Prophecy

Australian Media Eschatology in a Post Liberal World

There’s a new poll out, the Liberals continue their slow motion slide into oblivion. That’s not really interesting to me anymore. It was very interesting to me when it started - four months ago. I was predicting it on my podcast, in fact, the reason Brian Marlow and I started our podcast was specifically to talk about it. That’s not to gloat or anything - prediction without investment is merely prophecy, and prophets tend to die poor and irrelevant.

If I had have been as smart as I am prescient, reading chicken entrails four months ago, I would have made plays to actually exploit this, be nicer to what passes for One Nation power brokers, started a lobby shop kinked to grifting retainers out of corpos post 2028. The Liberal lobby shops are still making money, not much, but it’s money. They’ve probably got 30 days of billables left. Imagine what you could be charging for meetings with a viable alternative. Lobbying is miserable work though. My face would get sore when I used to do it. From pretending to smile for too long. Felt like I had rictus by the end of a week in Canberra. I’m not built for that. I’m better off in my tower, with my orbs and scrolls and crystals. Ruminating on the spheres. When a prophet is proved correct he doesn’t rest on his dais, he stares back into the void for another prognosis:

Here is my next prophecy, now Total Liberal Death is assured - the end of the mainstream media in Australia as we know it.

To understand why the death of the Liberals augurs the death of the Australian Media Complex (which is a better term, since there’s nothing “mainstream” about the numbers they’re doing nowadays), you have to understand how the Australian political economic ecosystem really functions.

Uniquely, it’s not that different to the actual physical Australian ecosystem. Most of the biomass is lumbering, grazing herbivores and the scavengers that pick at them when they die. Political parties, governments, eat votes and public support and shit out policy. The policies are picked over by stakeholders, some of them bigger than the parties themselves, but at the end of the day, they’re still organisms evolved to subsist on a diet of shit. The stakeholders eat policies and shit low energy effluviant, more policy papers, criticisms, campaigns, these are then consumed by even smaller stakeholders, until the whole food chain is processed down into a thin, diarrhetic gruel lapped at only by academics.

At ground level there is a seething mass of capital scurrying about like prototypical mammals, they too pick at the shit but not for food, they hoard it and build dam walls like beavers or reefs like coral polyps, the smart ones bury it and wait for supplies to run thin and trade it back. At ground level, Australian capital is all regulatory arbitrage, building bowers and nests for rainy days.

There are apex predators, but they lurk in environmental niches. Predatory capital stays in rivers of minerals and energy like crocodiles and only snaps at the dumbest mammals that come close, finance sharks stay far out to sea, getting most of their protein from strange foreign currents and only coming home when it gets too hot.

The most dangerous organism on land isn’t a predator per se. It’s a parasite. It’s called the Media.

Like Tongue-Eating Louse or Gullet Worm the Media attaches to every thing that subsists of votes and public support tricks it into eating its shit instead, while it gets fat on ears and eye balls. It detaches before the host gets too sick and moves on to the next one. Like certain species of cordyceps, zombie-ant fungus, it can take over the hosts brain for a time, make them wander close to next meal. Change the way it thinks. All to guide it towards green pastures where more ears and eye balls wait to be eaten. The media can get so big after long enough, it’s indistinguishable from other languid stakeholders idly grazing.

The Media is in a feeding frenzy now, worried about where its next meal will come from. 30% of the ecosystem’s biomass lies rotting, and the Media is trying to process the carcass to hoard its energy for what is to come. Ears and eye balls are growing scarce. And the media’s options for opportunistic parasitism are limited. The Government is too big now, the stakeholders too small and too sick from too much shit eating. One Nation, might as well have wings, might as well live in another ecosystem entirely. The sharks and crocodiles in the rivers and oceans will eat the Media back. And the biggest Media, the ones grown the most fat from spending the longest attached to the Liberals - they look like a tasty snack. The sharks dream of carrying them out to see and biting them into small pieces, to share with their friends.

The Media is a hive organism, and contains multitudes. Advertising makes up its outer most membrane, but the individual ad cells are resilient and can live on any surface. There’s veins, streams of entertainment equity, sports, gambling but these too are adaptable and can persist without the masthead exoskeleton, the network shell.

The journalist, the smallest, most agile and toxic lifeform, is a parasite within a parasite. The journalist knows with utter certainty that separated from the hive it goes from the top of the food chain, inside power’s very mouth - all the way to the bottom, subsisting with the academic bacteria. Eating the shit of the shit of the shit.

It won’t take them long until the Liberals are just bleached bones - and then what?

Laboured organic metaphors aside, Rupert Murdoch cannot live forever.

And the others - we are already seeing mergers. Sharks circling. They don’t even want to carve up the companies for their few profitable business units anymore. You can build a better business in an hour with a desktop stack. There’s value in the training data. Marginal value, but it’s there. It’s not hard to see scenario where AI starts buying newspapers that don’t even publish to the public anymore. Warehouses full of journalists writing takes so AI can learn to better impersonate them and recycle them back to ears and eye balls, but from a platform they actually trust.

The common jibe at journalists used to be learn to code, but it’s too late now, the code learned to journo.

If you’re sitting there thinking, the Australian media will never completely die, it will survive ask yourself seriously - were you saying that about the Liberal Party four months ago?

Maybe this time I’ll be smart enough to actually make an investment on this prediction. But in the meantime I’ve got to get back to the dais, the abyss is calling, the future is coming.