everybody is a winner concept is alien and unnerving and unconvincing because they cannot tangibly feel it in their every day lives. And that’s because America is so viciously predatory in its capitalism that it’s impossible to feel anything other than paranoia that predators are out to get you.

In that environment, indeed, you would prefer to be the predator rather than the prey. And this is the feeling of strength that Trumpism affords these people, even if it’s an illusionary strength. It’s an illusion they can comprehend and tangibly and viscerally feel in their day-to-day economic interactions with American capitalism.

They are not wrong. American capitalism does indeed prey upon them. And it is precisely this feeling which makes them believe whole-heartedly in the zero-sum game of predator and prey. Viewed in that vein, can you really blame them?

Fundamentally, at the higher level view, the modern interconnected world is a net-positive-sum game. But on a smaller, individual level, American capitalism is predatory to such a point that it feels like a zero-sum game to individuals. Although some small amount of socialism could be the antidote to predatory capitalism, the populace have been made so paranoid of socialism that it regards it as yet another predator hungering for their paycheck.

It’s going to be very difficult to convince zero-sum mentality people that they’re not being preyed upon. Their unease about pandemic response, climate change response, and healthcare reform are all attributable to their rightful paranoia of being preyed upon by American capitalist interests in their current lives.

Ironically, they voted for a man who blatantly and openly preys upon them in Trump himself who is literally funneling their campaign contributions into his own interests!

That they should fall for such a blatant charlatan and con-artist is an indication of how deeply wounded these people are by predatory capitalism in America.

So how do we lift these people out of these grievous injuries to their psyche? For post-WW1 Germany, they turned to fascism to assuage their wounded psyches. We must not let that happen here.

Traditionally, government has been the foil to curb the excesses of capitalism. But corporate interests and government have been in alliance against the people for too long that the people can trust neither government nor corporations. The liberal Left is deeply suspicious of corporations and the conservative Right is deeply suspicious of government. Both have well-founded reasons to be suspicious!

The government needs to make a bold statement against the corporate control over American government in order to win back the people’s trust in the government. I don’t know if that’s even possible. But that’s the route away from fascism, difficult as it may be.

Corporatism is too strong of a force to be countered organically by the people. Only a government that is dedicated to curbing its excesses stands a chance of providing shelter for the people against predatory capitalism.

If people are hell-bent on framing the world as a simple zero-sum dichotomy, then I’ll present this one— either strengthen the government to curb predatory capitalism or else suffer the consequences of an angry fascist mob!

It’s important to understand how American culture is accustomed to view conflict in terms of a villain and a hero. Right now, we need to portray the government as the hero against predatory capitalism. What Trumpism has done is to portray a zero-sum world with fascist white supremacy as the hero and the net-positive-sum game of cooperation as the villain. We cannot allow this incorrect view to stand unchallenged.


Footnotes:

  1. The entire cold war hallucination of the domino effect is a zero-sum culture belief— If a country could only be either capitalist or communist, then a communist country would infect its neighbors, and capitalist countries would have one fewer ally in the world.
  2. This world view is terribly naive in so many ways. Capitalist and freedom are not automatically synonymous, as we can plainly see in modern China. Furthermore, there is the false dichotomy of either capitalism xor communism without regard to any third option— decolonization of countries that wanted freedom from British, French, or other European imperialism. This was the true reason for the spread of communism— it was the automatic choice if you wanted an anti-imperialist ideology that automatically came with other anti-imperialist allies.