Baldur Bjarnason

You need to use the tools of the job you've chosen to do

– Baldur Bjarnason

When you look in at industries and fields from the outside, most of them seem filled with odd rituals, needlessly stringent rules, and overly moralistic “purity” rules.

If your background is in tech or finance, the immediate impulse is to “optimise” and build from “first principles”. You start from scratch, do only what you think is necessary – a decision you make without actually looking into the history or background of the field you are entering – and for a while this works quite well. You’re outperforming the dinosaurs of the old guard, doing more with less money, never realising that practices that develop over years or decades in a collaborative field might not impact an individual or small organisation until well after they’ve built something that can be destroyed.

Ironically, some of the best examples of this are when non-tech people buy into a “magic” solution for making software, whether it’s Rapid Application Development (RAD) or the Large Language Models of today. They think the code is the hard part of software development when it’s only a small part of a much larger system of collaborative work, design, testing, research, and rewriting.

It’s easy to fall into this misunderstanding because much of our talk of practices or methodology does not frame them as practices but as self-evident truths.

Or, more specifically, the metaphors we use to explain and transmit the practices to new practitioners become petrified: they become fixed symbols that simultaneously obscure and represent the underlying practices.

(Apologies for the Nietzsche reference. I’m not that guy, honest.)

Test-driven development, agile, waterfall process, for example, no longer directly signify the underlying practices they used to – practices that were evolved and developed through solving actual problems in actual projects. They have become petrified metaphors that happen to have guidelines embedded within them, like partially-digested invertebrate caught in a trilobite gut and fossilised with the rest of it.

This creates a double trap:

  1. Outsiders don’t understand the utility of the practices – these tools of the trade – because they now look like rituals and purity politics.
  2. Insiders apply the tools blindly as rituals not understanding their context or background well enough to adapt them to their situation.

The worst case scenario would be that the problems the original practice solved begin to recur because everybody applies the tool first and foremost as a ritual. Nobody knows it well enough to adjust the practice to new or changing problems.

They invent a new practice, give it a fancy name, and the process begins again.

Most of these practices evolve as adaptations. They are rarely designed from scratch but tend to develop first as a result of collaborative work at one institution and, when it’s discovered to work, starts to spread to other organisations doing similar work and tackling the same problems.

Newsrooms and newspapers are a good example of this.

Journalistic practice isn’t a purity signal #

There are a number of practices in journalism, documentary work, and reportage that crop up again and again. You see them emerge independently in different countries, under varying kinds of governments, and under diverse economic systems.

They get abandoned, then reappear, sometimes more than once.

Some are obvious, such as the sourcing and protecting your sources. Given the nature of the work, much of it will involve developing contacts that give you information. Knowing how to find contacts, source information, and protect your sources if need be isn’t a purity signal or an ethical code. It’s a practice that lets you do the job. If you don’t do it, at some point you’ll stop being able to get the information and do the work (so you get promoted into management, natch).

Others are less obvious. The journalistic writing style, for example, results in a textual structure that’s purpose-designed to be adaptable. The first paragraph summarises the story and front-loads the most important information of the entire piece. Each successive paragraph is less and less important to the whole. Each paragraph tends to front-load the most important points of that particular paragraph.

This results in a piece of text that is more easily editable on a deadline, more easily scanned by the reader, and can often outright be cut in half to fit on a page.

This focus on adaptability, which provides ease of editing and scanning, means the writing style also lends itself to the web, even though the length restrictions there are more a matter of reader patience than available space.

(This is also why using a Large Language Model to summarise news items tends to be so incredibly inaccurate. The first paragraph is often already the summary, so the model is just taking an already serviceable summary and then watering it down with less relevant facts from further down the text, removing them from their context, which tends to change their meaning.)

One of the more important practices of a journalist or reporter is less about efficiency or productivity and more about self-preservation: impartiality. It’s not, specifically, an ethical stance, although it is addressing a number of ethical issues by the by, but it’s overall a practice that makes the journalistic work more defensible and less vulnerable to attack.

And journalism gets attacked all the time.

News media and the press are the fourth power. They serve as a check on the government’s three powers: legislative, executive, and judicial. It isn’t a coincidence that whenever oligarchs, demagogues, and authoritarians attempt to assert their control over the three main powers of government, they begin by attacking news and the press. We’ve seen this repeatedly in history, most notably when a society begins to shift authoritarian, such as in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Putin’s Russia, Orban’s Hungary, or the US today.

You don’t need full-on fascism for these attacks to happen. They happen every time and everywhere power gets consolidated, for example during economic bubbles or monopolies.

Impartiality, proper sourcing, and a neutral style of language is journalistic self-defence, not a purity signal.

If you make a living digging up and highlight information on powerful people who don’t want that information highlighted, they will attempt to undermine you.

If you have a financial conflict of interest, then their message is easy. “You can’t trust what they say because they’re manipulating you for their own benefit.”

It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, whether it affected the story or not, the existence of the conflict re-frames the story in the public eye, rendering all of what it delivers suspect.

The same work, same writing, same format, same structure, same style, and the same delivery will have a different effect on the public if there is a perception of a conflict of interest. If there’s an actual conflict then even those who support the work will begin to have questions.

Avoiding conflicts of interest in the stories a journalist writes, proper sourcing, and a neutral style of writing is an act of self-preservation. If they don’t do it, they run the risk of being unprotected when something happens, when somebody with even a modicum of authority takes a dislike to their work, and their career will be over.

If you want to continue to do journalistic work, you need to pick up at least some of the practices of journalism simply out of self-defence.

Claiming that impartiality, sourcing, and neutral language is purity signalling or a vestige of an older era is like saying that wearing a helmet while riding a motorcycle is a useless purity signal that amounts to nothing more that a performative adherence to outdated rituals.

It’s there to protect you when something goes wrong, it’s not for those watching you from the sidelines.

(Mockery is its own kind of shield. Well-sourced mockery such as Last Week Tonight or Pivot To AI comes from a long tradition of parodying power. Western culture, at least, gives comedy a lot of leeway that has a similar function to the journalistic neutral style of writing.)

Over the past three decades, journalistic practices have steadily been devalued. That many, if not most, of you consider them to be useless purity signalling only serves authoritarians and oligarchs. It serves those who don’t like their power to be scrutinised or criticised.

The ethical dimension to impartiality isn’t inherent in the practice itself but in that the alternatives are less ethical: the other option is to serve and defend power. As long as you serve one master well and are useful to them, they are likely to stand by you even as you criticise others with power.

Tech journalists, for example, by and large opt to protect their work and career by simply working for the subjects instead of acting as a check on their power. They only cover critical stories when they’ve already broken out and even then they tend to co-opt the language of neutrality to downplay the impact in the name of “balance”. This is why neutrality and impartiality aren’t inherently ethical in and of themselves. The tactics and trappings of impartiality can be directly co-opted to serve unethical work. Serving power is obviously simpler and safer than attempting to do anything meaningful with your life but, thankfully, it’s not an option everybody can stomach.

Some people actually want to do important work.

If you do aspire to having a career scrutinising and criticising power, then for God’s sake, show at least a hint of a survival instinct! You can’t copy the practices of shills like Kevin Roose or Casey Newton while targeting the very powers they serve and protect. You need to shore up your defences! Review your potential conflicts of interest! Think about how and what you write in terms of defensibility and sourcing. You have two readers: the archetype that represents your likely audience and a tech oligarch’s opposition research team.

If you want to fight the fight of a journalist, you need to take up their weapons. If you don’t, you will get ploughed.

Case in point, Ed Zitron’s recent fall from grace as the “AI” Bubble’s most notable critic.

The unguarded flank #

If you don’t know who Ed Zitron is, he’s a notable blogger (sorry, “newsletter writer”) and podcaster who has made a bit of a career digging up information, analysing, and reporting on tech and the “AI” Bubble specifically.

He has written reports on industry finances, how specific products such as Google’s search were degraded, shady deals, and more.

He has a writing style that’s quite verbose and partisan, neither of which I’m really in a position to criticise.

(There’s also a question of what is a neutral tone of writing on the web. The tone of the web is different from print. You could argue that the blogger style of emotive writing is more neutral to the likely audience than a newspaper’s historical house style. But that’s a topic for another day.)

Ed Zitron definitely behaves like an asshole on social media. He gets angry at people who agree with him, demands credit at every turn, and just generally behaves like a pain in the ass.

That also isn’t in any way disqualifying. If we dismissed every reporter or journalist who is an insufferable asshole, the newsrooms of the world would be empty voids, populated only by a traumatised intern or two.

He doesn’t like to give credit and omits most prior work on “AI” criticism in his coverage. This can get annoying, but given that his focus has been on company finances, investment, and executive decisions, it’s been hard to argue that it compromises the work he does in any meaningful way.

That work has been interesting and often onerously detailed. Up until recently, most of the criticism of his reports has been minor. Some quibbles about how he uses terms (but the numbers were accurate). A couple of questions about projections and estimates, which he generally acknowledged in the text. A lot of complaints about the writing style and behaviour, both of which are completely valid but don’t change the facts he reported on.

The newsletter has also been popular. He was fast becoming the poster child for those who are criticising how the “AI” Bubble is playing out in the real world. He did research, had developed contacts and inside sources, and seemed to check his facts. He has been doing journalistic work using journalistic practices.

Or, at least, some journalistic practices.

He’s never hidden the fact that he is a PR guy. The fields of journalism and PR are, unfortunately, closely connected and there is steady traffic in both directions between the two.

Considering just how much work he’s been putting into his journalistic work – he regularly publishes newsletter articles that are over ten thousand words long, in addition to his podcast – I had always assumed that he was a former PR guy. I didn’t have the imagination to think somebody had the time to regularly hammer out several books’ worth of material and work in PR both at the same time.

But, a profile on him from Wired (itself the poster-child of servants of power masquerading as journalists) recently highlighted the fact that he is still running a PR firm, one that not only had tech companies as clients, but “AI” tech companies, including some of the least-reputable “AI” companies around, such as DoNotPay and (formerly) Nomi.

The backlash online has been swift and intense.

Conflicts of interest re-frame your prior work #

Remember Zitron’s tendency to hog credit and not reference other critics?

Something those critics all have in common is heavy criticism of DoNotPay and character-based “AI” chatbots such as those sold by Nomi. Those two companies have each become poster-children of sorts for distinct kinds of abuses by the “AI” sector:

Almost every active critic of the “AI” bubble, the ones that have kept up a pace of output that’s similar to Zitron’s, has covered these two companies.

But not Zitron, it seems.

The revelations abou his clients re-framed his writing. That he focused on the more obviously unstable companies in “AI”, while at the same time downplaying the contributions of researchers who have broader and more fundamental criticisms of the technology and the industry – who have specifically criticised his clients – no longer looks like an innocent decision. The conflict of interest changes how people see the writing, how they understand it, and undermines their trust. It re-frames the audience’s understanding of him from being an independent crusader to being a shill at best.

The writing itself hasn’t changed. The work that went into them hasn’t changed. The facts they report on are still facts. But his actions have changed how readers will interpret the text and all that the companies need to do to deflect his reports and criticism is to point at the conflict. “That’s the guy you trust, huh? Really?”

I have no doubt that a PR guy as capable as Zitron will find a way to salvage something out of this and bring himself back into the centre of attention. But his writing no longer does the job it used to. It has become a different thing entirely. What exactly it becomes will depend on how he spins and and re-reframes his work. But he used to position himself as a journalistic speaker of truth to power and that is no longer a position he can hold.

Another irony in all of this is that the Wired piece is generally laudatory:

In truth, Zitron’s two jobs aren’t in as much tension as they might seem to be. The PR wheedling and the critical needling come from the same place: He loves this stuff. He’s just mad it doesn’t work better.

This isn’t surprising because your average Wired editor, historically, wouldn’t know journalistic ethics if it walked up to them and hit them in the face with a shovel. (A “smart” shovel, obviously. The kind with bluetooth that only works half the time.) Wired has been one of the more consistent cheerleaders of the tech apocalypse over the years and their recent turn towards criticising the current US administration doesn’t even come close to making up for it.

The silk gloves treatment Ed Zitron got from Wired – “the funny part of Zitron’s becoming the face of tech’s new pessimism. He is, in fact, its truest believer” – shows us that it would have been trivial for him to head this entire thing off at the pass.

Once the newsletter and podcast started to get some traction, he could have just fired his “AI” clients. Then if somebody had mentioned them, he’d have been covered by a simple “yeah, that was before I truly understood how bad it was”.

It wouldn’t have been perfect. Some people would have still dismissed him, but that would have largely been the people who were already dismissing him for being an asshole (which he is).

But he wouldn’t have been put in the situation of having a whole host of potential allies turn their back on him, forcing him to retool his media career on the spot.

Dude has a book deal that’s threatened by this kerfuffle. This didn’t need to happen.

Turns out, if you want to act like a journalist, write like a journalist, and fight the fights of a journalist, not practicing journalism can get you into trouble.