Ok, putting people on blast isn’t exactly something I shy away from, but I like to think I do it for intellectually explicable, if not rational reasons. Today, I will shed a little critical light on a phenomenon I’ve witnessed blossoming in the cesspool of journalism, and take some responsibility for my arguably insignificant participation in cultivating these weeds.

I started to notice the growth of a particularly toxic system of incentivization and exploitation a few years ago, reading newspapers from all over the world, attempting to take note of stylistic choices and inter-community continuity among news agencies (I wanted to see what effect freelancing was having on news media), but I really only began to suspect something was horribly wrong when I began writing about the canker that is the Metaverse.

Let’s set the stage…

Most freelance writers are just folks trying to keep the lights on, and this became blatantly obvious when the pandemic forced many burnt-out employees in the western hemisphere to seek, on the fly, alternative means of making a living. A lot of them are just holding on by their fingernails, and the job boards, coupled with this new hyper-saturation of freelancers, have created a zero-sum game of sorts; a race to the bottom where the lowest bidder wins a stable contract, for pennies. It’s no fun being caught in a situation, almost every week, where you have to choose between your morals (if you have any) and getting paid, especially if you got into this business to be free from some corporate overlord or whatever.

And herein lies the fulcrum on which this phenomenon’s lever has moved the world. Desperation. Simple, mundane, but very real, human desperation. Desperation to make money, desperation to be included, or desperation to just know shit. In the case of modern news media, there is a functionally inexhaustible reservoir of writers in the freelance world, some are talented, some extraordinarily so, but most are just trying to break even, and therefore are susceptible to taking jobs from entities whose goal is churning out the most content at the fastest pace possible, regardless of whether or not the information is true, useful, or harmful.

The Metaverse and everything being written about it is a prime example of this cancerous miasma of depravity. I can almost guarantee you that everything you’ve read about the Metaverse was/is being written by somebody like me; a hired gun completely unaffiliated with the interests or reputation of the entity for whom they are writing, and motivated only by the money they’re getting to write this nonsense over, and over, and over. At least seven out of every ten articles I read about the Metaverse begin and end the same way. They open with a definition of the Metaverse (because writers are trying to meet the minimum required word count for that piece so they can get paid), and end with a tawdry statement about how the Metaverse will change the world as we know it, somefuckinghow.

The Metaverse doesn’t exist. At least not in the way these poor bastards say it does. They’re just trying to make a living and they don’t care who pays them, and the people paying them don’t care either. This is happening with every piece of content you’re likely to read regarding a “current event” of dubious importance. The importance, scope, or magnitude of the issues are being artificially inflated by companies who are exploiting cheap labor, like companies are wont to do, and the general public is falling into the trap just like they always do.

Remember reading about the I, Libertine hoax in English Lit? Yeah, it’s just like that, but with the internet, and no discernable orchestrator. I was just listening to a commentator talk about some article written about the new Lord of the Rings series being developed by Amazon. This commentator seemed completely surprised that the article, having outlined one particular stance on the show for the first ¾ of the piece, made a veritable 180 and started defending the opposite view by the end of the article. This should only surprise you if you think the companies churning out these articles actually care about the content they’re producing. It’s all about SEO and analytics now.

These companies care about maintaining their trending status on Twitter, guys.

Whatever they have to write about, at whatever pace, by whatever means, they will do it to keep the machine running. I, Libertine didn’t exist, and not only was the mastermind behind the hoax able to convince an entire country that it did, he made complete buffoons out of the so-called literary intelligentsia who were falling all over themselves trying to appear as though they were well informed on the matter. One critic even published an article in a prestigious magazine claiming that he, the critic, had taken a cruise with the author of I, Libertine, and met his “lovely wife.”

So, before you get caught up in another hoax, getting bamboozled into developing strong opinions on phantoms, try and remember that people are much more interested in the appearance of being informed than they are in doing the work of informing themselves. People like catchphrases and blasé hand gestures more than facts, typically, and the “copy, of a copy, of a copy” opinion they are sporting on their sleeve isn’t demonstrative of reality.