There is a specific, jagged irony in the way we attempt to solve the problem of abundance by creating more of it. It is the hallmark of a civilization that has mistaken activity for progress and 'curation' for thought. Mediaite, a platform that has long functioned as the voyeuristic neighbor peering over the fence of the American media landscape, has recently announced its newest contribution to our collective digital migraine: a daily newsletter designed specifically to summarize other media newsletters. One might call it a meta-summary, but that gives it too much credit. It is, more accurately, the human centipede of digital journalism—a recursive loop of recycled takes, processed through the digestive tracts of several editorial layers before being spat into your inbox as a 'convenient' morning read.

In the grand, crumbling theater of the twenty-first century, we find ourselves at an impasse. The 'cacophony' that Mediaite claims to want to cut through is a monster of our own making. For years, every journalist with a laptop and a sense of self-importance has been told that their only path to salvation—and perhaps a paycheck—is the 'personal brand.' This has resulted in a deluge of newsletters, each promising to be the definitive voice on the industry, each clogging the arteries of our attention until the very act of checking one’s email feels like a descent into a digital landfill. And now, Mediaite steps forward, draped in the robes of a weary librarian, offering to manage the mess by adding to it. It is a solution that could only be devised by a culture that believes the cure for drowning is a slightly more organized wave.

The absurdity is, of course, the point. We are witnessing the professionalization of the middleman. In a healthy culture, one reads the news to understand the world. In our current state of intellectual decay, we read summaries of people who are reading the news. We have moved so far from the source material that the truth is no longer the objective; the objective is merely to be 'informed' about what the 'informants' are saying. Mediaite’s new venture is the ultimate expression of this bureaucratic impulse. It is an administrative layer for the mind, a way to ensure that you never have to actually engage with a primary source ever again. Why bother reading a deeply reported piece on the collapse of local journalism when you can read a three-sentence summary of a newsletter that mentioned it? It is intellectual homeopathy: dilute the substance until not a single molecule of the original remains, and then sell it as a miracle cure.

The media industry’s obsession with itself has always been a source of quiet amusement for those of us with a more detached perspective. There is something tragically comic about a group of people whose primary job is to observe the world becoming so fascinated by their own reflection that they lose track of the world entirely. Mediaite summarizes the media, and now it will summarize the summaries. One can only assume that within eighteen months, a rival outlet will launch a newsletter to summarize Mediaite’s summary of the newsletters. It is turtles all the way down, except the turtles are wearing blue-light glasses and have strong opinions about Substack’s monetization model. This is the Anglo-Saxon obsession with efficiency taken to its most illogical extreme: we are streamlining our own obsolescence.

This is the terminal conclusion of the attention economy. When information is infinite, the only thing left to sell is the illusion of time saved. But the time is never truly saved; it is merely reallocated to the consumption of the summary. We are building a cathedral of noise, and Mediaite is busy polishing the pews. They promise to 'cut through' the noise, failing to realize—or perhaps realizing all too well—that they are the very frequency they claim to be filtering out. It is a masterstroke of cynical marketing: identify a problem you helped create, and then sell the antidote in a slightly different package. In a world that is quite literally on fire, where the political landscape has the stability of a Jenga tower in an earthquake, the elite’s primary concern is how to better digest the gossip of their peers. It is the height of decadent incompetence. We no longer value knowledge; we value the metadata of knowledge. We are perfectly content to live in the echoes, provided the echoes are well-formatted and delivered to our smartphones at 8:00 AM. As the theater collapses around us, Mediaite has decided that the most important thing to do is provide a program that summarizes the other programs. I suppose we should be grateful that someone is keeping track of the noise as we drift toward the silent, inevitable end.