Balaji on How Tech Truly Wins Media

To understand why the Journal's behavior changed so drastically, one must first grasp the underlying economics. We are now in 2025, 17 years after the collapse in media revenue. Consider someone born then, now 18 years old. If you play multiplayer video games like Quake or MOBAs, you know how you can be spawned into the middle of a chaotic battle. That's essentially the experience of a Gen Z individual today. For an 18-year-old, the conflict with the Journal has been a constant throughout their entire life.

That's a great point. This is about journalists. Anyone who has read this book cannot view journalists the same way. Janet Malcolm discusses this in her opening line of the excellent book, *The Journalist and the Murderer*. Her famous opening line states: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man has all savings unsold, the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns when the article or book appears his hard lesson."

Once you apply that framework, it applies to everything. For example, SpaceX is a network, while NASA is the state. Uber is a network, and taxes and medallions represent the state. Bitcoin is a network, and the Fed is the state, and so on. These are two distinct organizing principles for understanding the world. The state's principle is, "Someone should pass a law," whereas the network's is, "Someone should write some code." The state encompasses everyone directly or indirectly paid by the US government or a government more generally. The network includes all those who are directly or indirectly monetized and earn their living through the network.

Exactly. Legacy media is the non-consensual invasion of privacy for profit. Let's use that definition. Is it non-consensual? Can you opt out? Can you tell a journalist to stop stalking you or spamming you? Can you tell them not to mention your family? In normal English, we have words for this. When journalists go through your garbage, it's like someone stalking people online. For example, Luke Farritor had someone spamming all his friends and contacts. This person was just some drug addict or crazy individual.

What hasn't done as well are institutional things. If something is too institutional, it's playing it safe. This means there's no conflict, no strong opinions, and nothing novel. It's focus-grouped. Certain things benefit from averaging, like the velocity of a plane; you want it within an envelope, not large deviations. So, some phenomena benefit from averaging. However, opinions and theses usually don't. The entire 20th century was centralized. Even the shift from widescreen to portrait size, like a phone (9 by 16), visually represents the movement from institutional to individual.

For those seeking aid through grants, people often present themselves as sympathetic or pathetic as possible. It's like the movie *Slumdog Millionaire*, where it's dramatized that a child's limbs are cut off to evoke more sympathy. This creates a kind of learned or caused helplessness. The goal is to pretend to be, or actually become, as helpless, pathetic, and sympathetic as possible to secure maximum funding. You win the competition by being the biggest loser or victim. This is essentially what wokeness is. In contrast, within tech and venture capital culture, we value strength above all else.

She needs a long context window. Until recently, I didn't know how to show someone how to find internal contradictions. But AI can do that. AI can find every internal contradiction. You could just have them contradict themselves. They're enslaving people, then pretending they're not. There are so many examples like that, such as the Ukraine, pro and con. Coming back to your point, we need a stronger form of truth. If we don't have that, you're essentially accepting their premise that this event happened.