Einstein wrote in 1949 that the time had come where the rich controlled the means of communication, making it impossible for people to make informed decisions.
There is something called the illusory truth effect. People will believe false information if it is repeated over and over again, even if they know that information is false.
We have been living under a mass media apparatus that fewer and fewer people control as the years go on. Their ability to coordinate messaging and effectively brainwash generations of Americans has been improving. And what’s worse is most of us believe we are not susceptible to it thanks to things like the Dunning-Kruger effect.
There are not quick and easy solutions to this problem as best I can tell. But we should be aware of it. It impacts you all. It impacts your families. It impacts your neighbors. It shapes what we believe about our fellow Americans.
I have used propaganda techniques to raise consumer awareness for at least 3 years now. With about $10,000 from my professional community I challenged corporations that make millions of dollars. If one person can do such things with such little money, then imagine what the people controlling the money can do.
We should be aware of it. It impacts you. It hurts our country. It shapes what you believe about your fellow American.
Our spirit must prevail.
Addendum:
October 2025:
Most of this addendum deleted.
If anyone ever asks what my problem is, it’s that we’re human beings and we’re really good at war. So why not start a war on human suffering? I want everyone to have what I have or better.
Tomorrow I have a very serious post that I think I’ll be leaving up at least the entire week as the “most recent post.”
Today I have a new way of conceptualizing all the things I’ve written about.
Stenonymous.com shares image explaining the controversy with Speech-to-Text Institute in 60 seconds.
I read about how hardworking people like you don’t have time to read material like mine.
This means liars who have smooth, simple arguments can win you over faster than someone like me who spends time trying to explain the truth.
I lucked out. I have the time. With contributions from the community, I can expand operations until Stenonymous is able to incorporate and begin feeding money back into the field.
I will be working on a prettier image for you. But feel free to share this one. I need your help.
Divided, my research makes it clear that court reporter incomes will freeze or fall. Whatever your financial situation is, it will degrade if your income comes from being a working court reporter.
Together, we’ll make a difference.
You may not believe it. And that’s okay. Because I don’t always know what to believe either. We are human.
The truth remains the truth whether you believe it or not. Just one company stands to gain hundreds of millions of dollars if you don’t believe me. Consequently, many of them are working together to lie to you in violation of fraud, antitrust, and false advertising laws.
I was scared when I started down this road. Scared of what you might think of me. Scared of what the largest players in the game might try to do to me. I was loaded with so much fear that my health degraded.
I recovered because you stood with me.
I will stand up for you. Will you stand with me?
I will stand up for you. Will you stand with me?
I will stand up for you. Will you stand with me?
All rise.
Christopher Day addresses the audience for this blog post.
Addendum:
A reader stated “it reminds me of a business/professional form of the Margaret Mitchell Effect.” I thought this was brilliant, so it gets a home here. Just let me know if you want your name here, reader!
A wonderful reader sent me this article quoting ex-Sonalight CEO Spenser Skates. Notably:
“We spent a month just talking and exploring different ideas. You really want to find a problem that fits your strengths, weaknesses, and interests. Voice recognition was almost too hard technically to solve. It’s like this probabilistic problem where there’s not a clear right answer. Analytics, to the average engineer, it’s a pretty hard problem — but to us, it was a cakewalk, because we were algorithm guys. Building a distributed data store was very straightforward for us. It’s like ‘OK, that’s a solvable problem with a clear answer. If we do it, people want it. Great, let’s go to work on that.’ It was a million times easier.” Ex-Sonalite CEO Spenser Skates speaks about why him and his co-founder moved from “solving” voice recognition to “solving” analytics.
Let me get some self-aggrandizement in.
Half a decade ago, I wrote that computers only do what you give them instructions to do, and explained that there are solvable and insolvable problems. And I explained that voice recognition is a solvable problem, but that it will take indeterminate time and resources to solve. The CEOs, salespeople, and software engineers of the world know this already. They have probably known it decades longer than the vast majority of the population. Despite that, they lie and say their products are better than they are so that they can try to recoup the investor money they’re burning on what is — like Mr. Money Bags just told you — a “probabilistic problem where there’s not a clear right answer.” Said another way, some of the brightest minds on this planet could not, and still cannot, figure this problem out 100% despite the billions of dollars spent to solve it. It’s not quite as much as it would be to solve world hunger, but let’s just say we could’ve solved some pretty big problems with the time and money spent on “get computer to know what I say.”
Then journalists lap up the bullshit and ride the hype train, because who’s going to challenge Microsoft? Who’s going to challenge Google? Who’s going to challenge these rich and powerful entities and power players that make money off of the ignorance and fanciful beliefs of a population that believes with all its heart that tech will solve all our problems and grow exponentially into some kind of singularity (partial joke)?
Stenography’s citizen journalist remains reliant on your eyes. Please continue to send me stuff like this. I’m grateful.
P.S.
Rant that I felt better for a post script.
It is not the job of journalists to be seekers of the truth. They have become stenographers for the rich and powerful. Stenographers are uniquely positioned to fill the gap. I dare say that, just by presenting what two different sides say, we’d be doing more journalism. Because I’m at a stage in my life where I’ve told multiple journalists about the blatant fraud being committed and they’ve either danced around the issue and eliminated what I told them from the article, like Maia Spoto did, or participated in “journalistic equalizing,” as Steve Lerner did. De facto silencing of the truth through blatant and indefensible lies of omission. Could be their editors. Could be the culture of their outlets. Could be that journalists discriminate against people like me that are open and honest about mental health struggles and successful ongoing treatment. Could even be that some journalists are independently wealthy and see people like me as being against wealthy people, and they don’t like that. The nuance of “no, I don’t hate people with money for having money. I know people who are better off than I ever will be and we’re cool because they don’t steal from their employees or engage in schemes to defraud thousands of jobseekers” isoften lost on my detractors. I’ve been told maybe our field isn’t exciting enough to write about. But at a certain point it’s almost comical to look back at the number of journalists that uncritically published about our labor shortage only to turn around and ignore the fraud claims.
What can I do but publish my findings and see what happens? Maybe someday court reporters will realize that they give millions of dollars to the National Court Reporters Association each year and it was ready, willing, and did actually watch the Speech-to-Text Institute flood the market with lies and set the stage for stenographer jobs to be eliminated. By contrast, court reporters gave me $10,000 and I made sure the STTI got sued and shut down its website.
It’s kind of like how I feel about CoverCrow. More adoption of the cause would benefit us. Issues could be worked out. Once the thing became self-sustaining, it would give working reporters a lot more power because it would decentralize the method by which they find and agree to jobs. It’s just math and reasoning.
Similarly, if there were more widespread adoption of my sort of brand of journalism, there would be significant systemic changes. It’s a power dynamic thing. Without checks, wealth concentrates at the top. The top then uses its power to effectively control government regulators (corporate capture) This is the basis of logic for our antitrust laws. That concentration is currently what’s happening all across America (corporate consolidation).
In a functioning democratic republic, the government enforces the laws that stop wealth from concentrating to that very dangerous point. If the government failed to do so, the free press would jump in and destroy every single politician involved in the wholesale selling of the country (Citizens United & beyond). The government isn’t enforcing the law and the free press is literally actively assisting in the fuckification of America by blacking out opposition voices, effectively handing a monopoly to “the concentrated wealth” with regard to the narrative that the public hears.
It’s said that Einstein wrote about a time when the very rich would control the means of communication and it would be impossible for citizens to make informed decisions. Democracy would be broken. According to Full Fact, this is not true. Einstein wrote that that had already happened in 1949.
We have had over 70 years of corporate consolidation since then.
(And Robert Reich states in my fuckification link that corporate consolidation costs the average American family over $5,000 a year. So if anyone here thinks that something that costs the average family over 5% of their income is a political idea not worth covering, I respectfully disagree. Thanks again, reader!)
The Associated Press reported on Thursday that the companies that control the court reporting industry have been bought out by KKR and Blackstone, each now representing half of the country’s current court reporting workforce. The FTC’s Lina Khan stated in a recent press conference on the issue that court reporters were “pretty much on their own” because helping such a small industry is a “colossal waste of time and resources.”
All of this happened simultaneously with a change in state law that would allow court reporters in California to work in Texas. Opponents of the bill said that the lack of mutual reciprocity was concerning.
Local court reporter Jim Jones said “wow, my association could’ve done something about this, but all the board members were making money by selling off their businesses to the perpetrators. Who could have seen this coming?”
After the news broke, enigmatic blogger Al Anonymous posted to popular court reporting blog Steno Imperium that the wholesale purchasing of court reporting firms and ousting of professional court reporters from courtrooms was done to sway the record in big money’s favor. “Think about it,” Al wrote. “When you have transcribers that are paid pennies, desperate to keep their jobs, they’ll change anything for a buck or if they’re ordered to by their boss. Those pressures exist even in traditional court reporting circles. What hope do we have if you trade that responsibility away to a culture without ethical boundaries?”
Shortly after, a Staten Island home was raided by police and the Steno Imperium blog went offline. There are no further updates at this time.
Court Reporting Company of the Year, Veritext, through its representative Jane Doe, stated, “We are pleased with this outcome. Now nobody will have to bribe judges to win appeals. They can just bribe us. All profits matter.”
*None of this is true. It’s part of Stenonymous Satire Weekends. I used to use these to expose corporate fraud in court reporting, but this time I’m doing it as more of a cautionary revisiting of the leadership vulnerability issues that I raised in the Cost of Corruption article.
The private equity model has dug its claws into everything from court reporters to emergency medicine physician staffing. If KKR and Blackstone are giving DOCTORS a run for their money, you can bet we’re all going to feel it sooner or later. But use this as a creative thinking exercise. If you continue to allow the corporate consolidation of court reporting and the alleged massive shifting of the workforce to people they’re going to pay less and treat worse, how easy is it going to be for the wealthy to influence transcripts? At least with stenographic notes, you can’t easily alter the stenographic strokes, so any lawyer could hire another reporter to read the notes and see if stuff was left out or filled in from a source other than the stenographic notes. With audio, as we know, court audio goes missing and court administrators in other states hide it by omission. Audio’s also far easier to edit than stenographic strokes.
