The way we receive information about our world is unlike any previous generations of humanity. Paradoxically, it's destroying democracy—and Trump's America is the main canary in the coal mine.
Great analysis. Seems apparent that disinformation is democracy’s green kryptonite. It also seems apparent that the existential question - as to whether democracy survives and thrives or fades to black - is how do we find the antidote and cure democracies of this poisoning?
It has been glaringly obvious that this simple observation is almost completely absent in the endless postmortems about why the Democrats lost the election. I suppose it’s not entirely surprising that no one in the mainstream (or secondary or tertiary) press can come out and sum it up Carville-style: “It’s the information ecosystem, stupid.”
How can we even begin to address fixing this Gordian knot? Perhaps use the old tactic of “propaganda air drops” but with pamphlets full of facts that can be carpeted over towns and cities using drones? (I kid, I kid…mostly) I’ve been mulling this question over for quite some time and would love to see a public and vigorous discussion around possible solutions.
The contrast with Britain is an important one, but in my opinion it's less a function of the BBC's reach than it is of the regulation that they and their counterparts are subject to. The BBC has its "royal charter", basically its constitution and guiding mission, but it's also regulated by OFCOM, the communications watchdog that sets standards for all content broadcast on tv and radio. Their broadcasting code requires outlets to "report news with due accuracy and not materially mislead audiences".
Obviously this kind of regulation couldn't happen in the States due to first amendment protections. That's the core of it for me - over here you can broadly trust that BBC/ITV/C4/Sky News, local news, or commercial radio news aren't going to deliberately mislead audiences, whereas in the US it's a free-for-all with an extremely high bar to clear for legal recourse.
Great analysis, as always, Brian. I do want to make a comment that while some of your observations repeatedly appeared since the 1890s ("The barriers to information production crumbled; information borders disappeared..."), the true statement that "the initial reception of this profound shift was naïve" is only since the 1990s and the Internet bubble. In authortarian countries, this has been fully recognized. We can, for example, step back to Russia's demonstration they knew they couldn't win a war of ideas when they started jamming the Voice of America by 1948 (after possibly sabotaging VOA's transmitters in 1947 immediately after VOA launched its Russian language service). But we can go back to the first real upset of old media by new media: the introduction of the international telegraph. Charles William Eliot, the longest serving president of Harvard University, warned in 1898 of “a phenomenon new in our country, and perhaps in the world.” Changes, he continued, in the “formidable inflammability of our multitudinous population, in consequence of the recent development of telegraph, telephone, and bi-daily press” could make the US population “more inflammable than it used to be, because of the increased use in comparatively recent years of these great inventions." This sentiment continued as barriers fell of access, gatekeeping, and costs fell. The US went in on shortwave radio early as a new media upset to the old media of cables because of Britain's dominance in the latter, and not just with the infrastructure but the global news cartel headed by GB's Reuters and France's Havas.
There is signficiant naïvete, true, and its borne partly out of extreme ignorance of reality and of history. The warning lights have been flickering for a long time that disinformation entrepreneurs, operating for financial or political gain (or dark "whimsical" "fun"). The issues we're seeing today are nearly identical to the past, but there are two key differences. First, the guardrails of the past, whether institutional and individual that sought to adhere to honesty and ethics, are nearly obliterated, many due to forms of surrender, capture, or turning for their own profit. The other is the cost of failure today, which we're witnessing day to day, is exponentially greater. Both are accelerants not seen in the past.
"...many due to forms of surrender, capture, or turning for their own profit."
Being outshouted is a problem as well. In the age of info-megaflow, ( occuring at fire hydrant intensity) + shortened attention spans, the first, very loud Voice of Truth appears to be winning the Reality Battle.
Critical Thinking and Rhetoric need to be compulsory subjects in schools, it's basic self defence in the information age. How to read data too, why did they pick that scale ?, what can't I see in this chart etc.
Neil deGrasse Tyson defines three kinds of truth: Personal truth, political truth, and objective truth.
Personal truths could be “My wife is my best friend.”
Political truths are truths people believe in because of tradition, culture, or through sheer repetitions and time.
Then there is the Objective truth, grounded in science. Truths that no matter what you believe, who you are, your age, your income, your education, your skin color, your religion, they remain indisputable and immutable.
The billionaires own all the newspapers and media outlets, and the social media!
An ignorant citizenry, have little education in history or civics, or science, as the public schools have been defunded, and the almost 20,000 separate school systems in fifty states, have been under attack from internal forces, banning books and destroying factual information!
Diane Ravitch, former asst Secretary of Education, and history Professor emeritus at NYU, has followed the assault on education, and documented, in her books, this war on truth!
She created the Network for Public Education, where you can follow the war on education!
Know this… 70% of our citizens get their information from social media.
Experienced teachers have been eradicated!
This is a real war! Perceptions are the way people grasp events.
That is how we got a monster like Donald Trump, to drive what’s left of our democracy into the ground!
"But that explanation, which undoubtedly applies to some of Trump’s base, isn’t just unsatisfying but implausible, in that it writes off seventy-seven million Americans as lost causes to be condemned."
This is a circular argument. The Bad People argument is precisely that (most of) the 77 million Americans who voted for Trump did so because they support bad things (racism, misogyny etc), or at least don't regard them as disqualifying. Restating this in judgemental terms ("writes off", "to be condemned") is not a refutation.
Consuming misinformation is a choice, and people have been making that choice, by watching Fox and listening to hate radio, since well before the Internet was widely used.
Abstract thought is Homo Sapiens' secret weapon. It's also our Achilles Heal. Abstract ideas need not be tethered to any objective reality. They only need to be adopted in significant enough numbers to be a factor in society (see also, religion). I hope our species survives this. Truth doesn't owe any of us a damned thing.
I think this moment is very much about WHO will control information. Will it be the capitalist tech bros or a corrupt government under the influence of special interests? We've already seen what it means for the government to control information - not only in long past history, but with the recent history of the pandemic and the genocide in Gaza as well. The public has been fully lied to and important facts have been and continue to be suppressed. This has had real world consequences and has led to divides that are unlikely to be healed in the near future. An algorithm is more subtle because it is more opaque. And so I suspect the majority have already chosen this option without really understanding it at all. Dangerous times for humanity.
Brian, A very insightful and helpful summary and analysis. Resonates. I am thinking that the canary in the US has been forced fed some of its diet from Russian, Chinese and Iranian state sponsored ‘cuisine.’ I am sure the US has done the same in parts of the world it has identified as zones of interest. In this international context, it seems also highly likely, as Yuval Noah Harari points out in Nexus, that as our information environment becomes more and more shaped by competing AI, people living in China using DeepSeek will live in a fundamentally different factual ‘cage’ than parts of the West, in essence living different‘realities.’
Thanks Brian for this insightful article. I cannot shake the notion that Pandora’s Box has unleashed the terrible knowledge - born of advances in advertising science, psychology and communications technology - of how human brains can manipulate, rewire and destabilize each other. Do we have to drive ourselves mad with the “mass customization” of “bespoke realities” for people to regain trust in expertise and objective reality? 😵💫
Sometimes I think of social media as world-wide gossip, the way humans have always shared information ever since we lived in small foraging and hunting bands. According to Frank McAndrew, "The Science of Gossip: Why we can't stop ourselves," (see Wikipedia) gossip can:
1)reinforce – or punish the lack of – morality and accountability [who decides what is moral, I ask]
2)reveal passive aggression, isolating and harming others
3)build and maintain a sense of community with shared interests, information, and values [even among conspiracy mongers, I'll add]
4)provide a peer-to-peer mechanism for disseminating information [and disinformation]
Another reinforcement of beliefs is religious. Many of those who showed up on January 6th were believers in spiritual warfare. They came to challenge the demonic forces who were standing in the way of Trump's election through the power of prayer and other means. Matthew Taylor asks, in The Violent Take It By Force, why the news organizations paid so little attention to their presence that day at the Capitol. Taylor is among the few who want to touch it, to explore this powerful conspiracy, shared by millions.
Look closely and you will see many of the Senators and Congressmen and women are of similar persuations. They are now in the Capitol through legal means.
And by the way I would like more discussion on the ways we conceive of reality and how it can be challenged and created by others, whose reality we then embrace, and how divergent realites lead to the 'demonizing' of others whose realities aren't the same as ours. Thank you.
in 1960s usa i remember fondly, on haloween assembling the small unicef orange cardboard cartons we would carry when trick-or-treating. at every door, people would warmly plop coins into the orange box i'd hold out to them. and i remember the weight of the full boxes when we were done. i forget who collected the coins from us. we just knew it was a good cause. right alongside our overflowing bags of candy. here's that unicef link, again: https://www.unicef.org/
It would be interesting and worthwhile to listen to a future podcast discussion between Brian Klaas and political historian Stephen Kotkin. Discussion topics would be democracy, power, and the US / Trump pathforward. Kotkin shared his related circa Sep 2024 high level perspective at the Vienna Humanities Festival. The resulting video lecture is publicly available and titled 'The World In Pieces'. Brian, if you have the interest and means, kindly consider a future podcast discussion with Kotkin.
Great analysis. Seems apparent that disinformation is democracy’s green kryptonite. It also seems apparent that the existential question - as to whether democracy survives and thrives or fades to black - is how do we find the antidote and cure democracies of this poisoning?
It has been glaringly obvious that this simple observation is almost completely absent in the endless postmortems about why the Democrats lost the election. I suppose it’s not entirely surprising that no one in the mainstream (or secondary or tertiary) press can come out and sum it up Carville-style: “It’s the information ecosystem, stupid.”
How can we even begin to address fixing this Gordian knot? Perhaps use the old tactic of “propaganda air drops” but with pamphlets full of facts that can be carpeted over towns and cities using drones? (I kid, I kid…mostly) I’ve been mulling this question over for quite some time and would love to see a public and vigorous discussion around possible solutions.
Brilliant analysis. Depressing. Information availability plus lack of training=disaster. That’s where we find ourselves.
The contrast with Britain is an important one, but in my opinion it's less a function of the BBC's reach than it is of the regulation that they and their counterparts are subject to. The BBC has its "royal charter", basically its constitution and guiding mission, but it's also regulated by OFCOM, the communications watchdog that sets standards for all content broadcast on tv and radio. Their broadcasting code requires outlets to "report news with due accuracy and not materially mislead audiences".
Obviously this kind of regulation couldn't happen in the States due to first amendment protections. That's the core of it for me - over here you can broadly trust that BBC/ITV/C4/Sky News, local news, or commercial radio news aren't going to deliberately mislead audiences, whereas in the US it's a free-for-all with an extremely high bar to clear for legal recourse.
Yes I agree — that’s definitely an important part of it too.
Who’s on OFCOM? Trump would go after it first.
Great analysis, as always, Brian. I do want to make a comment that while some of your observations repeatedly appeared since the 1890s ("The barriers to information production crumbled; information borders disappeared..."), the true statement that "the initial reception of this profound shift was naïve" is only since the 1990s and the Internet bubble. In authortarian countries, this has been fully recognized. We can, for example, step back to Russia's demonstration they knew they couldn't win a war of ideas when they started jamming the Voice of America by 1948 (after possibly sabotaging VOA's transmitters in 1947 immediately after VOA launched its Russian language service). But we can go back to the first real upset of old media by new media: the introduction of the international telegraph. Charles William Eliot, the longest serving president of Harvard University, warned in 1898 of “a phenomenon new in our country, and perhaps in the world.” Changes, he continued, in the “formidable inflammability of our multitudinous population, in consequence of the recent development of telegraph, telephone, and bi-daily press” could make the US population “more inflammable than it used to be, because of the increased use in comparatively recent years of these great inventions." This sentiment continued as barriers fell of access, gatekeeping, and costs fell. The US went in on shortwave radio early as a new media upset to the old media of cables because of Britain's dominance in the latter, and not just with the infrastructure but the global news cartel headed by GB's Reuters and France's Havas.
There is signficiant naïvete, true, and its borne partly out of extreme ignorance of reality and of history. The warning lights have been flickering for a long time that disinformation entrepreneurs, operating for financial or political gain (or dark "whimsical" "fun"). The issues we're seeing today are nearly identical to the past, but there are two key differences. First, the guardrails of the past, whether institutional and individual that sought to adhere to honesty and ethics, are nearly obliterated, many due to forms of surrender, capture, or turning for their own profit. The other is the cost of failure today, which we're witnessing day to day, is exponentially greater. Both are accelerants not seen in the past.
"...many due to forms of surrender, capture, or turning for their own profit."
Being outshouted is a problem as well. In the age of info-megaflow, ( occuring at fire hydrant intensity) + shortened attention spans, the first, very loud Voice of Truth appears to be winning the Reality Battle.
Critical Thinking and Rhetoric need to be compulsory subjects in schools, it's basic self defence in the information age. How to read data too, why did they pick that scale ?, what can't I see in this chart etc.
Neil deGrasse Tyson defines three kinds of truth: Personal truth, political truth, and objective truth.
Personal truths could be “My wife is my best friend.”
Political truths are truths people believe in because of tradition, culture, or through sheer repetitions and time.
Then there is the Objective truth, grounded in science. Truths that no matter what you believe, who you are, your age, your income, your education, your skin color, your religion, they remain indisputable and immutable.
I have been saying this for years.
The information highway has been hijacked!
The billionaires own all the newspapers and media outlets, and the social media!
An ignorant citizenry, have little education in history or civics, or science, as the public schools have been defunded, and the almost 20,000 separate school systems in fifty states, have been under attack from internal forces, banning books and destroying factual information!
Diane Ravitch, former asst Secretary of Education, and history Professor emeritus at NYU, has followed the assault on education, and documented, in her books, this war on truth!
She created the Network for Public Education, where you can follow the war on education!
Know this… 70% of our citizens get their information from social media.
Experienced teachers have been eradicated!
This is a real war! Perceptions are the way people grasp events.
That is how we got a monster like Donald Trump, to drive what’s left of our democracy into the ground!
"But that explanation, which undoubtedly applies to some of Trump’s base, isn’t just unsatisfying but implausible, in that it writes off seventy-seven million Americans as lost causes to be condemned."
This is a circular argument. The Bad People argument is precisely that (most of) the 77 million Americans who voted for Trump did so because they support bad things (racism, misogyny etc), or at least don't regard them as disqualifying. Restating this in judgemental terms ("writes off", "to be condemned") is not a refutation.
Consuming misinformation is a choice, and people have been making that choice, by watching Fox and listening to hate radio, since well before the Internet was widely used.
Abstract thought is Homo Sapiens' secret weapon. It's also our Achilles Heal. Abstract ideas need not be tethered to any objective reality. They only need to be adopted in significant enough numbers to be a factor in society (see also, religion). I hope our species survives this. Truth doesn't owe any of us a damned thing.
I think this moment is very much about WHO will control information. Will it be the capitalist tech bros or a corrupt government under the influence of special interests? We've already seen what it means for the government to control information - not only in long past history, but with the recent history of the pandemic and the genocide in Gaza as well. The public has been fully lied to and important facts have been and continue to be suppressed. This has had real world consequences and has led to divides that are unlikely to be healed in the near future. An algorithm is more subtle because it is more opaque. And so I suspect the majority have already chosen this option without really understanding it at all. Dangerous times for humanity.
Hi Pamela, I think it will likely be the tech bros actively cooperating with a corrupt government. That's what we're seeing right now, IMHO.
100%
Brian, A very insightful and helpful summary and analysis. Resonates. I am thinking that the canary in the US has been forced fed some of its diet from Russian, Chinese and Iranian state sponsored ‘cuisine.’ I am sure the US has done the same in parts of the world it has identified as zones of interest. In this international context, it seems also highly likely, as Yuval Noah Harari points out in Nexus, that as our information environment becomes more and more shaped by competing AI, people living in China using DeepSeek will live in a fundamentally different factual ‘cage’ than parts of the West, in essence living different‘realities.’
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free … it expects what never was and never will be.” Thomas Jefferson
" ignorant and free"
Pregnant virgin. Military Intelligence. Things that are very hard to believe .
Thanks Brian for this insightful article. I cannot shake the notion that Pandora’s Box has unleashed the terrible knowledge - born of advances in advertising science, psychology and communications technology - of how human brains can manipulate, rewire and destabilize each other. Do we have to drive ourselves mad with the “mass customization” of “bespoke realities” for people to regain trust in expertise and objective reality? 😵💫
Sometimes I think of social media as world-wide gossip, the way humans have always shared information ever since we lived in small foraging and hunting bands. According to Frank McAndrew, "The Science of Gossip: Why we can't stop ourselves," (see Wikipedia) gossip can:
1)reinforce – or punish the lack of – morality and accountability [who decides what is moral, I ask]
2)reveal passive aggression, isolating and harming others
3)build and maintain a sense of community with shared interests, information, and values [even among conspiracy mongers, I'll add]
4)provide a peer-to-peer mechanism for disseminating information [and disinformation]
Another reinforcement of beliefs is religious. Many of those who showed up on January 6th were believers in spiritual warfare. They came to challenge the demonic forces who were standing in the way of Trump's election through the power of prayer and other means. Matthew Taylor asks, in The Violent Take It By Force, why the news organizations paid so little attention to their presence that day at the Capitol. Taylor is among the few who want to touch it, to explore this powerful conspiracy, shared by millions.
Look closely and you will see many of the Senators and Congressmen and women are of similar persuations. They are now in the Capitol through legal means.
And by the way I would like more discussion on the ways we conceive of reality and how it can be challenged and created by others, whose reality we then embrace, and how divergent realites lead to the 'demonizing' of others whose realities aren't the same as ours. Thank you.
in 1960s usa i remember fondly, on haloween assembling the small unicef orange cardboard cartons we would carry when trick-or-treating. at every door, people would warmly plop coins into the orange box i'd hold out to them. and i remember the weight of the full boxes when we were done. i forget who collected the coins from us. we just knew it was a good cause. right alongside our overflowing bags of candy. here's that unicef link, again: https://www.unicef.org/
It would be interesting and worthwhile to listen to a future podcast discussion between Brian Klaas and political historian Stephen Kotkin. Discussion topics would be democracy, power, and the US / Trump pathforward. Kotkin shared his related circa Sep 2024 high level perspective at the Vienna Humanities Festival. The resulting video lecture is publicly available and titled 'The World In Pieces'. Brian, if you have the interest and means, kindly consider a future podcast discussion with Kotkin.