Late last week Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush complained that Pres. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry hide behind “big syllable words,” bemoaning “nuanced” and “sophisticated” approaches to foreign policy. This impulse toward anti-intellectualism saw an echo in a depressing think piece about the end of the long form film criticism site The Dissolve and the $100 million valuation placed on the clickbait firm Viral Nova, which made its money slapping zany and sometimes deceptive headlines on other people’s content for quick clicks. “Over the past two years,” weirdly named Carles.Buzz wrote on Motherboard, “we’ve learned that there isn’t any actual monetizable ‘cultural value’ in building a content farm with an authoritative voice or domination of a niche area. Instead, it is more important to chase quantifiable human metrics by shoving lowbrow content in front of Facebook users.” In other words, dumb is the hottest trend in advertising, and the only one guaranteed to reach a mass audience. Arguably, this is a problem created by the size of the internet, but in the end it affects us all. The internet is nearly infinite in size, but that means that any one website stands next to no chance of reaching a large audience. Specialized content—or even meaningfully smart content—will never attract more than a small fraction of the reading public, since by definition niche audiences are self-limiting in a world of limitless choice. By contrast, the only thing that can cut across all demographics to assemble a mass audience is stupidity. Stupid attracts a large audience of the stupid, but it also draws in the curious, as well as those who know the content is stupid but consume it anyway, either for entertainment or to reinforce their own sense of superiority.
Fringe history is in its own way the Viral Nova of the field of history—low quality, outrageous content meant to attract a large audience quickly, burn bright, and get replaced with the next big thing. The website Ancient Origins doesn’t hide the fact that it uses all of the tools of the viral internet to push low-quality fringe history content, particularly by promoting their stories on social media, or, as Buzz put it, “shoving lowbrow content in front of Facebook users.” They aren’t particularly good at going viral yet, but give them time. They’ll stumble upon a way to link Roomba-riding cats with the Ark of the Covenant one of these days. The Daily Mail has made good use of the viral internet by spamming its own pages with extremely low quality content, most of it thoughtlessly rewritten from other sources. This has allowed it to become, in its internet incarnation, the world’s most popular newspaper. Gawker ran an exposé about its tactics earlier this year. “We were simply given stories written by other publications and essentially told to rewrite them,” former staffer James King wrote. It was therefore hardly surprising when the unrelenting maw of the Mail fed on John Ruskamp’s claims that he had discovered three thousand year old Chinese pictograms in the desert southwest of the United States. The story seems to have come from perhaps a bit of original reporting added to material borrowed from the Chinese diaspora newspaper Epoch Times, itself a viral content farm with a large section devoted to rewriting online fringe history claims—often by the same people who write for Ancient Origins and cross-promote their work to give it legitimacy. April Holloway, for example, writes for Epoch Times’s fringe section and operates Ancient Origins. The Epoch Times piece on Ruskamp and his claims, by Tara MacIsaac, in turn was recycling material that had appeared a few days earlier on the Message to Eagle website. Ruskamp has been pushing this line for years, and he compares a series of geometric images to Chinese characters, to which they sometimes bear either a partial or a vague resemblance. In a language where a single brushstroke out of joint renders a character illegible, the differences should be devastating, as should be Ruskamp’s own claim that many of the characters lacked a “readable message.” But when has that stopped anyone from declaring various markings in America remnants of Old World languages? Nevertheless, the Daily Mail cites the Epoch Times as the source for the claim that Dr. Michael Medrano of Petroglyph National Monument confirmed that the petroglyphs “do not readily appear to be associated with local tribal entities.” This means much less than the Mail thinks since the local peoples have turned over many times over the past few thousand years. Similarly, the original claim on the Message to Eagle website that Ruskamp had written an article about his Chinese characters for the diffusionist journal Pre-Columbiana (from the Early Sites Research Society) gradually changed. Epoch Times over-emphasized the supposed academic nature of the journal, claiming that Ruskamp’s article was under “peer review” because the magazine’s editorial board of “scholars” is apparently modeled on the operations of well-regarded academic journals. The Mail simply states that Ruskamp’s “academic article [is] currently undergoing peer review,” without specifying the publication or its purpose, thus legitimizing it beyond the facts. The Mail author, Richard Gray, in his haste, has also completely misunderstood the so-called Solutrean Hypothesis of Dennis Stanford, which claims that early Europeans influenced Ice Age America. Instead, Gray gives us this whopper about Ruskamp: “His views are also beginning to be taken seriously by other academics and they echo some theories put forward by researchers such as Dr Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution, who believed North America was first populated by people from Asia during the last ice age.” Gray has clearly confused the Solutrean Hypothesis with the standard model of the peopling of the Americas, and then cited the standard model as proof of Chinese in America in 1300 BCE! And now Ruskamp can have his claims legitimized and go happily viral, and the rest of us get to watch.
29 Comments
Mike Fedele
7/13/2015 09:44:42 am
Today substantive discussions are simply not tolerated by most sides. The "other side" is the enemy and hence if they disagree with you they have to be attacked as evil vile "things." No one listens to any other ideas other than the ones they hold to for various reasons. Yes you can be right but it is important to listen to other views..sometimes you might change your mind. Paul Krugman seems like a nice person but he constantly attacks like a two year old when anyone disagrees with his keynsian ideology. You see this on both sides of any issue and its only further marginalizes people and expands the fringe. When the DHS comes out with very political reports that anyone who supports the Constitution or say doesn't think central banks are a good idea are 'threats"...or recently returning veterans just creates more suspicion and increases fringe followers. People are dropping from the 'commons" and staying in their enclaves repeating the same line over and over again
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David Bradbury
7/13/2015 10:10:48 am
That's a different issue. There are many situations particularly in complex systems, where there is no one "correct solution" but where different imperfect-but-acceptable solutions may be incompatible with each other.
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Uncle Ron
7/13/2015 01:54:13 pm
More to Jason's point, if I may, is the presentation as news of outrageous, attention-grabbing topics and headlines without regard for accuracy or truthfulness, with the sole objective of drawing as many viewers as possible to the subsequent advertising content. The actual topic will soon be forgotten (except by a few crackpots), replaced by the latest outré entry. It’s all part of the gotta-have-the-latest, selfie/twitter/face-book obsessed, “notice me but don’t try to actually engage with me” culture. Besides, what good is truth? It's how you FEEL that's important.
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David Bradbury
7/13/2015 08:08:20 pm
Ooh!
titus pullo
7/14/2015 10:02:25 am
You have a good point but I wonder if the economics are one of diminishing returns the more you put ridiculous things up..unless there is an infinite pool or new customers you risk having the same old ones who are probably not the target market for most ad campaigns as they tend to have less discretionary spend...but I could be wrong...it is is working...(maybe you just come out with new web sites like new H2 shows? ha ha)
nergal
7/13/2015 11:05:33 am
Carles is a really great writer, and I have loved the self-awareness in his work for a long time. He can speak authoritatively about "content farms" and the general spiraling decline in quality of work on the internet, because he is one of the patient zeroes for it.
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Mark L
7/14/2015 04:39:12 am
Can't say I'm super-upset about the end of The Dissolve. People from the AV Club who wanted all that sweet website-running money for themselves, and realised that the only reason they had those readerships was due to the AV Club itself, not any innate talent they had.
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7/14/2015 08:23:35 pm
This is depressing stuff: when given access to the limitless information of the internet, humans opt for checking out obvious stupid clickbait.
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Uncle Ron
7/16/2015 05:36:34 am
"In-Credible" is the proper term. :)
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Hendon Harris
10/2/2015 04:09:44 pm
Have any of you considered that these discoveries of John Ruskamp may in fact be what he says they represent?
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2/17/2016 03:50:19 pm
Jason,
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Hendon Harris
6/30/2020 03:19:18 am
Google: "Agni-The Hindu God of Fire--Chinese Buddhist Encyclpedia"
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7/19/2020 05:42:27 pm
I have twice been shown a map in the Library of Congress by the then Director of the Map Division, Dr. John Ebert, Former Chief of the Maps Division that Completely Contradicts.what the LOC is now saying about ANY map in their collection!!
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7/19/2020 06:31:33 pm
The LOC has a formal process when maps are submitted for this type of review. This was not the case for The Harris Maps. These
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6/16/2023 11:59:19 pm
Here are three sites that I believe will provide information regarding what I believe is more evidence pointing to the veracity of claims that Fu Sang was indeed located in North America's Pacific Southwest.
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10/4/2023 05:03:01 pm
Going back into ancient Chinese history for thousands
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Hendon Harris
10/13/2023 12:06:01 am
“Agni-Hindu god of fire-Tibetan Buddhist Encyclopedia”
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10/13/2023 01:38:37 pm
In 2005 Lynn Hickox discovered "The Badlands Guardians No. 1 & 2" Use "Google Maps" to access these images for yourself.
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11/30/2023 10:59:29 am
“The Ching Bird’s Head” is ONLY available on Yahoo
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12/21/2023 06:32:23 pm
The "Doctrine of Discovery" issued by the Roman Catholic Church some 550+ years ago gave the reason and the justification needed to empower Southern European countries to use whatever force and whatever means necessary to subjugate any people who stood in the way of the spread of Southern European faith and culture. It gave the authority to take over "heathen lands" by violent force if neccesary.
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1/31/2024 01:11:51 pm
"Chaityas of Ajanta Caves" These images of still existing ancient
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7/18/2024 03:10:56 pm
Numerous high altitude satellite photographs of massive geoglyphs located throughout the North American and Canadian Pacific Southwest bear ancient testimony of a highly advanced civilization/s once living there for a considerable amount of time. Doubtful?
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12/9/2024 02:43:01 pm
"Akkadian King?/ chinesediscoveramerica.com"
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12/23/2024 08:36:35 pm
"China's Historical Isolation
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1/18/2025 01:22:07 pm
The first above listed posting dated 12/23/24 "China's Historical Isolation ..." as well as "The Ching Bird's Head" appear to be only available on Yahoo at this time.
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1/18/2025 09:26:34 pm
Use Yahoo Search to access the articles mentioned above.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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