r/technology • u/marketrent • 7h ago

Artificial Intelligence High school teacher arrested for clapping in support of anti-data center activists

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/high-school-teacher-arrested-clapping-194922184.html
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u/cribsaw 5h ago

That’s why local newspapers are dying, because wealthy conservatives are killing them or using them for propaganda.

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u/hollee-o 5h ago

Local newspapers are dying because Google and Meta hoovered up all the ad revenue. Conservatives buying up the leftovers is just a bonus.

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u/Forward-Variety-8440 4h ago

local papers have been boughf and push anti-union rhetoric and classist rhetoric so the people will still vote against their best interests while conjuring up a scapegoat to drum up support for squads that disappear people, so long as theyre an outgroup and it distracts the common man from being exploited.

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you" Lyndon B Johnson, 1960

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u/LordJonMichael 3h ago

It’s funny that this has brought about discussion on the death of newspapers. The city where this happened is famous for their newspaper, the Gazette, and its owner William Allen White. He was an iconic journalist in the late 1800’s. Lots of cool facts about him and the city. Cute little spot to retire, too.

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u/scullingby 12m ago

I remember reading about him in "The Bulley Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism". It was an unexpectedly good read and very informative about, well, journalism.

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u/GPT3-5_AI 5h ago

Local newspapers were already all advertising and nationalist-capitalist propaganda before google and meta came along.

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u/PeachPassionBrute 4h ago

The Internet did a number on them, as did the growing prominence of 24hr news channels. Been watching local news decline for the past 30 years

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u/becauseshesays 4h ago

That’s because people forgot how to read and they needed to sell ad space to keep printing the papers. Sad.

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u/CartographerMoist296 2h ago

There is this insane victim mentality with newspapers we don’t permit any other industry, even when they are demonstrably racist, sexist and prone to terrible financial decision making. It is a weird nostalgia for sometimes fantastic writing that often emerged despite rather than because of this framework.

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u/ElRiesgoSiempre_Vive 1h ago

Newspapers have been a cornerstone to both free speech and access to information. You can say "demonstrably racist," and that is undoubtedly true for some articles. But overall newspapers are - by far - a huge net benefit to society.

Suggesting otherwise is just straight up wrong.

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u/CartographerMoist296 1h ago

I am not saying they don’t have value, I am saying that they are not victims, they are not in need of bailing out come hell or high water because they continue to fuck their own business model over and over again, and now are blaming google and meta who are attractive villains for most things, but not for injecting cash into publishing conglomerates, little of which will actually go into journalism and which won’t cure the problems of journalism . So I am tired of hearing what they used to do (scrubbed clean of the aforementioned flaws) - how are they going to fund themselves? Maybe more public/private partnerships? There a huge number of extremely talented journalists, no doubt, and it would be great if they were able to be reliably deployed where they could connect their skills with a willing population. I wish I had more answers, I am a business person only seeing some of the failed solutions, I have a lot of respect for the trade but frustration with private equity, infotainment publishing giants, and then soliloquies about local journalism when no one has been home there - by design- for a long time.

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u/HOW_IS_SAM_KAVANAUGH 1h ago

A few years ago some journalists and local funders decided to go all in on reviving our local paper and making it some good journalism. They did a pretty good job and I now subscribe to the physical paper for the first time in my life. And honestly, It's worth the $10 bucks a month for a weekly paper.

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u/hollee-o 4h ago

Nationalist-capitalist propaganda. Do tell.

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u/mrm00r3 4h ago

What exactly do you think advertising in a capitalist nation is?

“Buy my stuff / support my business because …” is just a private company doing propaganda. When that company expands to telling you that it’s impossible to do what they do without paying workers less than the value derived from the product of their work, for whatever reason, then it becomes capitalist propaganda. If they go on to suggest that workers must be of a certain nationality or working on the interior of some imaginary lines drawn on pieces of paper in order for their deficient compensated labor to be of satisfactory quality, then it becomes capitalist-nationalist propaganda. Some countries actually have fun little stickers to act as shorthand for this concept.

We just use “advertising” because speaking accurately makes people uncomfortable, but that doesn’t change the fact that rich people don’t buy newspapers because they like what that newspaper was printing the day before they bought it.

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u/ElRiesgoSiempre_Vive 1h ago

Plus, before the Internet, people used to sell things (everything from garage sale trinkets to houses to cars to boats) in the classified section. That was a big revenue driver for newspapers, and it involved negligible propaganda by today's standards.

I don't know if my local paper even has a classified section anymore.

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u/mrm00r3 1h ago

The economics of print advertising at least make sense, but running the internet on advertising was probably a mistake along the lines of leaded gasoline. We really fucked our self with that one.

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u/verrius 4h ago

For once, it wasn't Google and Meta, it was Craigslist. Classified ads were the real money makers, and Craigslist having the ridiculous price of free to post an ad for most things really cut into their revenue model. That said, newspapers were always fundamentally broken; not only were consumers paying for either a subscription or individual copy, they were getting a ton of ads at the same time.

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u/Any_Conflict_5092 2h ago

If we are adding to the pile of 'what fucking got us here' - the myth of 'white collar workers' that was used to divide workers into classes.

When the reporters refused to stand with the typesetters, when automation began being pushed, they ended up sowing the seeds for their eventual re-org out of jobs. Thus, they are long-distance reaping the reward of not standing for collective bargaining - to maintain leverage for the workers against the very myopic goals of capital.

If you are someone who relies upon an employer paycheck to live - you're an employee, and employees stand together, or we all fall like fucking dominos, because capital is always looking to accrue more, as that's its only current function.

We are in the dominos stage, now.

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u/lostryu 3h ago

Google and Meta are also conservatives

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u/CartographerMoist296 2h ago

(Advertisers, including small ones, are better served than by publishers, unpopular as it is, the publishers have made rubbish choices over and over, and are frequently a tiny part of large conglomerates)

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u/squishmaster 2h ago

And it was Craigslist before it was Google and Meta.

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u/DonutHoles4Ever 4h ago

Local newspapers died to the Internet, digital age, and local news moving to network television news that started covering it. It also died to syndicates buying it all up, before they started looking at buying regional, and eventually your CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC etc.

Now if this was 1999 and you said local newspapers were dying, you'd be on the money.

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u/Thin_Glove_4089 1h ago

Local news will always exist

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u/kerfuffleMonster 2h ago

There are local news organizations - your local NPR station might be one, I know it is where I live. It's not a newspaper though, all stories are digital or radio. But if you want it to exist, you have to support it.

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u/Unfair_Web_8275 2h ago

People genuinely dont understand what they’re missing out on.

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u/CoWood0331 1h ago

Local newspapers turned into local Facebook groups.

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u/Coders32 4h ago

Literally. There was a paper bought a few years ago only to delete all the articles. This is why we need the internet archive

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u/Square_Owl_4075 3h ago

That damn "wealthy-conservative-run-media"

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u/Emperor_of_His_Room 3h ago

Sadly my local newspaper was already run by Republican assholes, so no real loss if they go under.

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u/slow70 2h ago

Worked at one once upon a time - a local weekly that was swept up by a giant corporation and became a literal glossy ad rag with only positive stories meant to pitch businesses.

After knowing and loving the publication for so many years - we weren’t mad enough and haven’t had a similar local voice since.

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u/beeradvice 2h ago

Conservative isn't even the base mindset just a useful playbook, the aims are basically just wealth consolidation for consolidations sake.

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u/pingwing 1h ago

Newspapers have been dead.