Light and shadows

Some days reading the news, checking your Facebook feed or listening to your podcast queue can be simply appalling. If it were not bad enough that natural disasters seem to be becoming more and more frequent, Internet and the digital media are only making it worse by creating a chasm among us that might be impossible to breech in the near future. For the sake of a few dollars (well, a few millions) some news outlets will serve us pieces that feed and curate our fears, ensuring that we keep our eyes on the screen except for the occasional suspicious side glance to check what our neighbor is doing. The best established ones will even provide our neighbor with a complete different set of news to tend to their fears and to contribute to their own mistrust against you. And all the while we keep thinking that the news are for free, but in fact we are paying for them with our mental health, our joy of life and even with our hopes for the future. There are still shades of grey with respect to the credibility of the different outlets, but in the end they are all attention mongers and they have to stay in the black month after month.

Photo: John Ragai

The last couple of days I have been listening to a mini-series called The Chaos Machine from the podcast Invisibilia, from NPR, about the media turmoil developing recently in Stockton, California, where a news site has arisen and gained the appreciation of the population by their dedication to covering local events, but at the same time it is becoming a social force by affecting the public opinion with forceful editorials and scandalous investigatory pieces that occasionally edge on libel. Listening to the grief of the former mayor, a victim of the site, breaks my heart because he seemed to be truly interested in improving the conditions in town. He enjoyed being in the public eye and even the media attention of some nationwide organizations, but I do not think he deserved to be thrown under the bus. The owner of the site rightfully claims his right to publish whatever he considers interesting as long as he has the documents to demonstrate the authenticity of his statements. He gets thtrough a bit too strong for my taste, but that does not disqualify him from running a news site. Some of his headlines might be stretching the reality somewhat, but that is not anything unusual these days even among prestigious newspapers. Finally, a former collaborator, who also claims to be the co-founder, admits leaving the job because there were plans to use the site as a king-making machine, selling their clout to the highest bidder and then publishing the stories that would better server their goals. All in all, the truth is so muddled that it has become impossible (at least for me) to extricate who (if any) is in a morally higher position than the other two. Very depressing.

Fortunately, not all is bad in my feeds and a couple of days ago I ran into a very inspiring article by Jason Kehe on Wired about American tea devotee and science fiction writer Becky Chambers, whose tetralogy "The Wayfarers" not only has won the Hugo award but has also become one of the founding works of a new genre paradoxically called hopepunk. This literary movement is a reaction to the previous grimdark, which depicts bleak and pessimistic worlds and world views, where cruelty and disappointment are part of the daily experience, almost touching on nihilism, like the original punk culture in the 1970s. Hopepunk combines the right to demand a better world with the need to keep fighting for it at all levels, including in particular an enormous dose of empathy for all actors, with their strengths, weaknesses and limitations.

Reading the article I could not avoid feeling a pang of curiosity. The books were not only well received by the critics, but they also offered some sort of innovative (and heartwarming) way of telling the stories. This article by Aja Romano on Vox explains the narrative movement in a lot of detail and I was pleased to find that some of my favorite works of science fiction were listed as conforming to the definition even if they were written well before the term was coined in 2017: the Expanse series by James S. A Corey, the Discworld series by the late Terry Pratchett, The Martian by Andy Weir, the Jupiter Ascending movie, the Sense8 series and the whole Star Trek saga, in particular Discovery.

One cannot always ensure to get a decent balance between good and bad news. Some days you find a delightfully enticing collection of books and the light dominates; other days the ominous tales of news manipulation cast heavy shadows on our mood. But luckily, life ends up pivoting between the extremes and bringing both into play, with the gloomy moments contributing to make the cheerful ones even brighter. Have a nice weekend.