Last week, Casey Newton wrote a column announcing that “it’s time to change how we cover Elon Musk,” and for a very brief moment after reading the headline I very nearly became The Joker. Not because Newton’s point is wrong, or even because he’s the worst example of the tech media’s belated realization that they’ve been extending Musk far too much credit for far too long now (an honor that has been entirely earned by his mentor, Kara Swisher). No, what really bothered me about the post is Newton’s apparent belief that the media can change how they cover Musk, and that if they could it will make a difference.

For starters, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the fact that Newton’s pronouncement was prompted by (non-)developments in the Musk vs Zuckerberg cage match “story,” a situation so deeply stupid and unnecessary that only Ed Zitron’s scorched earth snark really does it any justice. In large part, that’s because Ed isn’t a reporter and doesn’t need to pretend to be part of some semi-sacred Social Institution; he’s just a guy writing his opinion on the internet (he just like me fr). That journalism creates any pressure at all to take this cage fight, or literally anything Elon Musk says any more seriously than Ed does is itself a sign of the problem we find ourselves in.

It would be easy at this juncture to argue that what Journalism needs is more tough-minded truth-tellers like me, not a bunch of spineless dweebs whose pursuit of access has made them just another bunch of clowns in Elon’s circus. Maybe, somewhere deep down inside, I even want to believe that. But not only is that a trite, self-serving response to what is actually a very deeply worrying situation, it also isn’t a practical solution. After all, I spent years thinking tough journalism might help people see through Musk’s pervasive bullshit, and I’m here to tell you it just isn’t so.

The real blackpill on Elon Musk is actually the opposite: there has been lots of very good, tough reporting done on him over the years, and none of it has made a difference. I’m definitely not just talking about my own work here, either. Almost every serious reporting outlet that you can name has had at least one big scoop that lays bare the myth of Musk’s genius, and there have been plenty of stories that would have prompted congressional hearings and shareholder revolts if they’d been about any other company. Instead, nine times out of ten, Tesla stock simply went up.

Now, if you have a deep fundamental belief in the value of Journalism as a Social Institution, maybe that would carry you through years of lonely, tough reporting that ultimately had zero impact. I wouldn’t know, because as far as I’m concerned Journalism is only as good as its impact. Technical excellence in the reporting of credible facts means nothing to me if those facts aren’t able to change things. Absent any meaningful impact, the very idea that Journalism is a critical Social Institution feels like a discredited scientific theory that people can’t stop holding onto for some reason.

The point I hope to make here is that we can’t just blame journalists for the failures of journalism. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of crap journalists churning out garbage and dunking on them is one of the few things that reliably brings a ray of sunlight to my pitch black heart. But the theory that journalism is bad because journalists suck is both untrue (or at least insufficient as an explanation for our situation), and the kind of thought-terminating cliché that must be avoided if we want to have a chance of escaping said situation.

The search for structural factors in the apparent debilitation of journalism has an obvious first stop: the internet and social media, which now mediates almost all information. The idea that Journalism empowers the public to hold powerful people and institutions accountable was formed in a fundamentally different informational environment than the one we occupy today, and examining how those conditions have changed help illustrate some of the factors at play.

Probably the most important is that the internet has taken us from conditions of informational undersupply to one of informational oversupply. The sheer amount of content (journalistic, and otherwise) available to us has exploded to a degree that we rarely stop to appreciate. As a result the challenge as a consumer of news is no longer the reporting getting done, but being able to find the reporting. Even as an experienced blogger whose job once depended on precisely these skills, I regularly struggle to locate stories on the internet that I know have been reported. This is partially the result of SEO and bad platform migrations and linkrot, but to some extent it also feels like a byproduct of the sheer volume of content being produced.

This endless irruption of content exerts subtle but unmistakable psychological effects. For one thing, people seem so overwhelmed by content (especially serious content about bad things) that curiosity can start to feel maladaptive. This is why many of the smartest and most caring people online retreat into layer after layer of irony, and why shitposting has emerged as a major aesthetic force in online content. Forget the challenge of finding the information that’s relevant to you, when you’re bombarded by this much information it becomes difficult to know which items even should be relevant to you.

Taken a step further, our informational oversupply does what all oversupplies do: it makes information less valuable. Not as a category, of course, as clearly more people consumer more content (including journalism) than ever before. But the endless gushing of content does lure us into a sinister rhythm, in which the information we consume today becomes valueless tomorrow, when a whole new crop of content will satisfy our innate need to feel informed about our world. The result is a kind of amnesia that traps us in an eternal now, in which we gorge endlessly on Today’s News, only to have it wiped from our mind by the next day’s incoming tide.

I first noticed this back in my early days of covering Tesla, when I eagerly debated the day’s news with the company’s partisans on Twitter: everyone was so busy debating each day’s news, jumping from (say) manufacturing to product design, that nobody seemed to noticed the long-term patterns that cut through all these different stories. Worse still, it turns out to be much, much harder to illustrate those long-term patterns in Twitter’s terse, context-flattening format. This problem eventually became so frustrating to me that I literally wrote a book about Tesla, in the hope of overcoming the shortcomings of a medium I otherwise loved.

The point of all this is that Elon Musk’s entire schtick maps directly onto the kinds of structural issues that the internet is creating. His entire rhetorical talent is saying things that sounds like they should be right, freeing most people from ever considering the possibility that he might not be. But even if you do suspect that Musk isn’t on the level, it’s become much harder to find the information with which to hold him accountable online. This has happened at precisely the time when his legend was spiraling out of control, and thanks to generative AI we’re well on the way to an even murkier internet, giving people like Musk even more opportunity to impose their version of reality in spite of the facts.

This all sounds very doomer, I know, but that’s not my intent. I don’t know how to overcome the structural issues with our information economy that I lay out here (besides using Musk’s ownership as an opportunity to detox from a long-term Twitter addiction, which I strongly recommend), but every possible solution starts with a clear acknowledgement of the problem. Let’s start by finally letting go of the Great Man Theory of History and admitting that if Elon Musk hadn’t exploited the novel conditions of the online Eternal Now, somebody else would have.

More importantly, let’s acknowledge that where once only Elon saw (or stumbled into) an opportunity, the unfathomable wealth that he has been rewarded with now provides all the motive anyone needs to follow in his footsteps. The prospect of millions of highly-incentivized Elons, and not the indignity of having to report seriously on a fake cage fight, is what’s really at stake here.