A friend of mine texted me a couple of days ago. He asked if I thought we would ever "civilize the internet." By this, he was asking if would ever regain a sense of common, authoritative voices, or would we forever be trapped in a state where everyone would prefer to make sense of the world through the Matt Walshes and John Olivers of the world, as they appear to us at sundry times and in divers manners. For my own part, I am skeptical that such a future exists. The age of Walter Kronkite and even Peter Jennings (the first newscaster that I really own any memories of) is over.
I think L.M. Sacasas' essay "The Analog City and the Digital City" goes a long way to help explaining why. The key idea here is information super-abundance. In this paragraph, he uses it specifically in reference to the doomed project of fact-checking the internet:
The anodyne insistence on fact-checking to bridge chasms in worldview misunderstands the nature of our new media environment; it fails to see the difference between the economics of information scarcity and the economics of information abundance. Information scarcity may lend itself to a measure of credulity: When facts are few, persuading the ignorant is relatively easy. But information abundance, already characteristic of early modern societies, engenders a degree of skepticism: The more there is to know, the more likely we feel that truth is elusive. Information super-abundance, or the condition of “digital plenitude,” as media scholar Jay David Bolter has called it, encourages the view that truth isn’t real: Whatever view you want to validate, you’ll find facts to support it. All information is also now potentially disinformation. Fact-checking, however well-intentioned, does not solve the problem; paradoxically, it may in some cases make it worse.
There are two ways that we can use information super-abundance to deceive ourselves and rob us of the truth. The first is as Sacasas presents it—we decide a priori what must be true and find the sources and charts and methods to "prove" it. In the event we are presented with contradictory information, we either plug our ears and point to the sources that support us or we dismiss them as coming from the wrong sorts of sources with obvious biases against our own position (and therefore, against the truth). The other option is that we give in to epistemic nihilism: in the face of an overwhelming onslaught of facts and alternative facts, we throw up our hands and assume the truth to be unknowable and, thus, non-existant. This neatly allows us to hang on to our own version, as it asserts that nothing can really be disproven.
The methods that the major media platforms are resorting to regarding fact-checking in particular seem especially bound to backfire. In the wake of the 2016 Presidential election, various targeted advertisement and disinformation campaigns came to light. The uproar was enough to get the heads of the media conglomerates hauled into Congress for a special sound-bite session where the public would be assured that nothing so nefarious would ever happen again. The first go at this was fairly innocuous, usually with some little tag appended to note that their reputable sources (already discounted by half the population to begin with) considered the post incredible. More recent attempts, where offending posts and videos are summarily removed are more heavy-handed. With exhortations like "watch this before they take it down again," their methods are more likely to lend a perverse credence to the sorts of things they are trying to discredit.
I mused a couple of months ago about the possibiltiy of pandemic denialism being a coping mechanism. When we were on the cusp of what promised to be a great storm, it seemed a reasonable and charitable enough interpretation. In the two months since the idea first crossed my mind and the storm has come State-side, denialism has paved the paths for floomerism and other sorts of conspiracy theories. If you are not in New York or one of the handful of other very hard-hit areas, you are more likely to look around and ask "Where's the beef?" and assume it was never there to begin with.
Hannah Anderson revived this train of thought for me on Twitter, saying "I wonder if conspiracy theories are actually a form of coping w/ awfulness that is right in front of us. Rather than see the obvious, we look for evil that is hidden & ultimately unprovable. This allows us to restructure evil to something that is manageable & potentially avoidable. If evil is contained in school system or medical establishment, you just have to opt out. Mischief managed." In the quest to make sense of a world-altering, hugely disruptive event, with the option for unlimited information at our fingertips, and the "uncivilization" of the internet and a lack of common social authorities; conspiracy theories offer a neat, tidy little package.
Adrienne LaFrance has a spell-binding article in The Atlantic about the rise of QAnon. Prior to the last few years, the possibility of the distributed conspiracy theory that is QAnon would be almost unthinkable. The phrase that seemed to keep coming back was "Do your own research, make up your own mind." In Sacasas' Analog City, that advice spells the end for a ruse. There's no "there" there. But in the Digital City of limitless "information" (happily scare-quoted), it finds new life.
Where then, does this leave us? As Sacasas notes in the opening of his essay, it was an error to assume that the coming of the Digital City was an unalloyed good-that peace, progress, and prosperity lay necessarily ahead; with better democracies, better information, and better lives assured. There is, certainly, a tension in the liminal period, but that is not to say that the converse is true—that the Digital City and all that it represents is a grave error. To extend the parallels with the Cities of God and Man would be a mistake, it is not the case here that we ought to (or can) choose between one or the other.
It will require wisdom and imagination and prudence to understand how to adapt as the Digital City takes pre-eminence over the Analog. It is important, then, that we recognize our own tendencies and our own limitations. I am certainly not immune to the temptations now available. Despite the promise of limitless information, we must still operate in a fog of something less than omniscience. This should not be confused with what I called epistemic nihilism above. There is a path forward with humility that can recognize the limits of what we can know while still earnestly seeking to find the truth.