Sarah Kendzior is a political writer who I greatly admire. Her frustration sounds a lot like mine. I wrote in 2017 that the bankers in tech should watch out because Twitter had just elected a president, and its market capitalization was so low that it was bound to get bought by someone who saw that you could buy the presidency of the United States for a few billion dollars. Was it worth that? Absolutely, as we're learning. All I got were pats on the head, stories about PE ratios, which of course I understand. What it did show is they didn't understand that the presidency could and would be monetized.

Yesterday Kendzior posted a tweet about how frustrating it was that all the "new" details of the Epstein scandal were known in 2020, and published in her book Hiding in Plain Sight. Sounds like what I've been saying about how tech and news works, we just come at it from different perspectives.

I don't know if there's a way around the ownership of news in the US, if there's still a way to route around it, but I'm sure that publishing on Substack, which is owned by the same people she doesn't trust with other journalism, is not the answer.

In order for news to have a chance of working we need to be using only the web, commodity services that are completely replaceable, and we keep our own writing, and route it to everyone who's interested via the open protocols of the web. That's the only way people with important ideas and info can get it out there.

I think in order for this to work we have to have people like Kendzior, and Heather Cox Richardson, Paul Krugman, publishing via the web, not via Substack. It should be fine for Substack to continue to publish their stuff, no problem with that, but they shouldn't be the only place their stuff is published. That gives them near-total control of the writers.

Our bigger problem is news distribution that works, and not depending on system we have. It may be too late to fix it, but we have to try.

PS: The story Kendzior was writing about was not covered yesterday on CNN or MSNOW, as far as I can tell. It got dumped on Christmas Day, I guess — and that's probably the best day in the US to dump a story you want to get lost in the haze.

PPS: The title of this piece recalls a great documentary, The Fog of War, about America at war in Vietnam.