> I think Elon musk would disagree with you on your last point there.

Elon Musk is a fucking moron. He is utterly ruining the profitability of Twitter through his conviction that a "woke mind virus" needs to be combatted. Where does that fit in the belief system that capitalism and the pursuit of profit explains everything?

> Money, ownership, and influence are key to controlling narratives and outcomes.

Sure, ownership matters. But the problem I have with most Marxist-derived capitalist theory is that they reduce "influence" to nothing but money and ownership. Other things matter.

For example: the Right wing insists that media has a massive left-wing bias because most journalists identify as left-wing. And part of this is true: a majority of journalists identify as left-leaning. They also have some measure of influence over news production. It's not nearly as much as the Right claims, but it's there.

Or do you claim ownership of media mean that journalists, journalist unions, journalistic professional bodies exhibit no influence on the media whatsoever. They can't even publicly complain about failure to uphold journalistic standards? Can't strike? Can't do anything at all?

> But in a capitalist system where distribution of the news is inherently dependent on funds received via advertising and donations, conflicts of interest are constantly appearing.

In a capitalist system, competition is a thing. Even if just 2 people control all the news (and we have not reached that point yet), just having 2 means that media outlets can and do try to attack each other's profitability in a number of ways, one of which is to jump on another's errors or false reporting, in order to try and look better by comparison. To some extent, therefore, news media in a capitalist system is partly self-policing, if even a slight tendency towards competition exists. Perfect? Hell no. But the pressure is there.

I would strongly suggest reading the study I posted. It includes a good model for how both negative and positive pressures havehistorically shaped news content; it is also a model of news that modern right-wing media ecosystem has completely abandoned.

Both sides are not the same.

Glenn Greenwald's misleading presentation of honest errors as deception is more about Greenwald's kneejerk refusal to accept Russian interference as a real news story than it is about whether any media outlets actually engaged in "making shit up".

His false portrayal hinges on accepting this falsehood: "It’s inevitable that media outlets will make mistakes on complex stories. If that’s being done in good faith, one would expect the errors would be roughly 50/50 in terms of the agenda served by the false stories". Besides having no way to confirm whether his cherry-picked list actually included all available inaccurate stories, the real test of whether an honest error occurred has nothing whatsoever to do with the distribution of errors. The real test is as follows: did the media outlet that ran the false story issue a correction?

Greenwald not only fails to highlight the vital fact that these "false" stories got corrected, he actuallly and bizarrely complains at one point that a story was getting "diluted" by editorial corrections, as if trying to get at the truth and correct one own's errors is some sort of nefarious political trick.

It's ironic that the news outlets that actively acknowledge their fallibility and try to make up for it get this used against them to supposedly prove their nefariousness, while right-wing attack sites can routinely lie and get away with it simply by never admitting error and by leaving huge errors uncorrected, or by deleting false information without mentioning they have done so if they absolutely have to, even covertly altering information in their reporting without ever admitting to it.

> all news is unreliable

Knee-jerk rejection of all news is as intellectually lazy as uncritical acceptance of all it. It's not being critical; it's just being gullible in the opposite direction.

The empirical reality, as evidenced in this study is that American centre-right and far-right media are significantly more insular and more susceptible to pushing propaganda than centre, centre-left and far-left media. Lazy dismissal of the entire media ecosystem because "duh billionaires" is both an inaccurate understanding of how the media really works - ownership is not control in today's world - as well as being demonstrably wrong according to available empirical evidence.

Kuhn himself mentioned this in a 1969 postscript appended to his original publication. The OP summarises Kuhn's postscript: Kuhn tried to clarify the matter by starting to use the term "disciplinary matrix" to describe more of what he was loosely referring to as "paradigms" initially. He started using the word "paradigm" specifically for what he now termed "exemplars": examples from existing scientific reseach in a field that are taken as exemplary models of how a key problem in that scientific field was solved, and which implicitly provide guidance for how currently unsolved problems in that field are best approached.

Hunh, it seems that the 1969 postscript at least is available online

> if your audience doesn't have a common frame of reference for your words, there's a not-insignificant chance that the metaphor will either fail to convey meaning or, more likely, will convey a meaning wholly at odds with the author's original intent.

If I rephrase this as "your audience needs background knowledge to understand", then this is actually identical to knowledge. Especially when it comes to specialised knowledge, such knowledge can only truly be gained if the required background knowledge is present.

The informative statement "traffic consists of automobiles" will not be understood by anyone without the background knowledge of what an automobile is. Entire scientific journals exist which would be completely incomprehensible to anyone except experts in that scientific field.

In other words, I don't think you've found a flaw in the use of metaphor, so much as you've found a fundamental challenge to effectively communicating understanding in any way at all.

Whoosh

I have not read much of Heidegger, and I did get the impression that Latour was over-simplifying things in his criticisms of other approaches. I've seen Graham Harman (author of the original post, and a philosopher who has spent considerable time arguing that Latour fully deserves the title of "philosopher") claim elsewhere that he found Latour and Heidegger surprisingly compatible, but I have not had time to pursue the details of such a claim.

As near as I can tell, Latour is highly suspicious of the privileging of "Dasein" in Heidegger's work. I'm not sure how strongly related this is to his criticism of the subject/object distinction. It is related to another aspect of Latour's work, which is that no single actor is inherently privileged in any way at the outset (some actors become privileged in some situations, but this is always an outcome of an earlier act, not something that inheres in any "reality-in-itself"). More broadly, Latour strongly insists he is not "anti-modern", which is true insofar as he does not reject the usefulness of science or technology - he simply views dominant accounts of how they work as very problematic. I have read Heidegger's famous "Question of Technology" essay, and I find it very hard to reconcile with Latour's much more pragmatic and anti-essentialist approach.

I see a lot of disagreements with this single quote from the entire article that hasn't quite grasped where Latour was coming from. Latour was aware of, and dismissive of, existing philosophical attempts to bridge the gap between subject and object because he denied there was any special need to bridge it in the first place. He further argued that modern attempts to solve this "problem" still kept the divide implicitly present.

Phenomenology? Solves the "problem" by reducing all experienced reality to the subjective pole and rejecting any independently objective reality. Scientific realism takes the opposite, equally problematic approach of reducing all experienced reality to the objective pole only. Hegel and Marx's dialectical solution posits a mediating process between subject and object but still treats them as ontologically distinct domains. I can't speak to non-modern philosophies like Buddhism.

Latour's solution? Simply, that there was no real need for a solution, because the question was not worth asking in the first place. Gaps between actors are innumerable, moreover, and positing this one alleged gap between subject and object as the most important one vastly overinflated its importance in contrast to all the other gaps between actors that might exist. The later, much less well-understood work of Latour - the "modes of existence" work mentioned in Harman's article - is an attempt to identify and explain the nature of some of these additional gaps and how actors overcome them.

EDIT TO ADD perhaps this quote from A.N: Whitehead, a huge influence on Latour, might help clarify where he coming from a bit better. This is taken from The Concept of Nature (1927, p. 30):

> What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses. One reality would be the entities such as electrons which are the study of speculative physics. This would be the reality which is there for knowledge; although on this theory it is never known. For what is known is the other sort of reality, which is the byplay of the mind. Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream.

I think the misunderstanding that many people have is that Latour wasn't interested in "reconciling" anything. He argued instead that, most of the time, these supposedly massive distinctions between such domains don't actually exist - or that they don't matter, which, in Latour's heavily pragmatist-influenced philosophy, amounts to exactly the same thing.

The best introduction to Bruno Latour as a philosopher wasn't written by him: it's the book Prince of Networks, by Graham Harman. Latour was never formally a philosopher, but his work was massively concerned with metaphysics all the same.

Harman described Latour as a "secular occasionalist". Occasionalist philosophers are concerned with how anything can interact with anything else (a much broader and, to Harman, a much more interesting question than how subject can interact with object, the question which has dominated Western philosophy since at least Kant). Occasionalism sees all substances as radically isolated from each other - but then have to posit a special exception to the rule of separation, like "God" (in classical Islamic occasionalism) or "eternal objects" (A.N. Whitehead's more recent occasionalism).

Latour dispenses with any special substance in occasionalist philosophy by positing that anything can potentially take on the role of mediating bridge between anything else. Harman doesn't view this as a perfect solution to all the problems of philosophies of occasionalism by any means, but he views at as innovative step, worth pursuing further, which for Harman entailed the development of a version of "object-oriented ontology" - but this post is about Latour as a philosopher, so I'll stop now.