MOCKINGBIRD MEDIA DELUXE: Watch Kara Swisher Sit & Spin!

She’s Got Important Things to Say! Though Not Quite In the Way She Thinks.

Life During Wartime: Dressed in what appears to be a drab facsimile of military garb, Mockingbird media all-star Kara Swisher had several insightful things to say on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday morning.

“The CIA’s use of the American news media has been much more extensive than Agency officials have acknowledged publicly or in closed sessions with members of Congress.” — Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” all the way back in 1977

“They tell us that ignorance is bliss / I guess by those that control the media it is / They own the media, control the stories we are told / If you ever try to go against them, you will be ignored…” — Van Morrison, “They Own the Media”

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Some people prefer easy wins in the Culture War that’s actually Civil War 2.0 but really WW3 yet at its esoteric foundation a Spiritual War. They like batting around low I.Q. Woke dummies who don’t know which way is up. 

But me, I’d far rather hold some level of reluctant admiration for the adversary instead of contempt, and one of the best examples is canny and conniving Kara Swisher. I bow in this exceptionally intelligent tech writer’s general direction…while making sure I never take my side-eye off her, either. 

Don’t sleep on this woman. Former Vox-co-founder and past-tense NYTimes/WaPost/WSJ reporter Kara Swisher is far more dangerous than most Mockingbirds in the controlled corrupt collectivist corporate criminal clown media because she’s definitely no Bozo. 

Unlike the vast majority of her propaganda-pushing peers, Swisher’s very smart, experienced, articulate and well-connected, with ambiguous and sometimes intriguing allyships and a skillful actress’s gift for making bullshit declarations sound conclusive and convincing. 

I was reminded of this Sunday when she took two strikes before knocking out a solid double talking about technology, social media, modern media moguls and the escalating economic perils of the Hollywood strikes. 

It’s half-happenstance I came across her Q&A on Face the Nation, a premier propaganda perch atop the Sunday talking head parades. I was originally paying attention because the CBS news program interviewed my favorite media mogul Barry “Killer” Diller, who always has something interesting and insightful to say, unlike the vast majority of his peers. I’ll let the man speak for himself and you can decide if he’s still the most honest smart guy in the room or the smartest honest guy. You know what I think.

I’ve been following the media and marketing industries for 35+ years. Of all the media moguls I’ve observed, there’s nobody smarter or more willing to share his honest insights than Barry Diller. I almost snagged an interview with him for MediaPost in 2018 about A.I., about which he was already presciently warning. But then his flunky asked if there were any other subjects I wanted to talk about and I stupidly added a couple questions and that’s all she wrote.

But with Barry Diller, I also got Kara Swisher. And even if Ms. Swisher’s takes weren’t nearly as honest as “Killer” Diller’s, they were actually more interesting and insightful, because she helpfully served up the Mockingbird agenda(s) to the plebs she thinks she’s outsmarting (and she might be half-right!). 

Ms. Swisher’s linguistic and thespian talents were on full display Sunday morning on the CBS (CIA B.S.?) talking points machine Face the Nation: Addressing the writers & actors strike; Elon Musk’s hypocrisy; ZuckWorld’s quick pivot to Twitter-competitor Threads, now that the Metaverse has proven to be a virtual zombie graveyard akin to Second Life 2.0. All while dropping valuable insight towards what the Media Establishment wants and thinks and wants us to think about all three of those subjects — like I said, two strikes and a double down the line. To whit:

1-  “Hollywood's shift to streaming is necessary and important.” 

But is it though, Kara? Financially? Or just societally? My interpretation of the past couple years’ flattened media landscape is that the Real Power Brokers (the “Apex Players” as another guy pegs them) are hungry for more streaming because it means less get-out-in-public activity and more surveillance: A willingly dormant, stay-at-home, out-of-shape homogenous Amerika that’s constantly, willingly being monitored is easier to control. 

So while Ms. Swisher confidently calls Hidden Hand Hollywood’s move away from movie theaters, live entertainment, broadcast & cable television “necessary” and “important,” of course neither is actually the case. It will only further consolidate messaging control among ever-fewer corporate players as platforms shrink, and exacerbate an already sedentary, lazy, and self-focused cancer culture of creative collapse.

Not only that, as we’ve demonstrably seen Invisible Hand-wise, it’s less profitable. What’s “necessary” and “important” to Hollywood’s bottom line is EXPANDING the number of outlets and different distribution platform experiences for profit. Not contracting them. Like this: 

First, ideally, a theatrical release that gets people out of the house and into a shared communal event. Then, a longer window after the film’s debut before home release: 90 days at least, not 45 days, which is the CurrenThing. Make FOMO people understand that if they don’t see the movie in theaters, they’ve got at least a season’s wait before they’ll get it at home. 

Then, if possible (and I’m not sure it is) retreat to a material product release on DVD/Blu-Ray, if the media conglomerates can manage to bring that back into vogue (which they probably can’t, but they should try). Then, and only then, maybe six months after the DVD release (but preferably a year, the way it used to be), put it on streaming. 

“Many are called, but few are chosen.” — Matthew 22:14

Moreover, and this is probably the bigger deal, a lot of these streaming platforms ain’t gonna last. We are seeing a consumer contraction of streaming services investment because there’s only so much budget and time-allotment space for a glut of streaming options. The thought that every media conglomerate’s going to have their own streaming service (or, in Disney’s case, two: Disney+ and Hulu) simply isn’t a realistic scenario.

It’s financially stupid, too: By keeping everything in-house, what had been an overly-optimistic idealized walled-garden money-printing monopoly of hoarded I.P., has instead played out as a caged, dusty, isolated circle-jerk of the same dollar bill being counted as three. That can’t last.

Disney is the perfect example. It used to be that even if a studio had a bomb, like, say, Disney’s disastrous animated gayboi flop Strange World — the biggest bomb of 2022 that will nevertheless be outdistanced downwards by at least two 2023 box office catastrophes — there was backend money to be made by selling the dud to Netflix or HBO or Showtime or somewhere, all the way down the food chain to a grubby TV network in a year or two’s time.

Except now Disney owns two streaming platforms and a broadcast TV network (ABC) and several cable networks (too many to list), so everything’s always in-house and it’s just a matter of shuffling money around different corporations under the Rat Kingdom conglomerate, like a streetwise shell game, until, finally, one day, perhaps soon, the pseudo-Ponzi scheme collapses into its own footprint like WTC7. 

So I’m not sure for whom streaming is “necessary” and “important.” Maybe for the two or three platforms that remain standing as the music grinds to a stop, but not for the industry overall except as another channel for incoming cash flow. Moving everything into a digital home delivery technology is going to do for Hollywood what it did for the music industry: destroy it. We’re actually in the midst of exactly that right now!

They Live! I’m not going to theorize that the Threads logo integrates a “666” like some people are pointing out. But I will note how it makes me think of “G” and “A,” which will cause most people to associate it with Google, not Meta. That said, I doubt it will matter because Threads will probably not be around all that long.

2- “Threads is a good product. [Elon] Musk gave [Mark] Zuckerberg an opening, and if this was a cage match he would’ve have the stuffing knocked out of him. I don’t think [Twitter] can recover.” 

But is it though, Kara? Is ZuckWorld’s “Threads” — which doesn’t have a desktop application, offers no curation nor DMs, Siamese Twins itself to Instagram, and sucks up your data like Dracula on a blood bender — truly a “good product”? Or is it simply the latest and maybe last desperate Hail Mary from the richest entry yet in a billionaire’s parade of alleged “Twitter Killers”? All these social media mirages that disgruntled blue checks rush to and trumpet, right before they repeatedly fail to make “fetch” happen. Regale, rinse, repeat.

The Mockingbird media has made it clear for years they are desperate to limit free speech, under the auspices of what Kara Swisher calls “safer, more civil” social media spaces but what a lot more people would call oppressive anti-American controlled narrative platforms where you can’t criticize a blowhard politician or challenge a bad reporter or call a groomer a groomer….even if the place is loaded with half-people worse than groomers. Like Mastodon, the first failed “Twitter Killer” the Mockingbirds flocked to after Musk’s takeover. Followed by a couple others that got even less traction. Maybe it’s time to bring back Google+? Ha. Ha. Ha.

Still, I’m a fan of Capitalism more than Twitter or Elon Musk/Lone Skum, so if ZuckWorld actually comes up with a better alternative, more power to him! Though I probably won’t participate — I prefer a maximum number of technoligarchs jostling for control of who I know and how I think and what I do, not less. 

But Threads ain’t the better mousetrap, no matter what reality Kara Swisher is trying to conjure. Threads looks pretty lame to me, so far at least, and anybody who calls it “a good product” at this point I would give serious side-eye. Instead, steer to the far more clear-eyed and rare trustworthy straight-shooting PR expert Jeremy Knauff, who helpfully provided a detailed explanation of why Threads is, thus far, a “dumpster fire.” 

The dumpster seems to be burning fast, too — a thread that became a fuse? — as engagement on Threads has dropped 50% since the first couple days, cratering even as Kara Swisher was touting it as unassailable on Sunday. That’s the big quick decline, exactly like every other Twitter alternative that got the blessing of the controlled corrupt collectivist corporate criminal clown media. Their anti-Midas touch means the vast majority of everybody else chooses to reject or ignore the new watering hole, because we all hate the controlled corrupt collectivist corporate criminal clown media and would rather they just leave Twitter and leave us alone and become even more irrelevant than they are now, which is pretty irrelevant.

How many of these Social Media platforms (R.I.P.) did you join?

The Mockingbird goal, which is also and uncoincidentally the occupied government’s goal, is to find or create a new, more easily controlled social media platform that multinational marketers can get behind, because they’re all globalists who want to destroy U.S. sovereignty and they’re “All In This Together.” 

As Ms. Swisher rightly points out, there’s no question a massive advertiser exodus from Twitter has put a hurt on the company’s finances. What she doesn’t say, though, is that the problem for advertisers who’ve left is that there’s no where else to go for the kind of Zeitgeist-reach you get with Twitter. Not even close!

So now the question is whether the Hidden Hand types determined to limit what you see, learn and know can manifest a legit Twitter alternative by, say, early November and the holiday shopping season. If they can’t, it becomes a matter of either swallowing their pride and crawling back to Twitter, or simply shooting themselves in the head, marketing message-reach-wise. All these Woke companies are so stubborn and stupid, I honestly don’t have a clue which they’ll choose.

Still, this much-desired advertiser alternative is what’s at the root of Kara Swisher’s absurd assertions about Threads being unstoppable. She’s bluffing. It’s a wannabe fake-it-until-you-make-it claim that Ms. Swisher hopes will create a de facto acceptance of and exodus to Threads. Far more likely, it will prove as prescient as her 2019 prediction that Jack Dorsey would still be running Twitter in 20 years (though I think she actually believed that one). 

Beyond Threads’ three-cheers-arrival and near-immediate follow-up yawn and pending implosion, Ms. Swisher’s unexpected pivot to ZuckWorld fangirl deserves noting for another reason. Because 13 years ago at the All Things Digital Tech Conference (R.I.P.), K.S. pulled a mean bit of perhaps unintentional (but maybe not!) de-occulting. 

Ms. Swisher’s aggressive questioning about online privacy got the then-26-year-old Facebook CEO Zuck sweating so hard — this was 2010, back when I was still in NYC and a ubiquitous hoodie was still part of Zuck’s personal brand — she convinced him to reluctantly take off his hooded sweatshirt to reveal… a “hidden Facebook Illuminati symbol,” according to Gawker (R.I.P.). Or a “creepy insignia,” according to The Week. Or a “mysterious” one, according to VentureBeat. It was “Bizarre,” wrote Business Insider. Etc.

Here, on the right, is the “bizarre, creepy, mysterious, hidden Facebook Illuminati symbol” that Kara Swisher is examining on the left. Please note how publications constantly decrying “conspiracy theorists” — like Business Insider, The Week, Gawker and Venture Beat — breathlessly obsessed over the symbol for a 48-hour Mediagasm in 2010. People who see a Zionist plot under every media rock immediately entered neo-Nazi Nirvana. The mainstream pubs only hinted at it, cuz that’s how they do. 

So there’s a curious Plot Twist, though I guess “The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend” dictum may be in play here, now that both Kara Swisher and Zuck share an enemy in Lone Skum. Politics and power-quests make for strange bedfellows, of course, though there’s not much stranger than a San Francisco lesbian in bed with a social media cyborg. 

But I’ll just leave the Illuminati Hoodie reveal back a couple paragraphs, and move on to Kara Swisher’s finest and fairest moment in her mostly misleading interview on Face the Nation. It ties back into her animosity towards Lone Skum — damn does she hate free speech! — but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong.

3- “Elon was ahead [on Artificial Intelligence], then he was behind, now he’s trying to be ahead again after calling for a pause. It’s so funny he called for a pause and then started a company. One would imagine that was hypocritical if one was of that mind.”

Ms. Swisher cynically but properly notes Lone Skum’s double-talk on Artificial Intelligence, which the South Africa-born billionaire has warned is “summoning the demon” (shit, ANOTHER one?) while at the same time trying to create his own version. And dressing up like, uh, “The Devil’s Champion.”

So one cheer and two boos for (IMHO!) formidable Mockingbird mouthpiece Kara Swisher, who’s often ahead of the curve because she’s one of the “influencers” attempting to turn us into it. A left-handed turn. “Back, and to the left.” A lot like her fellow controlled proposition, the lousy and not-nearly-as-smart-as-she-is former NYTimes Business Section scribe Andrew Ross Sorkin, who, let’s remember, immediately interrupted, pumped the brakes and changed the subject during the CNBC show Squawk Box back in January of this year, when Kevin O’Leary started making noises about Disney and Bob Iger losing billions in the FTX meltdown. PRO TIP: That’s your signifying event that Andrew Ross Sorkin is not a professional journalist.

Is Kara Swisher? Probably not; she was just on CBS after all. But she’s still got value even if it’s halfway inverted. You’ve just got to read her tealeaves to figure whether she’s telling you the truth because it serves whatever team she plays on, or whether she’s lying because that serves the team. Or agency. Or Hidden Hand. “We’re all in this together!”

On the other, Invisible, hand however, I’ll remind you that the book that really put Ms. Swisher on the map was AOL.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads and Made Millions in the War for the Web. So it’s not like she’s been a perfect prophetess of tech media, because everybody still knows who evil Bill Gates is and nobody knows who Steve Case is. 

Then again, like I said, maybe that’s not Kara Swisher’s remit. If you watch that Face the Nation interview, you’ll notice Ms. Swisher uses the term “narrative” a lot, instead of “facts” or “Truth.” Like, The Narrative is such a big deal that it’s earned her a spot on the “AZ Quotes” page: “Everything is a narrative in life. I learned that early on as a reporter at The Washington Post.” Chirp Chirp! 

Self-promoting, self-impressed tech “reporter”/tattletale twatwaffle Taylor Lorenz would love to be a VVitch Queen of the Mockingbird Media like Kara Swisher. But she never will cuz she’ll never make up the obvious I.Q. gap and, unlike terrible Taylor, Kara Swisher does not appear to be insane in the slightest. While it’s good to be wary of Ms. Swisher’s wiles, I would not and do not classify her among the roughly 50% of liberal white women 18-49 who self-identify as having been diagnosed with a mental illness (and not only because Ms. Swisher was born waaaay back in 1962, 241 days after me). Ms. Swisher’s a keeper; terrible Taylor’s a flavor-of-the-moment and in two years a trivia question. Pffffft.