Information Asymmetry and the Fall of Mainstream Media

How the UnitedHealthcare shooting tipped the scales against establishment media

The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault - highlighting the shipwreck of a French vessel and painted as a critique to how leadership mismanagement can lead to the suffering of the masses, with anti-imperialist and abolitionist themes.

One of the most surprising but welcome developments I’ve seen in the wake of the shooting of UnitedHealtchcare’s CEO is the seemingly bipartisan ire and mistrust against mainstream media. My use of “shooting” here is a nod to the ways in which mainstream media often defangs actions like murder depending on how they want the event to be perceived. One media outlet used the phrase “assassination-style killing” and got roasted for it. Thread user

Phil Jamesson

lamented, “if only there were a single word for that.” Incredible journalists like Mona Chalabi have built careers out of pointing out the inconsistency in language that legacy media uses, often adopting the passive voice for acts of violence when they want to soften the reporting, one speculates, for entities they desire to protect or uphold.

In the wake of the UHC shooting, the veil with which media hides their bias, is the thinnest it’s ever been. Nearly every single article I’ve seen posted by mainstream media has been attacked for bias in the comments section to a degree I’ve never witnessed before. The most absurd (because it was so trivial) was an NBC News article, which became a parody of itself, by asserting that Luigi Mangione “once belonged to a group of Ivy League gamers who played assassins” the headline reading “Suspect in UnitedHealthcare CEO slaying played video game killer.” This headline hid the lede that the “assassin” video game they were speaking of was Among Us, a hugely popular and innocuous game played mostly by children and young adults.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Among Us, please join in on the joke by looking it up. For reference, this is what the game looks like:

Among Us gameplay

It’s a silly game featuring little sour patch kids in rubber suits, with gameplay as innocent as the dinner table game nights of Mafia or Werewolf. Sitting Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez played Among Us live on Twitch to get out the vote, 400,000 people innocently watched along. For some reason, this needless spin on the part of NBC (owned by multibillion dollar company Comcast) highlighted the depths of absurdity to which media will kowtow for the establishment. You don’t have to take glee in Brian Thompsons death to see media’s deference as insidious. This event, even when viewed as tragic, should be a jumping off point to discuss why people are feeling so desperate and united by the corruption that runs deep in private healthcare, with less time dedicated to devalidating the suspect, whose motives were unequivocally spurred by structural injustice.

The spin isn’t working. I believe this frustration is proving that the signal has finally broken through the noise. This uproar against mainstream media as the lapdog of corporate interest seems like some significant break with an otherwise entrenched status quo.

At the intersection of corporate power and main stream media is a topic that I believe is central to explain what is happening, a frustration with decades of the consequences of Information Asymmetry.

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“Information Asymmetry” is canonically a type of “market failure” in neoclassical economics. Information asymmetry is one example of how the otherwise culturally lauded idea of the free market can fail to deliver the best result, and it occurs rather straightforwardly: one party (usually the seller) has more or better information than another party (usually the buyer).

The truth is, free market ideology rests on a laundry list of idealistic assumptions which expose it to many fatal flaws that economists collectively call “market failures” but have managed to think of them as aberrations as opposed to core design flaws. I won’t get too much into it, read Doughnut Economics if you want a deeper dive but, essentially in the 1920s Frank Knight gave the hypothetical “rational consumer” homo economicus two unrealistic godlike traits so that economists could more easily model how markets might function. He gave man perfect knowledge and perfect foresight. Over time, this shortcut became canon, and the ideology of modern economics rests on the assumption that consumers have perfect information.

They made that assumption because it is required when believing that an unregulated market will correct itself via the oft invoked “invisible hand”. Here’s an example:

Let’s say a seller of some product is dumping their trash into your community without consequence. This is actually another market failure called an externality, where a company does not have to price in a harm they are causing, resulting in a cheaper product for them, but still a cost that must be burdened by the larger economy. That cheaper product will be more competitive on the market, de facto punishing companies that haven’t relied on externalities, and rewarding those who have. But this failure is also supposed to be corrected by our godlike homo economicus that has perfect information. As a rational all-knowing consumer (big assumption), you’re supposed to punish the cheaters by not buying from them anymore. The idea is that they will have to correct that behavior if they want to continue being in business, and the market would correct itself, pricing that product appropriately and shifting demand toward the most net beneficial products.

However, what that would take though, is for you to have that information of the bad thing that they’re doing, AND, have the moral resolve every time, to choose the more expensive product you know isn’t doing the bad thing. What often happens is that you don’t have that information. Often that information is intentionally hidden from you. So you find out decades later, for instance, that 3M knew about forever chemicals and silenced the scientist who raised concerns it was in people’s blood. Or you find out decades later that fossil fuel companies knew about global warming because their own scientists came up with shockingly accurate models of how they were causing it and then the oil companies closed their research department and spent millions covering it up. They hid all of this research because they didn’t want you as the customer to have that information because then you would ideally make the decision not to buy from them, or pressure government to regulate them (get rid of the externality).

As an evolutionary biologist, I see this problem as nearly inevitable. Without regulation, you’ve set up a system that rewards sellers for hiding information about any and every bad thing they do. You’ve created an evolutionary pressure, and what happen is that the entities that can escape that pressure (by hiding information) will thrive. Biology would make it very clear that your only recourse is to introduce a predator: an entity whose job it is to sniff out externalities and eat the entities that make them. That needed predator is largely journalism and regulation. People to find and share the information, and public institutions to punish the companies for breaking the rules. Doing this, by neoclassical economics own definition would solve market failures and lead to a more efficient economy. I’ll say that again, regulation is the solution to solving market failures and creating a more efficient economy.

The issue is, this dynamic where companies have escaped the information asymmetry pressure was the early stages of market failure. We’re way past that now. Information obfuscation was Phase I.

Once these companies start reaping the rewards of lying, they make gobs of money, because all the suckers trying to do business fairly and honestly are left behind in the evolutionary dust. The cheater’s “success” leads to entrenchment. They start to buy the architecture of information: billionaires buy media companies, they hire lawyers, they hire lobbyists, they hire top PR firms, they buy politicians, influence algorithms and sway elections. This is Phase II.

They create an entire system that prevents you from seeing the bad thing that they are doing. Media companies owned by the same billionaire class more or less become propaganda machines for these entrenched cheaters while attempting to maintain a semblance of credibility. This setup prevents you from seeing information that would make you choose not to support them. If anything, what you see instead, is how great they are for the economy.

One thing that is so powerful about the UHS shooting aftermath is the amount of information that has been unleashed over these ensuing days. Horror story after horror story has flooded social media of times when patients have been wrongly denied treatment for their child’s cancer therapy, or when doctor’s have spent weeks jumping through hoops to get necessary tests approved to watch their patients die in the interim intentional delay. This explosion of stories became reminiscent of the #MeToo movement, where our collective attention seems only to be able to address a problem when it reaches a critical mass. Most damning, are people from other industrialized nations with Universal Healthcare that look on with horror and voice their outright disbelief.

I’m not sure if monetizing our attention and giving us an endless stream of distraction was a conscious intention, but it has definitely become useful to corporations interested in getting away with murder while the populace remains distracted. Assuming we have access to the information at all, the public is either too exhausted, too busy working, or too distracted to see widespread injustice with clarity— to have it reach us with any bite that can hold longer than the time it takes to scroll to the next funny meme. But this event seemed to usher in a moment where signal has broken through the noise and people are synchronizing around a class consciousness focused on the injustices of health insurance and the more broadly entwined monied interests.

But we have a problem. Even once we see the information, we may not have many choices. In Phase III of our market failure the cheaters of the system have amassed even more power, they’ve cornered so much of the market by being so good at hiding the information of their harms, that you no longer have options. They have not only captured the information architecture but the choice architecture, limiting the options of what you can buy and from whom you can buy. They may have complete functional control or you are so depleted of wealth, so strapped for cash, because they’ve skimmed every last bit of profit off the collective output of labor (because their entrenchment and power of the narrative has deflated worker solidarity and worker power), that you are left with having to buy the cheapest thing, even if you now know the harms it causes.

Then, we’re completely stuck with a bunch of companies who maybe we even know now are a bunch of cheaters, but they still have the only or cheapest product on the market, and they still have the most lawyers and the most lobbyist, and the most influential PR firms on retainer, capable of fighting against any sort of regulation. They fight regulation because it is that singular predator (ecologically, a good thing) we would fund with our information if we had the information and the ability to act on it. These companies are polluting our communities, polluting countries the world over, are killing activists overseas, and we are left with very few options to resist them.

That is the model that has been going on for decades and I think people are at a point where they can’t accept it anymore. The cheaters have had their fun, and have driven people past their breaking point. It’s time for a new model that is going to look differently. At the very least that is going to involve regulation that supports a healthy population.

If regulation doesn’t happen at the governmental level, the burden falls on consumers. In the sustainability world I inhabit, passionate individuals are forced to spend their lives researching companies and uncovering false sustainability claims. Greenwashing thrives because we’ve incentivized secrecy, allowing companies to appear sustainable while cutting corners and hiding the truth. This creates an arms race between resource-strapped individuals and powerful corporations. These individuals have to do immense amounts of work to buy something as simple as a f***ing teabag without plastic in it. They have to make endless rational and sacrificial decisions and research every last product that they buy. This is not a functional system. It is not realistic nor efficient to expect individuals to have the time to research every last detail of every last product. This is market failure.

The last phase of the power accrued through information asymmetry and other market failures is what Cory Doctorow calls Enshittificaiton, where the quality of everything starts being shit. These large companies have cornered so much of the market our choices are largely nullified so they can begin to sucker us with shitty products once we’ve become dependent. They do this because they have built such a dependance on profit that they have to start giving you less value for higher prices so they can continue returning more profit to their shareholders. This is why there is planned obsolescence, why products increasingly decay in quality, why Spotify Wrapped sucked (because they fired all the creative people that were in charge of it), etc. etc. Services and products are all getting worse because we are trapped in their choice architecture. They’ve created full constriction and they are resting cockily on their mountain of gold assured that we don’t really have a way out of their chokehold.

Ironically, this last stage, I believe, does give us a way out because in their insatiable hunger for growth, have started eating themselves. They have more or less shit the bed with enshittification. Their demise is inevitable with the logic they’ve been using: make more and provide less. We are now reaching the point where they are trying to charge more for worse services, they’re trying to get us to pay more than ever for healthcare while also trying to figure out how to deny the most claims. This is the logical and inevitable conclusion of deregulation of the free market which Trump plans to exacerbate, letting billionaires operate with impunity.

What this failure has signaled to me is that we need to get serious about supporting independent journalists and keeping our money away from billionaires. There are certain areas where that is very difficult because the choice architectures are so airtight: it’s very difficult not to support a fossil fuel company if your only current transit choice is your gas powered car. It’s very difficult to have any healthcare that isn’t private and for profit. It’s very difficult to have energy that isn’t provided by your state sanctioned utility monopoly. But we do what we can.

Any paradigm shifting work, I rely on a framework that was relayed to me from my mentor Dave Henson that has categorized activism largely into three buckets: Fire Fighting, Rule Changing, and World Building. Fire fighters address urgent issues, protest in the streets, and raise hell. Rule changers seek to codify the necessary changes by working within the system. World Builders create, nurture, and support the new models that will outdate the old. In my last post I speak to a few ways we can start to nurture the new.

This thought experiment with Information Asymmetry shows us that if governments won’t enact regulation we must start supporting organizations that are self-regulatory. The most common type of self-regulatory company are companies that are rooted in a strong community. One’s that are cooperative in nature, beholden to stakeholders beyond shareholders (like the environment and all people along their supply chain), one’s that limit wage gaps, one’s that are local and get close feedback to the people they serve. This is of course not efficient to do as individuals, so we must help each other achieve these goals. We will have to build the new organizations and regulatory systems to replace the one’s that are clearly on their way out, and also many will have to organize and protest until the entrenched cheaters lose their power.

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With love and determination,
Spencer