LA Story.

Lately, I’ve been watching the news about LA with a sick sense of dread.  

Talk about a year that no city, particularly not one eponymous with angels, deserves.

By the way, don’t believe White House hyperbolics that without federalizing the National Guard and now, blind to the lessons of history, sending active-duty marines, the city would have burned to the ground.

With the certainty of dating myself, I’ve been in the middle of major civil unrest. That includes the LA riots following the arrest of Rodney King — down for client meetings with Marriott, we wound up staring out of the windows at the columns of fire and smoke blossoming through Watts and South LA.

It was terrible and it was a tragedy, but the city didn’t come close to burning down.  

Nor will it this time. Not even if there are ten times the number of protestors and troops.

Here’s an observation that anyone who’s been in proximity to these things can report: just a few blocks from the burning car, the angry confrontation, the chanting crowd, it’s eerily quiet; calm and undisturbed.

Of course, you’d never know that from watching a media that — linear or digital, old school or new — is still living by “if it bleeds, it leads,” and for the same reasons Meta pushes its algorithms and AI deepfakes are gaining traction.

They capitalize on addictive outrage to sell.

But there's also the feeling that something deeper and even more disturbing is slithering on the ground, polluting the skies, and inflecting the national zeitgeist.

Call it a failure of clarity, an inability to distinguish signal from noise. 

The result is a consistent and collective incapacity to penetrate a deliberately created fog of confusion and distraction that seems more blinding than tear gas.

Lacking clarity, ideology runs free, without the constraints of constitutional protections or shared values or even common sense.

Lacking clarity, perceptions become untethered, focusing attention on the incidentals of crisis and magnifying the sense of self-rationalizing urgency.   

Lacking clarity, root causes become opaque, solutions unfindable, and injustice justifiable.

Clarity is really the only answer to the reality-distortion effect we’re seeing on every screen, every minute of the news cycle. Just as it’s the only answer to the distortions deliberately intended to put neighbors on a collision course with neighbors and, and, ultimately with government itself.

Lately, I’ve been watching the news about LA with a sick sense of dread and history repeating. That is, I did, until Wired news story cheerily added, “AI Chatbots Are Making LA Protest Disinformation Worse.”

Call it fuel on fire: https://www.wired.com/story/grok-chatgpt-ai-los-angeles-protest-disinformation/