By Ben Panga, a member of the Naked Capitalism commentariat
I have been reading Naked Capitalism for long enough that it has become part of how I make sense of the world.
When something important is happening, I read Naked Capitalism because I expect to find something increasingly rare elsewhere: people seriously trying to work out what is true, including being willing to say when the answer isn’t yet clear.
A lot of political and economic writing now seems to start with the conclusion and work backwards. Facts are selected to fit the preferred narrative. Mainstream media does this, but so does much of the media devoted to telling you that mainstream media is lying. Taking the opposite position doesn’t automatically make you more critical. Often it just gives you a different set of slogans.
One of the things I value most about Yves’s writing is that she doesn’t do this. She notices inconsistencies, reads primary material, remembers what institutions said months or years earlier, and changes her analysis when the facts demand it. She also has a brilliant and perceptive mind and an occasional rather terrifying fierceness.
This all sounds like a fairly basic description of serious journalism.
Apparently it isn’t.
If you value having a place that is serious about understanding the world we live in, please donate to the fundraiser via the Tip Jar. Whether you give $5 or $5,000, every bit helps keep Naked Capitalism playing its vital and now rare role, of doing the best job possible of giving its readers essential, accurate, and timely information.
The Iran War coverage this year has been the clearest example for me. I have followed it closely and Naked Capitalism has consistently been the best single place I’ve found for getting a sense of what is actually going on.
This isn’t because Naked Capitalism has access to some magical source of perfect information. The strength has been in pulling together reports from many different places, treating claims from all sides cautiously and continually updating the picture as new information appears.
The Links format really comes into its own here. You might get an American newspaper report next to something from the Middle East, specialist analysis, an official statement and then something which suggests the official statement may be nonsense. Taken together, you get a much broader picture than you would from any of them individually.
Naked Capitalism also makes a real effort not to view the world entirely through an American or Western lens. Again, this ought not to be remarkable. It increasingly is.
The same approach extends across a huge range of subjects: economics, politics, climate change, healthcare, technology, labor and more. Naked Capitalism also manages to cover them without treating them as entirely separate things.
All of this requires somebody to actually do the work. Reading widely, checking claims, following sources, writing detailed posts and keeping the site running all take time.
So if you read Naked Capitalism regularly and can afford it, please donate. The Tip Jar is calling your name. Your donations have enabled Naked Capitalism to build a terrific team and go from strength to strength. But Naked Capitalism needs your support to keep getting even better as the information and much of the real world environment comesunder more stress.
There are a number of other very good writers here — Conor, Nate, Nick, Haig and others — covering different subjects and bringing different expertise. What they have in common is taking their subjects seriously and trying to find out what’s actually going on.
The comment section is another part of the draw. Many commenters know a great deal about the subjects they discuss and try to add something useful. Specialists turn up, people bring links, claims get challenged and errors get corrected.
That doesn’t happen accidentally. The moderation is active, sometimes strict, and clearly involves a lot of work behind the scenes. Without it, the comments would presumably end up like nearly every other sufficiently large comment section on the internet.
We know what that looks like.
One subject where Naked Capitalism ‘s skepticism has been particularly valuable is AI. It has been deeply sceptical of the AI mania without simply taking a “new technology bad” position. The claims are examined against the evidence rather than the marketing budgets behind them.
There is a certain irony here because much of the internet is now being filled with cheap material designed mainly to occupy space, attract attention or satisfy an algorithm. Naked Capitalism is almost perversely unsuited to this environment. Articles can be very long because the subject is complicated. There are links everywhere because readers are expected to check things. Sometimes there isn’t a neat conclusion because nobody actually knows yet.
Not great for maximising clicks. Quite good for understanding things.
For me, the theme running through all of this is critical thought. We live in an information environment with enormous incentives to simplify, sensationalise, confirm what people already believe and keep them clicking. Increasingly, there is also an incentive to have a machine churn the stuff out by the tonne.
Naked Capitalism is trying to do something very different: find out what’s actually happening and explain it without forcing everything into a pre-existing narrative.
I once described Naked Capitalism as “an oasis of sanity and rationality in a desert of lies and idiocy.”
I still think that’s basically right.
The oasis does, however, have bills.
If you want it to remain here, please give what you can to this year’s fundraiser. Every contribution helps! Please head to the Tip Jar and dig deep.
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