Conspirarists Part Deux

The Alternative Thinkers

One of the more interesting questions I think would be to see why there’s a market need for ‘alternative’ platforms to ‘traditional media’. Well, we kind of having answered that above. These platforms are edgy, new. They allow for free-speech-discourse-marketplace-of-ideas to be even freerer than the stifled old establishment™ that is having trouble evolving and is doing a bad job of being relevant or politically extreme enough (in any direction) so we NEED to rebel and wise up to the world of information that surround us.

Have you noticed how information dense our daily lives are? How it has become harder to trust what you see online because there’re is a lot of lying going on? How overwhelming it is to sift through all this information?

Well, The Journalist has a solution for you and it’s a mere £250. It’s an 8 week course that doesn’t boast to let you do what you love, become financially free, be your own boss, but it does promise to teach you to:

• Act more from a place of authority and autonomy
• Become better at meta conversations and explore cultural intelligence
• Become more skilled at untangling complexity
• Level up in your life

Now, who would not want that?

We all get stressed about information overload, so it would be nice to get taught an effective method of navigation. Although you don’t get to be your own boss for $375 per week, you do get:

1. Q&A’s with world-class instructors
2. A toolkit of self-development practices, working in pods of three, and larger community calls
3. A course workbook
4. Access to exclusive interviews with instructors

 For £31.25[1] per week. Which is expensive relative to paying for mere podcasts, so it’s better be quality. It’s weird how number 1 & 4 on that list above are almost the same thing, but whatever, the main thing is that these people are world-class.  And like…shouldn’t the course workbook be part of the toolkit ? Right, let’s not get distracted, we have world class people to check out. We have 5 white guys, a woman, and a ‘no rank’ Zen master.

I strongly suspect the woman one is there for diversity, and the zen master for the Orientalism aspect. Why do I say that? Well, the main body of podcasts freely available on the platform’s youtube channel is mayo & sausage sandwich[2]  as far as the eye can see with maybe a sprinkle of the women ones / rebellious zen master here and there. In fact, why don’t we check?

Out of roughly 231 videos available as of July 2020, (excluding short clips & promotional videos) we have 207 videos full of meaty content, of which 153 have names in the video title. The titles that have no names, often have repeat topics that the named podcasting guests were associated with earlier, so I am going to assume same pattern for the sake of my time (plus ¾ of the content is not a bad representative metric).

153 podcasts[3] feature 182 names, of which 163 are male (of those men like 3 maybe people of colour) and 19 are female. That’s roughly 10% of diversity of thought, folks.

Perhaps, I’m being unfair, and this particular platform doesn’t aim to appeal to a wide audience, they are laser focusing on the niche of …people who yearn for intellectualism untarnished by the establishment™, of male persuasion.

I realise as I am looking through this crap that people seem to find solace in it. And as internet is a place where people despise any kind of hard thinks, anyone who would see this and recognise who I am talking about could and will call me a hater. And you know what, I am. I hate that the aesthetic of intellectualism is repackaged as some kind of ‘alternative’ knowledge to just step by step deduction and induction methods taught by the establishment™.

It’s not overpriced meditation guides with edgy, unscientific, badly constructed views, it’s ‘alternative’ thinking.

So far, I am being nothing but sceptical, and that’s just not all that fair. World class! Let’s meet our ‘instructors’.

Read here for further look at Thrown-to-the-Lions and The-Baptist

and theBaptist.

banknote picture – https://pixabay.com/users/publicdomainpictures-14/ Praying hands picture – https://pixabay.com/users/alexas_fotos-686414/

[1] or $37.5 which is currently £28.35, the difference is very minor, but I feel nitpicky

[2] I am not sorry about how disgusting this metaphor is.

[3] Some of which are rather pompously called films although it’s one dude speaking for two hours.