The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — There will be a reckoning.

But it will not look like what you think.

It will not look like Biblical Christian myths about the final judgement day, although in places it will feel like and resemble hell.

And the impact will not just fall on those guilty of great evil. The meek will not inherit the Earth. That was wishful thinking all along. The innocent will die in the greatest numbers of all.

The silver lining in this dark cloud is that some filthy-rich, evil sons-of-bitches will go down in hellfire flames in a very public way, those who could have made a difference but instead chose to profit from helping to bring on the end of democracy as we know it and human life on planet Earth as it could have been.

If there is a promised land somewhere out there in our future, it lies somewhere beyond 2050 with a significantly diminished human population.

As I’ve already written, the human population globally reached 8 billion in Nov. 2022. By 2037, it will peak at nine billion, and along with the global environment, will then begin to crash.

Related: Global Population Reaches Eight Billion People: Is This Really Something to Celebrate?

Like Moses and Martin Luther King before, if there is a promised land in the future I will not get there with you. Good luck. You are going to need it.

I will be lucky to make it to 2030, when I will hit the average life expectancy of those of us in the Baby Boom generation, 73.

A Karmic Reckoning

At the top of the list of those who will one way or another face a karmic reckoning is the anti-Christ Donald Trump. With all his popular appeal to the uneducated Christian masses, Trump could have done great things in the world. Instead, he chose to use his popularity for great evil.

It is going to take awhile longer for all his legal woes to work their way through all the different courts. But in the end Trump’s story will have a tragic conclusion, just as all the anti-heroes in all the narratives of great literature. I hope to still be around and able to walk so I can dance on his grave.

Partisanship aside, he is without a doubt the most evil son-of-a-bitch to ever get involved in American politics. If there is a hell, he will certainly hold a prominent place in burning in it.

Now to the lesser players and some narratives that are playing out now.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg

It is becoming more clear every day that the destruction of the news economy mainly by Google and Facebook is about to face a reckoning in the near term.

We can’t blame the internet or the World Wide Web. The promise of a growing democratization of the world on the internet is still very real and ongoing. The down side of the promise of the internet was perpetuated by people who perhaps should have known better.

At the top of the list of those who will soon face a humiliating reckoning is Mark Zuckerberg, the guy who created a dating app at Harvard that ate the world. As I wrote back in February, 2020, right before the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States: “… what if Mark Zuckerberg, who created Facebook, instead of dropping out of college would have gone around on the Harvard campus and found some experts in all these fields to consult with on how to build something to save the world, he could have created a powerful tool to do just that. Instead, he was like a star basketball player (computer programmer) who selfishly created something to make himself a billionaire, and didn’t have any liberal arts or science understanding of how to work altruistically in groups to make something that was not just about the money, capitalist. He created a Frankenstein monster that threatens to destroy democracy and the planet.”

Part III: How to Create a Functioning Communications System to Save Democracy and the Planet

The Meta world he created is about to crash, and woe it be to all who joined up and became dependent on Facebook for news, information and entertainment on the web.

As The New York Times is reporting now, while Zuckerberg declared that 2023 will be the “year of efficiency” at his company, Meta, “so far, efficiency has translated into mass layoffs. He has conducted two rounds of cuts over the past six months, with two more to come; these will eliminate more than 21,000 people. Mr. Zuckerberg is also closing 5,000 open positions, which amounts to 30 percent of his company’s work force.”

Nearly one-third of the workforce. Think about that.

The company’s stock price has dropped 43 percent from its peak 19 months ago. More layoffs are coming this month, and indications are some of those cuts could be in engineering groups, which would have been unthinkable before the trouble started last year. Since then, the company reported consecutive quarters of declining revenue — a first since it became a public company in 2012.

It is hard to imagine how this could end well for Zuckerberg. As he turns his massive company platform over to bots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents, it is likely the algorithm will spin out of control and result in massive hacking that sends most users running for the exits.

It is ironic that critics began to complain about the 24-hour news cycle back in the 1990s because of cable television news, and now sometimes it takes four days for the news to show up on Facebook. What a world, eh?

Twitter’s Elon Musk

The news turns over faster on Twitter, which has never been a profitable enterprise, propped up by funding from Saudi Arabia. In the early days when Facebook attracted the average person who before had no skills to build a website for themselves, Twitter attracted politicians, celebrities and journalists.

Trump used this platform to orchestrate his coup attempt, so some smart prognosticators should have seen this coming.

I did and wrote about it, and not just by posting my opinion on Facebook.

Since Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion, took it private and turned it into a platform for MAGA morons and methheads, most Democrats ran from the platform. Now that The New York Times is refusing to support Twitter or Facebook, and with National Public Radio exiting Twitter in a very public way, it’s just a matter of time before it collapses. Even Musk admits its only worth half of what he paid for it. With most of the original staff gone, it is also destined to be run by bots and AI agents. And when users get hacked, they will leave it too.

NPR quits Twitter after being falsely labeled as ‘state-affiliated media’

The News Industry

Will this benefit the news industry and help bring it back from the brink of collapse? Doubtful.

While the Times and Washington Post — now owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — are best positioned to benefit, they too have suffered low staff morale, layoffs and in the case of the Times, the threat of a staff union strike.

Many new news outlets in the Internet Age have popped up and profited, including Politico, Vox, Axios, the New American Journal to name a few.

The Google Conundrum

But since the era of blogging shifted to the Trump era, fake news and sensational clickbait, it is hard to see how they can all keep going until something changes at Google — the biggest conundrum of them all.

Google created the first successful interface for publishing advertising online, and it remains a near monopoly. But due to its pay policy of pennies a click, it robbed all news outlets of much needed revenue for the gathering and production of news. Google does not pay for one reporter to cover anything. Neither does Wikipedia for that matter.

In the Trump era of right-wing clickbait, Google and YouTube chose to profit from pushing fake news, instead of putting its considerable resources into fighting it.

So it is imperative that Google also face the music, hopefully in court.

The last time I checked, Google had $60 billion in cash reserves sitting in a bank account doing nothing. As I have reported many times before, if that company would just pay us in the news business for an accurate count of page views for ads on our news sites, we could all be making a comfortable living and paying to produce real, reliable, accurate, independent news.

You would think that $60 billion would attract some up-and-coming, ambitious law firm to sue and get us our due. But so far, nothing. Only crickets from the big bad law firms who like to claim they are there to help people.

On top of it all, we are clearly headed for a recession in the U.S., and the world, if we are not already in one.

“The bottom line is that a recession in the United States appears inevitable. It may already have begun, Julian Brigden, a founder and the president of the macroeconomic research firm Macro Intelligence 2 Partners, told me Tuesday. If not, the U.S. economy is likely to fall into recession in the third quarter of this year, he predicted.”

“This was essentially preordained” by the Fed’s large and rapid interest rate increases, he said.

For his information, every recession for the past century has been foreshadowed by a drop in spending for advertising. Remember what happened to newspapers in 2005 before the Bush Great Recession in 2007-2009? That is happening again now. It is on the way, if not already here.

NYT: Why We’re Probably Headed for a Recession

Meanwhile and back to Google. The Alphabet company has paid out billions of dollars in lawsuit settlements in Europe and Australia, but not a penny in the U.S. I have offered myself up as a plaintiff in a case. According to my estimates, Google owns us over a half a million in unpaid ad revenue over the past few years. If we cannot recover this lost revenue somehow, our future is also in doubt.

So I apologize for having to ask for donations on Facebook and the web to keep going. But that is far better to me than putting up a paywall and forcing people who probably can’t afford it to pay for real, reliable, accurate, independent news. There is no profit in this. We only seek to pay the expenses to do what we do. If we can’t do that, I will give up and join the ranks of all the dead newspapers in the world.

I can’t save democracy and the planet all by myself. “The People” who care enough to save it must help.

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