It used to be that journalism was based upon unbiased, investigative reporting that above all, would stick to the facts and present both sides of a story. But as we have become “woke” to the ways of modern journalism around the globe, we are now confronted not with journalists, but with “readers” or “mouthpieces” for news who read what they are told to read by their owners. Stories are carefully chosen to fit the narrative of the huge media companies and their sponsors and anything that goes against this narrative, will never make it to the airwaves and is often ridiculed.
Reporting on Big Science in the mass media is no different. Big Science has their self-appointed ambassadors that are the mouthpieces for Big Physics and Big Cosmology who loudly toot their for horns for Einstein, Hawking, Dark Matter, the Big Bang and the latest particle found in their greatest temple: the “Large Hadron Collider”. These mouthpieces or what I like to call “science evangelists” are promptly called to arms by Big Journalism and mass media to help “explain” big, complicated “science truths” to the public. And unlike politics, there are no dissident voices out there to present “both sides” of Big Science issues.
But YouTube and the “woke” revolution has changed all that.
YouTube Realized
When YouTube came out in 2005, the idea was apparent from it’s name: YouTube. A place where you could make your own videos, your own movies, even your own channel. The prediction that with the explosion of the internet, that modern television as we knew it, would dissappear. But in the first years, even after Google purchased YouTube a year later, “YouTubers” as they commonly called, barely existed and YouTube was simply a place for humans to upload their videos.
Early adopters of YouTube had loyal followings but no one was watching their news on YouTube or making news channels. As YouTube collected the largest online repository of videos, it lingered for many years with some YouTubers having a cult-like following, but the masses were still not participating. Two things changed all this:
- Monetization for YouTube content creators
- The “Woke” revolution
Monetization
YouTube noticed that some “YouTubers” were accumulating the number of subscribers that would attract mainstream advertisers. Although at first it was foreign for big companies to advertise on YouTube thinking it would not be effective, that myth was quickly broken when advertisers started seeing return from their YouTube adverts grow substantially. What this meant was that original content providers could actually make a living at what they love to do. Today, monetization has created the first YouTuber millionaires and celebrities with some YouTubers reaching rock-star status among the younger generation.
Woke
The second piece of the puzzle came with the fact that the Internet provided a place for real truths to be found in repressed areas of the globe. The “Arab Spring” where countries run by repressive governments were lead by the youth who saw the freedoms of other societies on the internet and took to the streets, often dying for the cause of free speech and free and open socieities. One google executive who was Egyptian even choose to stay in his country and fight against repression.
Then in 2015, Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator from the United States started shouting at the American people about how things were not as it seems. This message was being shouted by Sanders for decades but everyone was too busy surving to pay much attention. But when Sanders message that what we were seeing on mainstream media was a narrative that favored the rich and the corporations and the war machine and not the people, it finally happened: humans became “woke” to the fact that what they were seeing in mass media was a lie.
Journalism Changed
Once the population became woke, YouTube was ready and waiting. Since 2015, the journalist as seen on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, Fox, the BBC, and other mass media outlets were seen a mouthpieces, “readers” of the news, “personalities” – high paid celebrities without any journalistic integrity. Those who voiced truths on the air were fired and forced underground and many of them ended up on YouTube.
Speaking truth to power became the anthem from the masses and random voices who were neither trained journalists nor polished speakers became the voices of the people where live broadcasts, interviews, and real journalism took place. Real journalism found its home on YouTube on channels where YouTubers went from hundreds, thousands, to millions of viewers with shows and production costs becoming so cheap that anyone with a computer, a webcam, and a YouTube channel could become a truth teller, journalist, and new channel attracting enough followers or “subscribers” for some to quit their job and devote fulltime to telling the news, or creating a channel with content that interested many people.
Science Evangelists
Before this golden age of “woke” and YouTube where journalists could not be found and mouthpieces thrived, science mouthpieces also started to appear. Self-appointed mouthpieces for Big Physics and Big Cosmology and Big Science began to popup on television with their skill of being able to explain complex science to the common man. These science evangelists like Bob Nye the Science Guy, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and Michio Kiku became regular gotos when some big science story broke and someone needed to explain it to the masses.
When the awakening of the masses happened during the past few years, physics and cosmology stood alone in that no dissident voices were heard. After all, who cares about “theoretical” science. It doesn’t affect anyone negatively – doesn’t make them go hungry, repress them politically, cause them to loose their jobs. With larger problems in the world like income inequality, the destruction of the earth, and unequal treatment of many parts of our society, particle physics and cosmology was just not on the radar.
Science Dissidents on YouTube
Ever since it started, there was dissident science on YouTube. Independent minds and critical thinkers were posting experiments, videos, and even making documentaries that were challenging mainstream physics and cosmology. There many YouTube videos of explanations as to why Big Physics and Big Cosmology was wrong appeared including attacking the very foundations of physics and cosmology itself. Relativity, the big bang, particle physics, quantum mechanics and even plate tectonics were under attack and although from only a few voices in the beginning, now number in the thousands world-wide – and some of them on YouTube.
Eventually, the dissidents on YouTube and the science evangelists from main stream media would clash, none more that in this video where a YouTuber asks the most famous science evangelist, Neil deGrasse Tyson if Einstein could be wrong. Tyson’s first answer: a laugh.
It then became painfully apparent that mainstream’s science evangelists were not different from mainstream media journalist: they were simply mouthpieces for Big Science. Their job was not to present Big Science in an unbiased way. Their job was to impart the “narratives” of Big Science to the masses and crush any dissident voices out there.
Dissident Science YouTube Channel
Inspired by YouTubers from the progressive political movement in the United States, I decided to start my own YouTube channel (Dissident Science) telling “truth to power” but this time, the power was Big Physics and Big Cosmology. I started simply recording my thoughts of Big Science from the dissident point of view, something that I had done for over 20 years. I noticed that people liked talking to me about physics because I had the perspective of a critical thinker, something I cultivated by hanging out with some of the greatest scientists of our time outside the mainstream.
Eventually, the channel grew from 50 to 100 to 300 and now to almost 3000 subscribers world wide. I took the time to learn what made channels grow on YouTube, how to make titles, graphics, even use a green screen. I now have a professional mic and lighting and am looking to create my YouTube studio when we move to a new house later this year.
I even made a video about the video of the answer from Neil deGrasse Tyson where he laughed accusing Tyson of being arrogant which is one of my most popular videos.
Parroting Big Science
Truth be told, the science evangelists themselves don’t understand the theories they talk of. They claim they do, but most of the time they don’t. They even tell us when confronted with “understanding” that they “trust” their colleagues and that they are just communicating the complexities of modern physics and cosmology to the masses.
So in the end, they are simply repeating what they have been told by Big Physics and Big Cosmology. They study the explanations and prepare themselves for questions from the public and the try to explain in “plain language” what Big Science is exposing.
In the process of explaining, more often than not, the explanations are above the public’s ability to comprehend and the evangelists come off as “super brains” who are way smarter than everyone else. They then become reveered by the public whose minds are tickled by the magic of a complicated universe.
This is a win-win situation for the science evangelists and Big Physics and Big Cosmology who are looked upon in awe as if they were science gods and goddesses to be held up on the pedestals of the highest and smartest of the human race.
But this could not be further from the truth.
To Complicated – But What?
These self-appointed mouthpieces for Big Science create the illusion of being able to explain the inexplicable to the public. After all, the universe is very complicated and you need a very high IQ and a much larger brain to understand what seems impossible to understand.
But the truth is, the universe is not complicated, it is our theories that are complicated. And when the public or a news “reader” on a major network doesn’t understand something, it is not because the theory or idea is paradoxical or wrong, it is because the public is too stupid to understand the concept.
Crowning Themselves Kings and Queens
In the end, it is fame and fortune that the science evangelists seek. They are not seekers of scientific truths or teaching critical thinking to the masses. If there were truly critical thinkers, they wouldn’t laugh at a question of whether Einstein is wrong and entertain that possibility. Instead, they pontificate about the universe, fill auditoriums, and make people marvel at their clever thought-provoking quips and carefully crafted stories – not to enlighten, but to sell T-Shirts with photos and sayings from them. Some of the T-Shirts even blatantly showing them as “saints”.
Science Woke YouTubers
Even though we are in the infancy of the science woke movement, there are clear signs that it is working. We now have three other channels that regularly put out material including Jeff Yee, Robert de Hilster, and Nick Percival, Lori Gardi and videos from our CNPS including conference videos and weekly like Saturday Morning presentations for the science woke. There are other channels that have been around for sometime including Robert Distinti, Bill Gaede, and Jean de Climount and new ones that are doing quite well like the Sky Scholar.
There are large groups out there with world-wide followings like the Electric Universe which boasts over 100,000 subscribers. Our CNPS group which is more general in nature is starting to grow slowly but surely.
We are just starting and have plans for growing even larger. This website is a big part of our “awaking” to the fact that Big Physics and Big Cosmology need truth spoken to their power to bring science back on track and advance once again.
Journalism is YouTube
To my teenage daughter, YouTube is television. She has no idea and never watches mainstream TV. She has no idea what CNN or MSNBC or FOX or NPR is. Her media world revolves around YouTube, SnapChat, and the like and her celebrities are from those arenas.
The science books she brings home reflect the narrative of Big Physics and Big Science and she knows that when I help her, that there is a different narrative out there. I know we still have work to do in getting the word out. But I now see it working. I see that there is an audience for being science woke and it is the silent majority.
The masses are not yet science woke. But between this new online science magazine, our YouTube channels, and decades of amazing work done by dissident voices in physics and cosmology, I am certain that those of us who speak truth to power in science, will be able to change the narrative and create the new voices who are true critical thinkers and not bias mouthpieces for a science that is wrong, stuck, and needs true unbiased critical thinkers to move it forward once again.
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