The big plastic bucket

The media manages a bucket, information is water. Our job is to punch holes in the bucket. All they have is duct tape.

The entire media landscape is a giant plastic bucket. The bucket is everything. It contains all information.

The bucket superstructure is implicitly managed by media outlets. They drill holes in the bucket to provide access to the bucket’s contents, trillions of gallons of water. All the information that exists.

The giant plastic bucket has innumerable holes drilled through the sides and bottom. A limited number are big, many are small. Some are microscopic so only small drips of water escape.

Most are unaware the bucket exists. Like examining a skyscraper with a magnifying glass the plastic bucket is so huge it cannot easily be perceived.

In the past no one really cared about buckets, only a few oddballs in universities who dedicated their lives to understanding bucketry and its many intricacies.

For the rest of us, only the holes matter because they provide access to the precious water stored within. All that glorious information from weather forecasts to the latest celebrity scandal. Plus the occasional war.

But increasingly people have moved sufficiently far away from the bucket to now detect its outline. They can at least discern some kind of mega container even if bucketeering isn’t really their bag.

The media bucket is in trouble. Its big holes are getting smaller. The smaller holes are disappearing. And the microscopic ones continually reappear even when mysteriously sealed up with duct tape by frantic bucket management teams who imagine they are in control.

The big plastic bucket isn’t what it used to be. That is a problem for our overlords, long since used to the immense benefits that accrue to the masters of bucketeering. Although it is good news for anyone who likes water, which means everyone else.

From whence did yonder bucket appear?

The job of the media is drilling holes in the bucket. Information then escapes the container in a controlled fashion.

At one point there were lots of neat holes and water poured out. Some holes were small, some big. So there was always plenty of variety.

Broadsheets, tabloids and magazines operated the traditional print media. Radio had its place, although television networks eventually emerged as the dominant force. But all chased the same audiences while catering to numerous tastes, everything from serious political analysis to fashion and gossip.

Everyone more or less agreed that the job of the media was to maintain their hole and to make it as big as their audience would allow.

The bucket itself was intact. Nobody wanted to destroy the bucket. Buckets were sacred. Everyone understood they had a role to play in maintaining bucket integrity, to not ruin it for the rest. It could take some punishment, but was not indestructible, so everyone did their bit to maintain the whole thing.

There was a kind of tacit agreement the bucket had emerged naturally and no one owned it. Control of the bucket itself was frowned upon. It was perceived as broadly uncontrollable anyway.

Since the 1970s we have seen fewer holes. Many media outlets have merged or come under the control of ever fewer owners.

Television networks became popular because the content was easy to consume. Many became big, some huge. As advertisers chased those big audiences the television world grew rich, enabling the creation of media empires that eventually spanned broadcast, radio, print and even film studios.

As a consequence the holes left were bigger and the smaller openings vanished over time. Even more striking was the lack of variety; most of the holes became more uniform in size and shape even against ostensible rivals. This uniformity of hole formation would have been unimaginable only two or three decades before the era of consolidation.

This steady process of amalgamation had been proceeding for decades. The bucket was becoming well organized by fewer and fewer people. A comprehensive bucket singularity seemed to be within the grasp of powerful shadowy entities who mysteriously went unreported in the media outlets they now controlled.

For people who immersed fully in the bucket its absolute mastery was now a realistic ambition. It was only a matter of time.

Then came the internet.

This will never take off

The internet gave rise to a new phenomenon, millions of tiny irregular holes in the bucket. The bucket became like a sieve. At first these were seen as a minor nuisance, no great threat to the perfectly engineered openings so lovingly maintained by the media titans.

For the first decade especially the internet was seen as a kind of hobby for weirdos. Big walls of text presented on low-resolution screens, all sluggishly delivered over slow internet connections. Photographs and graphics lacked the polish of the professionals. Smut made an early appearance. All of it was written off as amateurish, a world away from the pedigree of the print world and lacking the visual sophistication of broadcast media.

It wasn’t long before websites grew in number. By the time the banks figured out how to manage secure digital banking everything was online, including all those newspapers and TV networks who had trashed the internet as a passing fad.

By then the bucket was haemorrhaging water, with more and more escaping through tiny openings poked through the superstructure. Some of the holes that had started small grew at an alarming rate. A handful became bigger than the traditional media holes. No one seemed to see this coming.

A shower of information from the bucket rained down. It was a mess, and nothing like previous eras.

This was a problem for some. After decades of efficient hole reduction, water was escaping and the traditional players couldn’t control it. Anonymous nobodies were poking holes all over a bucket they had spent decades trying to own. This couldn’t continue.

Panic stations

In the past most were conditioned to see uniform information as authoritative. Well-known television presenters and print journalists carried considerable social clout. For some they were the last word in trustworthiness. The internet had none of this longstanding appeal to authority. It was just a bunch of eccentrics writing about niche interests.

The carefully cultivated orthodoxy of the mainstream, never slow to remind the faithful of their supreme professionalism, quite at odds with the cranks and Nazis online, served them well. For two decades the internet remained home to strange content not in the real media, everything that wasn’t fit to print.

Alas, this couldn’t last. Some noticed early on. For the first few decades everything online was referred to as new media. It took a while for the titans to realize the implications, that this made them the old media.

Once the penny dropped, right into the big deep bucket, they panicked. Virtually every major media outlet did their best to highlight the magnitude of dangerous nonsense online, from hate filled blogs to disturbing fetishes, but all to no avail. With the advent of smartphones the world was split into two groups, those online all the time and those who wanted to be.

Even now traditional media outlets constantly remind us the internet is unregulated, it lacks the kind of professionalism they claim to represent. A digital wild west populated with fascists who hate all that is amazing about our declining societies.

If traditional media is a well-ordered library with coordinated stacks and shelves full of published books, the internet is an unfiltered vortex of misinformation, dangerous conspiracies and filth.

The image projected by the bucket masters and their cheerleaders is one gigantic global Nuremberg rally with occasional breaks for porn. Maybe some fail videos for the real morons.

But despite this energetic assault most now spend so much time online traditional media have accepted it is now dominant. Almost no one buys newspapers or magazines, and the young do not develop television habits. Despite their best efforts the masters of the media universe found themselves outflanked by handheld devices delivering crap they themselves did not produce. All that digital fascism has proved popular.

Mainstream media is in decline. Fewer people now trust it. Audience numbers are falling across the board. A significant chunk of the population have never held a newspaper in their hands. Those big neat holes are getting smaller.

This is still the same bucket, just with different holes. The water keeps pouring in, but less of it is escaping via the big media holes and much more through small holes.

Bucket obsessives who first thought of these tiny holes as a nuisance eventually realized they were a threat to their livelihoods. Instead of upping their game they did something drastic, they got in bed with the government and its agents, with disastrous results for all concerned.

Duct tape fixes everything

There have always been rumours the media are thoroughly infiltrated by intelligence agencies. Even if true in the past this has been somewhat subtle, with all parties keen to at least pretend independence.

In recent years all attempts to maintain this veneer of objectivity have been abandoned. Even leading journalism schools canvas to establish the notion of activist journalism. This is pitched as opinion in lieu of neutral reportage and should be the duty of all right-thinking media types.

But lately even this seems old hat as the media now openly collude with what can only be described as the deeper aspects of society’s control mechanisms. We are often witness to a concerning nexus of conjoined entities that include media conglomerates, government departments, NGOs, financial services and technology companies. All dance to the same tune. They imagine this as a righteous fight against disinformation and hate. The rest of us see the abandonment of editorial independence and its associated credibility.

Most worrying of all are the occasional glimpses of well-funded intelligence operations designed to mould public opinion. Some government departments have even been caught boasting about their newfound Jedi mind tricks, enthusiastically embraced by a parasitic layer in society unable to understand that what looks like enlightened nudgery to them seems like the beginnings of totalitarianism to us.

The attempt to promote approved narratives is matched only by equally vigorous attempts to shut down dissenting voices. Some are deplatformed, mysteriously finding themselves unable to host websites. Sometimes domain names are blocked. Others find their bank accounts closed with no explanation. Yet others are simply discredited. One way or another the bucket masters duct tape over as many holes as they can.

In recent years a revolving door between intelligence agencies, think tanks, NGOs and the media has been revealed. On paper people are leaving jobs and getting new ones in media organizations, but it is becoming more difficult to believe they are divorcing themselves entirely from old employers and past loyalties.

Many are waking up to the extent of the collusion between key institutions regulated by government and the mainstream media. Aware of all this information leaking out of the bucket through an ever wider array of holes the bucket masters have resorted to damaging credibility since they cannot keep up with the constant output of new outlets.

For some years a baffling array of watchdog organizations have emerged seemingly from nowhere. These often have entertaining names that attempt to invoke some concept of societal vigilance and righteous damnation for the enemies of decency. The Institute of Reminding Us Words are Actually Violence; the Council of Nagging Harpies; the Really Nice People Who Just Want to Spread Love for All and are Definitely Not After Your Kids.

Many pop up just in time to condemn some new trend gaining ground. They often appear well connected despite their recent vintage and heretofore obscurity. Astonishingly most seem to walk in exactly the same direction, with identical calls to stop the hate, regulate the horrors of the online world and get government departments more involved in the removal of misinformation which they happen to be able to identify unlike the public they claim to represent.

When more of these obscure outfits emerged they lost ground as people cottoned on to the racket. This evolved into a new fad, fact checking. Why go to the hassle of creating a plausible looking watchdog when you can just declare something as a conspiracy theory minus the talking heads? Fact checkers emerged to provide a handy mechanism to casually discredit anything the media masters dislike.

Alas this has backfired for the same reason as every other narrative. Its artificiality is becoming known to more and more people. Fact checkers have been caught manipulating information so often they have become subject to fact checking initiatives themselves. The self-appointed hole police are now inside the bucket, their ridicule gushing through an increasing number of tiny punctures they don’t even see.

Even worse, some citizen journalists with microscopic holes of their own have established the funding sources of these fact checkers. It often makes for unpleasant reading as complex networks of influence and control come to light. When your reason for existence is trashing the integrity of holes, losing your own hole integrity can be bad for credibility.

But their real problem is not loss of credibility. It is the effects of loss of credibility, the most important of which is to make unorthodox sources of information more attractive and worthy of attention. And that is increasingly looking like a disaster in the making for the masters of the bucket universe.

The grass sometimes is greener on the other side

Most people are oblivious to the bucket. Attempts to explain the container industrial complex sound crazy to normals. Buckets? What buckets?

Censorship does nothing to halt the desire for information. Ordinary people want to understand the world around them. They are water consumers. If the established holes won’t give them it they will find others. If that fails they will take it from a hose, a tap or some other container.

Our suspicion of non-bucket sources of water is learned behaviour. When the broadsheets and the major television networks were somewhat trustworthy and staffed with journalists rather than activists, most were happy to use these convenient sources. But as they have become compromised and degraded over time people have noticed. The water still gushes out but it tastes different. It has become tainted. The sensitive noticed first, but word has spread. Even those who shun conspiracies sense something is off.

Many of us are growing in sophistication. Like modern audiences watching crude special effects in movies from the 1960s we look at what is happening and wonder who falls for fact checking and shrill attempts to shame the opinions of others as a kind of verbal violence worthy of punishment?

Inconsistency doesn’t help either. Calls for death to conservatives often get a free pass. Sincere attempts to discuss questionable public health initiatives or record levels of immigration are condemned as unthinkably evil, the work of monsters unfit to live in polite society.

This has triggered an exodus from the mainstream. More and more people look elsewhere for their information. The simple world of newspapers and television news has been replaced with an embarrassment of choices that includes podcasts, independent journalists, memes, alternative histories challenging established narratives and fresh on-the-ground video footage of live events, all the more compelling for lacking the suspicious polish of the mainstream.

People are becoming willing to stray off the reservation to find well crafted material that informs. Even longform essays, something of a dying art in mainstream newspapers, have seen a resurgence online as specialists in many fields find substantial audiences for their niche.

Perhaps more striking is the way people now readily share information among themselves. Secure messenger apps enable the rapid dissemination of memes and images. No surprise that many Western nations are trying to enact legislation to prevent this under the guise of various hate speech laws. This is non-bucket related activity, and that bothers them. They live in a world of buckets. It is inconceivable some other kind of water sharing method could be created by their subjects.

All this is to no avail. The duct tape is failing, peeling off because of the pressure of the water. Some people now listen to podcasts while walking their dog. For increasing numbers it may be their main source of news, entirely circumventing the mainstream coverage, much of it convenient to download and store, unencumbered by complex copyright rules or even payment.

Memes are popular because they are funny. The best of them instantly deconstruct common absurdities the traditional media play their part in establishing. All are easily shareable since they are simple image files. The very best of them convey difficult truths while making us laugh. Every successful meme changes our internal representation of the world.

Condemnation of memes by our overlords, that they are dangerous or worthy of jail time, just add to their appeal. The all powerful elites seem a little less impressive when they despatch their minions onto the TV networks to insist bad photos with comedy fonts laughing at today’s specially protected group is the precursor to genocide. When something makes us laugh and makes them overreact they begin to look deranged not sinister.

Even cancellation no longer has the impact it once did. Many content producers anticipate their removal from the major platforms and have backups publicly available. As a consequence these backup networks become more accepted as people search them for other related content.

Cancellation itself is becoming a mark of authenticity, an unintended consequence of casual censorship. With many prominent figures censured and silenced by leading social media platforms it has become a badge of honour to come to the attention of our would-be controllers. It is completely unimaginable to the censors that they could unwittingly endorse dissident voices, lending them a credibility they themselves are slowly losing.

This is a microcosm of the entire media shift. The harder they clamp down, the more pressure they create in the bucket which in reality no one still controls completely. More pressure from the top just makes the water gush all the harder through those small unauthorized holes, making them bigger in time.

This loss of trust is devastating to the mainstream. They have no defence as reputation, once lost, is difficult to regain. Even major players have seen their place in the world reduced over the last five years. But the blatant manipulation of information as well as obvious bias, propaganda and a growing awareness of byzantine funding sources that can include foreign actors and even intelligence agencies have all played their part to sour their relationship with us, the public they nominally serve.

Real men drink from horse troughs

More are moving away from the big, regulated holes. For years businessmen have told us acquiring new customers is more expensive than retaining existing ones. This is devastating to the established media giants as they lose people who may never return.

Even worse, much of the refined visual sophistication of the mainstream is viewed with suspicion as people get used to the more rough and ready world of microcontent and niche material. It begins to look orchestrated and fake rather than professional.

It is hard to compete with shaky camera work and poor lighting when watching a riot unfold live. Seeing the mainstream version with an attractive woman holding a microphone standing on a balcony a hundred feet above the fray wearing a flak jacket while she breathlessly talks bullshit about the factors that didn’t actually trigger the mayhem is becoming untenable. Actors talking nonsense about complex social issues from a safe distance looks like a pantomime when you’ve already watched five hours of looting from inside an actual burning store.

In rare cases some will no longer use the bucket at all. They use hose pipes, troughs and even water balloons. For them buckets are just one option from many. They are aware of how corrupt media has become so they actively search for alternatives because they have become suspicious of the big plastic bucket.

For people superbly trained in bucket management this is confusing. What kind of lunatic would drink from a horse trough?

To the neurotic, for whom full-spectrum control seems desirable, a hose pipe is a nightmare. How long is the hose? Where is the source? Why are they even using hose pipes at all? Aren’t they for washing the car? Who are these people?

This is more than a slight shift. This is a fundamental change in how people access information. Obsessive control of media outlets and their narratives has been successful, but it has come at a price. As they duct tape over ever more holes in their bucket they trigger a response in audiences who like the water. They increasingly go elsewhere and find content away from the censorious.

Internet connections are now often strong enough people can send each other short funny videos inadvertently circumventing the entire world of buckets while poking fun at those who would be our information controllers. How long before we can casually send each other 90 minute documentaries and create an impromptu decentralized repository of untraceable material? Buckets won’t help them when the alternative is a global reservoir of information they cannot control.

They say when everything changes, change everything. It would seem modern audiences have taken this maxim to heart.

Information exists, and we want it. It is natural to seek it out. Information restriction, the urge to block holes and prevent access, is the part we need to explain, not the desire to become informed.

Castigating those who seek knowledge on the many changes imposed on our societies is a sign of desperation, the angst a product of their distorted thinking and not our instinct to make sense of our world. It is normal to want to understand that which we see around us.

Although many are rightfully concerned about the rise of censorship in Western nations, we perhaps overlook the bigger trend. A battle royale is emerging between the traditional constrained world of the mainstream, controlled and endorsed by the Establishment, now fortified with agents of the state, and the unreconstructed chaos of everything else. Put another way, it is a conflict defined by decentralized content challenging centralized models that seem to be dying.

The long march through the media to capture it at its most fundamental levels has created a deep flaw in the minds of those who would control the grand narratives that can dominate whole cultures. When all you have is a bucket then alternative outlets look like leaks not legitimate sources of information people are entitled to access.

These developments are seen as a threat, although this very mindset is itself a product of constrained thinking. The apparent chaos of the internet doesn’t really work for them. The media professionals live in an ordered world of earnings meetings, advertisers influencing editorial decisions and mimicking rivals. Bringing in internet bouncers hasn’t helped change their mindset as they work inside the same bucket.

They can’t win without a total clampdown on everything and the time has now passed for that. It made sense in the earliest days of the internet, when their long range plans to control all those holes was somewhat workable. But the mega holes now compete with people whose entire media empire consists of a laptop and a $50 microphone reaching hundreds of thousands.

Their bucket mentality shows in all they do. Control is just about covering the wrong holes. That’s why they focus on hate speech legislation and agonize over an ever increasing list of protected groups. That’s all they have. To go further than this risks exposure. The duct tape only works if no one can see it. It doesn’t work at all with the many-headed hydra of decentralized sharing.

To an extent content creators are just ignoring all the noise from the political class and their amplifiers in the media. The memelords are oblivious to any censorship initiatives, especially torturous discussions about the nuances of hate speech or the shrill cries that virtual hate is, like, literal violence, and, you know, worse than the holocaust. It seems absurd to them, so much so the censorship initiatives themselves are often targeted for ridicule such is their disdain.

To the traditional media mindset the modern information landscape is a unrelenting hell lacking order or structure. There is too much to control and it has few central nodes to focus on. Very few of the players are even bribable. It must be a nightmare, a far cry from the days when capital called the shots. When a contingent of your enemy are teenagers with names like StonedPsycho17 posting funny pictures that destroy billion-dollar narratives just for the hell of it where do you even start?

But the elephant in the room is the fear on display. While many fret over the push for censorship they forget that the regime has already lost, and it shows. As our overlords push for draconian controls, and their political minions work hard to wrap it all up in some kind of newly invented right for a recently discovered group of abused people, the content creators march on regardless. Videos, podcasts, essays and articles, funny memes, humorous songs, graphic novels and all the rest are already out there circulating. While the bucket masters scheme to control the world, the world is busy consuming stuff just because they enjoy it.

As more accumulates it becomes ever more apparent almost none of it could be classed as dangerous content. For every PDF explaining how to create your own nuclear bomb there are fifty thousand memes trashing astroturfed agendas. For every genuinely sinister group of actual nutjobs there are millions of strangers enjoying a shared experience listening to a podcast that touches a nerve or embeds a new perspective in their minds. None of them feel like dissidents and yet they inadvertently trigger those who would rule us.

That is what the spectre of total control does to people, it promises more than it can deliver and ultimately incubates a deep neurosis that drives them insane in the end. That insanity is increasingly on full display. In some Western nations laws are being passed that criminalize offending people. What is that if not the neurotic’s end game, the punishment a reflection of their insane belief the contents of someone’s head can be accessed by the judiciary.

As a consequence they lose sight of a fundamental fact, that people obsessed with restricting access to opinions, data and facts are those who need to explain themselves. Their myopic focus on bucket management is understandable only as a negative. They have lost sight of the purpose of buckets, to carry water. It is the contents we want and are perfectly entitled to get. The mainstream media have overstepped their role as maintainers of holes and wish us to overlook the fact they are now water supply controllers. But no one wants their supply of water restricted at all. The water is ours whether they like it or not.

All that because they focused on a big plastic bucket. Those who fancy themselves our betters took their experience in hole management and misapplied it to questionable urges around social control and narrative manipulation. But they forgot about us, the drinkers. The water lovers. We are always thirsty and it will take a lot more than hole obsessives to stop us.

The era of buckets is coming to an end. Long live the free flow of water.

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Attention bucketeers!
Do your bit to escape the bucket and fight the duct-tapers yourself by sharing this article’s link with friends if they like dangerous misinformation 🧐🏴‍☠️