[FUPQ-11] INVESTIGATE

Day 3,721, 05:38 • Published in USA USA • by Pfenix Quinn


The Free University of Phoenix Quinn is a service of the Socialist Freedom Party, a venerable old recipe serving up a relentless mix of hearty rhetoric, wholesome assistance programs, and delicious anarcho-democratic community with plenty of international flavors.


This is Lecture Number 11 of a 20-part series on Combating Tyranny. It's derived from Timothy Snyder's excellent NY Times bestseller ON TYRANNY, adapted to our New World context by RF Williams, who sometimes claims to be the reincarnation of Phoenix Quinn and other times mumbles so much no one can even understand him.

Para traducir este lío es más dificil que cagar en un frasquito, pero podéis encontrar traducciones valientes al español de estas conferencias en VANGUARDIA SOCIALISTA.



Before we begin today, a moment of silence please for the passing of that tremendously creative giant voice against tyranny: Ursula Le Guin. Some SFP-ists aspire to create an e-community something like that on the moon-planet Anarres.










Investigate.

Figure things out for yourself. Spend time reading the long articles. Be aware that some of what you see in eRepbulik is there to harm you. Learn to distinguish propaganda from actual journalism and take personal responsibility for what you communicate to others.

Making mistakes is expected and normal. Being a dick is something we each have control over.



Cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative as we slip along with our fellow New World citizens into a morass of indifference. The ability to discern truth from lies is what makes one... let's say... a real individual, an adult, a whole person. And our collective trust in common knowledge is what makes us into a cohesive and vibrant and free tribe or society.

Authoritarian leaders twist the meaning of the word "lie". They use it to refer in an entirely subjective way to statements of fact not to their liking.

We can take some comfort in observing that in a free society facts have an inherent power to overcome falsehoods. Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality. Yet the internet has a way of twisting reality itself. And our New World is a twisted tunnel within that twisting reality of the internet. And so we have some tribes or groups with very distinctive new-worldviews, beholden to various manipulations, strategies, conspiracies and so on.

Indeed, figuring out what's what is part of the fun.



In these days, in this mixed up internet world, talking in a straightforward and honest way can even seem startling or bizarre. A truly robust and healthy investigative journalism provides stories that develop on the page and in our minds. When a leader refers to people as "slobs", "pigs", "dogs" or other nasty terms, when they have clearly engaged in underhanded manipulations, and when this is known about via our screens -- we tend to be drawn in by the logic of the spectacle. Learning of one scandal whets our appetite for the next one.

Once we are subsumed into this kind of interchange, this kind of "reality television" approach to realness, this utterly fake "journalism", it is like getting addicted to any other drug. We just want more.


Better journalism -- real investigative journalism -- allows us to consider the meaning, for ourselves, and for our tribe, our collective, our solidarity group, our e-nation of what might otherwise be isolated bits of information or fleeting images. Such researching and writing is hard to do. So it is not surprising that it is fairly rare and often widely celebrated in eRepublik when it does appear.


Try it for yourself. Write a proper article involving work and facts in the New World. Travel, do interviews, maintain relationships with sources, research the records, verify everything, write and revise drafts, all on a tight and unforgiving publication schedule.

Journalistic ethics produce writing that has a level of quality that is obviously distinct from spectacle and from the propaganda of tyrants and wannabe tyrants. Many excellent journalists and writers in the real world have suffered banishment, become refugees, or had to keep their writing hidden or distributed illegally during dangerous times.

If the main pillar of a system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth. In the Internet Age we are all publishers, and so each of us bears some private, personal responsibility for the public's sense of truth. Publishing falsehoods, perhaps now more than ever, is -- at least in some small way -- promoting fascism.

Let's try to avoid doing violence to the minds of others.






===========

At the end of this lecture series, scintillatingly satisfying certificates will be issued by An Official Non-Reformed Socialist Source based on responses provided in the comment sections. Participation counts. Indicate attendance by leaving a comment or endorsing the article. Higher honors will be awarded according to the degree of critical thinking, mindfulness and humor exhibited by responders.


Examples of questions you might want to investigate in response to this lecture:

* What are some examples of really good in-game journalism?

* It is a bit tricky to identify what exactly are "the facts" in a game world. There various schools or rules of behavior, and obviously there are the game mechanics. What else?