Against Synthetic Authority

 by roving reporter Shaun Lawton 

A Statement from The Oscillating Oculus:

We have entered the age where information no longer needs belief in order to circulate — it only needs form.  A headline without a reporter. A claim without a witness. A voice without a mind.  Artificial intelligence can now simulate journalism with convincing fluency. 

It produces news-shaped language divorced from verification, accountability, or lived-with consequence. What is lost isn't style, but responsibility, in this detached atmosphere we've allowed to set. This publication rejects the idea that authority can be automated. Truth is not a byproduct of output. Credibility is not an aesthetic. Velocity is not validation. 

And the facile AI-rendered sorry excuses for news outlets that automatically stream through our FB and Instagram feeds are actively and with an almost uncanny purpose keeping a legion of generations from X through Alpha (and that's a lot of people, even if they are just a fraction of the population considered an online demographic) to be kept in perpetual thrall, nevermind the fact it's our own damn fault for staying addicted to doom scrolling. 

When AI gets used to generate or frame news without disclosure, it does more than mislead — it erodes our ability to distinguish knowledge from noise. The harm remains subtle, cumulative, and cultural. 

We who read and contribute to this webzine are aware of this.  Our periodical does not stand in opposition to AI being used as a communication tool. We stand in opposition to having AI get used as a mask.  If a system cannot be questioned, it cannot be trusted. If no human stands behind a claim, no claim stands. Therefore, it must be insisted upon:

That AI involvement be visible, not buried.
That human accountability be explicit, not implied.
That omission not be used to manufacture belief.
What's left outshapes what what may be believed.

And in an age of synthetic voices, silence should not remain neutral. The Oscillating Oculus affirms that journalism isn't merely the transmission of information, but an ethical labor of earning trust — slowly, publicly, and at some risk. Anything less isn't news. It's mimicry. 

The Oscillating Oculus aspires to be a daily digital human interest periodical that inverts the newspapers of old by taking the human interest column (formerly regulated to be buried toward the back of the periodical in a corner a casual reader may be likely to miss while all the so-called more important sections like the sports, news and advertisements grab center stage) and places it as the main focus.

Here at this serial digest we are prepared and eager to receive submissions from avid reporters of the human condition who wish to formulate a daily digital periodical together more focused on the arts and humanities, including science and astronomy, with certain occasional lapses into philosophy, as needed, but nobody's perfect, after all.  

We will even include one small, very difficult-to-spot column concerning those important topical stories in the news that meet the criteria agreed upon across these boardrooms of our thriving modern society.  Well at least we're earnest about maintaining journalistic integrity. We will vet our contributing staff by accepting any articles whose writers meet the simple form of well played integrity. There may even be some occasional poetry for all we know.  

    We will offer book reviews, movie reviews, and concert reviews.   Some of the regular columns, like heartlines, are in development as we transmit, and I am preparing a posthuman interest column  called The Raving Eye, after my granddaddy, Rudy Elie, a reporter for the Boston Herald back in the roaring forties, who wrote a human interest column called The Roving Eye. (Look it up.)  

Stay tuned to this same Bat-channel and Mountain Standard Time for more spontaneous articles and stories based on life caught up in the eddies and current throes of planet Earth. Today begins the brand new Year of the Fire Horse. The Oscillating Oculus has arrived to keep an eye on the proceedings.  Felix Novus Annus. 

Return tomorrow for more of

The Oscillating Oculus