Hey.

This is Dake.

I’m a journalist currently working for the Associated Press.

While my work allows me to write, take photos, and shoot video – and gives me the world’s largest platform on which to publish them – from time to time, I have things I want to say, or photos I want people to say, or stories I want to shed light on, that aren’t right for the AP or for a mass audience in general – but might be right for someone out there.

And that’s what this blog is for.

It’s also an experiment. We’re witnessing now the dawn of a new era in human society. As grandiose a statement as that might sound, over the past year or so I’ve really come to believe that we’re in the midst of a fundamental shift in the configuration of our society – the biggest shift since the appearance of mass corporate organizations at the beginning of the 20th century.

Our world used to be dominated by massive, solid organizations and institutions that were immensely powerful in authority and the fabric of people’s everyday lives. We used to spend 40 years building a career in one company. Scientific and technological progress used to be driven by behemoths like the Department of Defense or IBM. The daily information diet was dominated by ABC, the New York Times, and yes – the Associated Press.

No more. As the internet is penetrating our lives and rapidly dissolving old barriers in communication, old institutions are disintegrating. Politics are being thrown into disarray. Intellectuals once fearful of the ever-accelerating homogenization of people into a “mass society” are now bemoaning the shattering of public life into a million different partisan factions. We’re entering a post-truth epoch, a time where people are entering their own digital echo-chambers, each with their own narrative of the truth, none able to agree on one narrative of the Truth.

While on one hand, this means establishment sources of information are breaking down – receding amid a continuous assault on the validity of their authority – this also means on the other hand that we’re being exposed, truly, for the first time, to new narratives and ways of viewing the world that we might never have been exposed to before. For the first time, New York elites are rubbing metaphorical shoulders uncomfortably with rural Kentuckians on the internet – and the result is chaos, and anger, but also exposure.

I’m going to use this blog to talk about anything and everything that interests me. But from the past few paragraphs you get an idea of what it is that interests me – the influence of the internet on politics and society, new media technologies, narratives and the truth, and the new post-authority world we’re all hurling towards.

With the dawn of new technologies comes a lot of confusion. Society is like a ship, and new technology is like a bunch of new buttons, levers, and screens suddenly appearing at the ship’s helm. We humans grasp around wildly, smashing buttons and pulling levers blindly in a desperate bid to retain our control over a ship we no longer can properly navigate. As we get used to the new controls, we gradually ease into to it, and finally start to figure out what it’s all about. Walter Lippmann was one guy who saw, early on, back in the 1910s, that America had yet to come to terms with mass social organizations, and wrote about the need to balance scientific organization – Taylorism – with the deeply human need for a sense of mastery and control over our own lives.

Today, we’re grappling with the need to balance the noise of the internet – memes, shitposting, newsfeeds, push-notification, clickbait and the easy, partisan, thrilling sensation of being with “our people” – with genuine empathy, humanity, and deep understanding. The internet is presenting unprecedented new opportunities for us to learn about the worlds of different people in a deep and fundamental way, but at the moment so much of it is getting lost in hypershrill partisan shit.

It’s exciting, it’s messy, it’s chaotic. We’ll figure it out. I have faith.