Journalistic Phylogeny of the Silicon Valley Apocalypse

For some reason, doomsday mania is totally in this season.

In 2014 I talked about the tendency of internet writers to regurgitate the press release for trendy science news. The direct lineage from press release to press coverage makes it easy for writers to phone it in: university press offices essentially hand out pre-written sensationalist versions of recent publications. It’s not surprising that with so much of the resulting material in circulation taking text verbatim from the same origin, it is possible to visualize the similarities as genetic sequences in a phylogenetic tree.

Recently the same sort of journalistic laziness reared its head as stories about the luxury doomsday prepper market. Evan Osnos at The New Yorker wrote an article describing the trend in Silicon Valley to buy up bunkers, bullets, and body armor-they think we’ll all soon rise up against them following the advent of A.I. Without a press release to serve as a ready-made template, other outlets turned to reporting on the New Yorker story itself as if it were a primary source. This is a bit different than copying down the press release as your own, and the inheritance is not as direct. If anything, this practice is even more hackneyed. At least a press office puts out their releases with the intention that the text serves as material for coverage so that the topic gets as much circulation as possible. Covering another story as a primary source, rather than writing an original commentary or rebuttal, is just a way to skim traffic off a trend.

In any case, I decided to subject this batch of articles to my previous workflow: converting the text to a DNA sequence with DNA writer by Lensyl Urbano, aligning the sequences with MAFFT and/or T-Coffee Expresso, and using the distances from the alignment to make a tree in Phyl.io. Here’s the result:

Heredity isn’t as clear-cut as it was when I looked at science articles: there’s more remixing in this case and we see that in increased branch distances from the New Yorker article to most of the others. Interestingly, there are a few articles that are quite close to each other, much more so than they are to the New Yorker article. Perhaps this rabbit hole of quasi-plagiarism is even deeper than it first appears, with one article covering another article about an article about an article. . .

In any case, now that I’ve gone through this workflow twice, the next time I’ll be obligated to automate the whole thing in Python.

You can tinker with the MAFFT alignment, at least for a while, here:
http://mafft.cbrc.jp/alignment/server/spool/_out1701310631s24824093CAxLP69W2ZebokqEy0TuG.html

My tree:
((((((((((((1_bizJournals:0.65712,(3_newYorker:0.44428,13_breitbart:0.44428):0.21284):0.11522,10_vanityFair:0.77234):0.04207,6_offTheGridNews:0.8441):0.05849,17_EdgyLabs:0.87290):0.04449,14_cnbc_:0.91739):0.02664,2_guardian:0.94403):0.02047,16_RecodeDotNet:0.96451):0.02541,(7_qzDotCom:0.95494,15_npr:0.95494):0.03498):0.00361,8_theIETdotCom:0.99353):0.01310,18_PedestrianDotTV:1.00664:0.03785,((9_ukBusinessInsider:0.06443,12_yahoo:0.06443):0.96008,19_sundayMorningHerald:1.02451):0.01997):0.00953,11_wiredGoogleCatsOUTGROUP3:1.05401)

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/29/silicon-valley-new-zealand-apocalypse-escape
http://uk.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-billionaires-apocalypse-preppers-2017-1?r=US&IR=T
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/silicon-valley-is-preparing-for-the-apocalypse
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/01/24/apocalypse-now-silicon-valley-elite-says-theyre.html
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/silicon-valley-billionaires-preparing-apocalypse-202000443.html

https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2017/01/apocalypse-2017-silicon-valley-and-beyond-worried-about-the-end-of-the-world/
http://www.offthegridnews.com/extreme-survival/50-percent-of-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse/
https://qz.com/892543/apocalypse-insurance-reddits-ceo-venture-capitalists-and-others-in-silicon-valley-are-preparing-for-the-end-of-civilization/