Press Releases & The Hyperreal, Part 2

I guess part of what I’m trying to embark on here in Part 1, and Part 0 of this series, linked below, has to do with…

Press Releases & The Hyperreal, Part 1

Plunging Into The Hyperreal, Part 0

…You create the spark, the imprint, the pattern, the so-called “event ladder” which you condition into the Preality matrix (prima materia). Some do this through sigils, some through very detailed outlines & wireframes…

But you do it, you imprint it, and then somehow – mysteriouslyl – the signal gets propagated by others. The others may be free-roving bots. They may be living breathing human beings.

In hyperreality, it’s hard to tell the difference.

Consider this case study:

Indie Publisher Uses Blockchain To Bypass Industry Gatekeepers with “The Lost Direction”

For $50 USD, I was able to propagate this out to over 100+ different news sites, albeit news sites of low or middling quality, like this cross-post on RecentDiscovery.com. Archived version, at it seems about a year later that most of these cross-posted sources are down or not easily discoverable (presumably because the PRUnderground link above is acting as canonical link, sucking up the SEO of the other matching items elswhere <–theory).

Now, there’s an issue here when it comes to hyperreality…

Do you just want it to appear that there is a footprint for your metaverse? Or do you want to actually get some of those real living beings to populate it? The first is easy, the second is elusive & difficult. (I’ll come back to this another time.)

Where I want to go for now, though, is when does something become “official?” When does PR turn into news? What’s the “magic moment” for pushing the slider into the next value range in the continuum of hyperreality?

Consider the case of BroadwayWorld. BroadwayWorld is a real website with well over 300K followers on Twitter. BroadwayWorld posted my press release about the Lost Direction NFT sale. (Archived version) The article attribution is simply “by BWW News Desk.” A bit vague, may make you wonder what it means.

Some of the other pieces I’ve posted via third parties include attribution lines like:

• “By Morris” – There’s even a photo and bio of Morris, but is it really him? And furthermore, did he really write the article, or do the research, or verify information contained?
• “General News” with no other attribution (archived)

Lost Books Reveal Antarctic Conspiracy Roots

The point is, you kind of never can ultimately know with untrusted sources (and honestly only rarely with trusted source), where ownership & authenticity have not been established, and there is no way to independently verify or audit anything.

But in essence, this is how news works, at least one side of it. Press releases get press released, and whatever signal chunks are contained in them get picked up and propagated. The nature and reach of the channels to a large extent determines the shape of the transmission and credibility to end consumers of information contained within. As information circulates in lower level channels, it may get picked up and signal boosted by larger news sites, which act as consumers of the base layers… Until suddenly a larger outlet is reporting something as fact which started out as merely an assertion on a website or in a $50 (or $5) press release that made its way into Google News & automatically was queued for syndication based on random keywords contained…

Welcome to the realm of the Hyperreal…