Cut Throat's 2018 Quarterly Review

1. Learn to Butcher and Fishmonger.

Plenty of fun had on this front, at this moment focused entirely on fish. Skinning, filleting, boning I do it all now. Just a case of practising this more before heading on to meat. It is very time consuming but also very satisfying to present someone with fish you have handled and processed from the start.


2. Study with Purpose.

I have picked three areas of study for the year: Pedagogy, particularly social/political debates about the purpose and nature of of good education; World Religion, since I know so little about them compared to Philosophy and finally for fun, Nietzsche... a lot of his themes resonate with me, others less so and it would be nice to have a properly informed position on his work.


3. The (Youtube) Party is Over.

This has been a mixed victory for me, a lot of my work now involves scouring Youtube for interesting sources and accessible videos so it hasn't been particularly useful resolution, however the block on social media has been both effective and well adhered to.


4. Sleep Better. Eat Better.

I certainly sleep better now that I have cool down period at the end of the day and I have generally started going to bed early and getting higher quality sleep. Cutting down on my casual alcohol consumption during the week has also helped me get deeper sleep. Finally portioning up my food and batch cooking has helped keep my diet in better shape, it is still nowhere near as under control as I want it to be but it certainly better than what it was before the start of this year.

Thoughts on Fake News: One Step Forward One Step Back

Wikipedia should be considered as an eighth wonder of the world. A totally open source encyclopaedia covering almost every topic imaginable that, despite the prejudices of some, is remarkably accurate. It is proof that democracy works; that allowing everyone to participate, even in something with as little margin for error as the construction of an encyclopaedia, can be as effective as entrusting this task to an exclusive team of experts. You can now receive a reasonably authoritative information dump on almost any subject you can think of, with an accompanying bibliography, within seconds. What's more through the use of 'talk pages', you can read through archived debates between editors so that you have context for why one article was written or edited one way or another. News can similarly also be acquired now through the internet and social media, spread through shared articles and first-hand reports rather than received from a handful of broadcasting corporations who decide in private which stories are worth spreading.

Stories of ‘Fake News’ perpetuated by trolls that tell more badly thought out lies with every passing minute and insular social groups curated by benign but ghettoising algorithms are the other side of this new digital levelling. Furthermore, this open source world is already being exploited by disinformation campaigns run by organised intelligence agencies. Wikipedia has so far proved fairly resilient to low level trolling and casual human error but attacks launched by state-sponsored groups have only just started to ramp up. Open source technology has so far sustained itself on the good will of the internet. There have been malicious attempts to subvert the format in the past but they have generally been easy to spot and correct. Now we are faced with well-funded groups working hard to find exploits that could give their masters control of this new digital space.

Some people are alarmed by this modern predicament of having more information and confusion at the same time. But fake news is not a new phenomenon; propaganda and misinformation have always been a part of media. When searching for information we now have a lot more junk to sift through but we also have more options when cross-referencing or gathering alternative views. The distribution of news through social media may be more open to abuse but has also allowed for a more independent culture of media consumption, and I can’t help but wonder if those decrying the rise of digital fake news, primarily those still invested in ‘old media’, aren’t just mourning the loss of their cultural capital. The public are undeniably growing less dependent on newspaper editors and it must be uncomfortable for them to watch their status as the cultural arbiters of truth slowly slip away.

There is reason to be worried about the future of online democracy; malicious disinformation, the rise of hyperbolic click-bait and the formation of online political ghettos are problems that could cause a lot of trouble in the future. In saying that I'm not sure a return to traditional media structures is really much of an improvement.