by Travis Mateer
Today I’m going to use my investigative skills to explore what The Pulp claims to be celebrating. Is it REALLY just an ostensible birthday? That’s what they’re claiming, and I’m sure it’s what they think they are celebrating, but are they?
Something big happened last week: The Pulp turned 1 year old! We can barely believe it. Seems like just yesterday we launched — thanks to the support of so many of you! — with wild excitement and a healthy dose of terror.
We want to celebrate this scrappy non-profit news organization’s first year in business.
I went to The Pulp’s website to see what they’ve done this week and was VERY unimpressed. There are only TWO articles to read, and one is a throw-away piece about food. Scrappy news organization? Um, how about SHITTY news organization?
Without a team or steady income I continue to produce MORE content than this shitty news organization EVERY WEEK, and that’s having cut back my Sunday posts. How can ONE citizen journalist do more than an entire new start-up news organization? I just don’t get it.
Later in the article The Pulp lists their “founding donors”. I won’t say which one, but an owner of one of these founding businesses told me they are disappointed by The Pulp’s output.
What The Pulp is actually celebrating is the ILLUSION that a scrappy news organization exists, when the reality is these former Indy reporters are stuck in the OLD way of approaching “news”, instead of appreciating that the advanced mechanisms of narrative control mean this is an INFORMATION WAR derived from fifth generation warfare tactics.
For context, here’s Wikipedia’s definition:
Fifth-generation warfare (5GW) is warfare that is conducted primarily through non-kinetic military action, such as social engineering, misinformation, cyberattacks, along with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and fully autonomous systems. Fifth generation warfare has been described by Daniel Abbot as a war of “information and perception”.
In honor of this perception war I’ve developed a new way of storytelling that incorporates subjective synchronicities as a means of directing my focus. Since July I’ve written over 150,000 words spanning five zines and the sixth one is already halfway done.
Depending on how the day goes, I might pre-position my box truck near Free Cycles because I’ve got some stuff to celebrate as well, and you can help add to the celebratory mood by donating what you can to Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF). Any little bit helps.
Thanks for reading, and stay tuned! The shitty capabilities of local news organizations means OPPORTUNITY for me, and that makes me smile.
Thanks for reading!