Asymmetric power in the information age - IV
Asymmetric power in the information age - IV
Chapter 4: Science as a candle in the dark
This chapter will outline strategies to actively target, fight and neutralize asymmetric actors and threats to the common good, as well as summarize possible avenues to pursue to protect democracies in the information age.
Bad epistemology makes for bad democracies, and bad democracies are not stable.
How to mount a digital counter-offensive for democracy
First and foremost, everybody I talked to agrees that there is not one single technological solution or action that could solve the detrimental impact of our current information systems on democracy.
“There is no magic bullet to solve our epistemic crisis“ — Prof. Stephan Lewandowsky (personal communication)
Just as there is no single actor or force that threatens our democratic processes (complex systems!), solutions will have to be specific, targeted, and actionable. That does not mean that we can not have a larger framework or theory from which we can abstract some general principles that we can put into action. Think about our immune system, while there is an endless array of pathogens it has to protect against, it operates on a small number of general principles, which include capabilities to detect and destroy infection, protect uncorrupted ‘self’, store and use the memory of repeat invaders, and self-regulation of its response once the attack is over (Lentz AK., et al. Nutr. Clin. Prac., 2003). This sounds like a pretty good starting framework for protecting a information systems and democracy too.
Detecting and destroying informational pathogens
In general, when it comes to detecting and destroying infection, we have to differentiate between harmful information products, harmful information spreaders, and harmful information system behavior.
In many ways, discussions about content moderation, ranking algorithms and choice architectures primarily target information products, and as others have noted, it is damn difficult to identify harmful content among the mess of human language, expressions and behaviors, especially when it comes to distinguishing genuine harmful information products from satire, humor or criticism of said information. Misinformation is pernicious, even true information can still be taken out of context, distorted or used to manipulate. So while necessary to use some automated way to detect and reign in harmful information products, no machine learning system can solve the problem of harmful information products in our shared info sphere.
A more promising approach might be to target harmful information spreaders. Especially when we understand that harmful information products have limited impact unless amplified and spread to many other nodes of the network. Sometimes called “information cascades” in research (more commonly known as something going viral), influential spreaders (i.e influencers) are the tipping points of harmful information cascades and bear responsibility when contaminating the rest of the system.
However, this also means that targeting those harmful information spreaders might be an effective way to counteract the spread of misinformation. Initial scientific studies show the promise of this approach.
Take de-platforming, (which is basically the removal of an information-pathogen spreading node in our network), researchers have shown is highly effective at reducing misinformation and even has positive knock-on effects on the rest of the network (Rauchfleisch R. et al., SSRN, 2021)
If we spin this though further into graph theory, we can use the network topography to identify and disrupt information spread through, for example, generalized network dismantling.
The removal or deactivation of even a small set of nodes may dismantle the network into isolated subcomponents and thereby stop the malfunctioning of a system. The effectiveness of node removal depends on the network structure and the removal strategy. — Ren XL. et al., PNAS, 2019
While approaches using this framework look promising to keep larger democratic platforms from getting infected, isolated sub-networks are still breeding ground for radicalization and polarization, and these fragmented realities do become more numerous too.
It’s clear that this alone will be insufficient to turn the tide of autocratic infection.
Protecting citizens from infection
Using technological tools to remove harmful information products or limited their spread can often not prevent citizens to come in contact with some informational pathogens. If we know about the pathogen in advance, citizens can be immunized through prebunking, basically vaccinating (inoculation) them against a specific type of information they will be exposed to. Technological solutions can help with implementing inoculation strategies, for example to build immunity against online manipulations (Roozenbeek J. et al., The Conversation, 2022)
Inoculation is an effective method to empower citizens against manipulation techniques. (Source: inoculation.science, see also: Roozenbeek J. et al., The Conversation, 2022
The major problem I see with inoculation is the catastrophic signal-to-noise ratio of our info sphere, how will prebunking content ever compete on attention with the inherent attractiveness of emotional narratives, crafty influencers and pay-for-play actors? Certainly not if we keep the attention economy as is.
We obviously need to look at reforming the whole online information architecture, and that needs politicians to apply pressure and regulations to these antidemocratic tech platforms.
Changing the tech platform dynamics
Just a few months ago, a whole array of proposed regulatory actions was agreed on by the EU (broadly falling into demanding oversight, content moderation & consumer protection) to reign in tech platforms.
The Digital Services Act is the new EU law that aims to limit the spread of illegal content online. It establishes a new set of obligations for private actors with the aim to create a secure and safe online environment for all. It is the first time in the history of EU platform governance regulation that people’s fundamental rights are put at the forefront.- Prikova E., “The Digital Services Act: your guide to the EU’s new content moderation rules”, 2022
This is laudable and absolutely necessary, European citizens can be proud to have at least some political organization (the EU) standing up for their democratic rights and values online. This is not a given in today’s world. Notable is also the role of science to inform policymakers, I can highly recommend (Lewandowsky S. et al., Publications Office of the European Union, 2020) which grapples with much of the same problems technology poses to democracy that we outlined in this article. The Digital Services Act will come into force in 2024 and should change our digitial environments for the better (quick summary here), but I am afraid it will not be sufficient.
One concern I have with political regulations is not that they can not be effective or wonderful, but that they are often reactionary when something went catastrophically wrong, or are too slow to keep up with the dynamic changes in the information sphere. If we had the Digital Services Act in let’s say 2014, instead of 2024, how different would Europe look? Would Brexit have happened, and if so, would it have happened in this hard-Brexit shape? How would the Syrian migrant crisis of 2015 have played out? Would Hungary and Poland have gone down the anti-democratic route they did? Even by 2024, what can the Digital Services Act do against new & emerging threats coming from deep fakes (Veerasamy N. et al., ICCWS, 2022) or artificially created content and actors, indistinguishable from authentic users (Kreps S. et al., JEPS, 2022)?
Remember also that in Chapter 1, we talked about the need for complex systems to be flexible and adapt to arising challenges to stay alive.
It would be unrealistic for certain complex systems to have survived in competitive environments if they had not adapted to it by evolving their self-defense capabilities.
Coming from a cancer research background, I have a learned appreciation of how difficult it can be to target a competing adaptive complex system with its own dynamics and adaptive strategies (Markolin P. et al., Genomics, 2021). It is challenging to defeat a malicious outgrowth that is slowly eating away at the larger whole. So you will have to excuse me to lean a bit on that cancer analogy in this section because it is illustrative of the general frameworks we need to employ to build effective immunity measures against the cancer of autocracy festering in our democracies.
If a complex dynamical system is globally asymptotically stable then any limited-time perturbation applied to the system will dissipate, and the system, sooner or later, will end up within its unique asymptotic attractor.- Rosenfeld S., Gene Regulation and Systems Biology, 2011
In non-complexity speech, this means that the real challenge of targeting adaptive systems like cancer is their robustness to perturbation (Rosenfeld S., Gene Regulation and Systems Biology, 2011), meaning interventions that do not destroy the whole will allow the remaining system to rebounce again and again once the interventions drop or become ineffective. Cancer can adapt, and so can asymmetric actors and alternative autocratic networks and systems.
This is to warn you that while there are short-term actions that are effective, they are not addressing the root causes, and will be unable to deal with the autocratic cancer in our system in the long run.
Let’s consider de-platforming again, which is highly effective at reducing misinformation and even has positive knock-on effects to the rest of the network (Rauchfleisch R. et al., SSRN, 2021). Yet disinformation researchers have been noticing for some time that de-platformed influencers increase the robustness in hate networks by spreading to multiple alternative platforms (Guhl J. et al., ISD report, 2022). In cancer, we might call that metastasizing. Metastases make both systemic protection and cancer treatment much harder.
We also talked about how the attention economy will keep emotional narratives alive artificially, constantly mutating and adapting them to new circumstances with the help of USP-hunting influencers, without any specific further input needed when the attention changes. That’s why no matter what is in the news today, commentators will find that wokeness is actually at fault. Masks? Blame wokeness! Vaccines? War? Wokeness! It will never die. Cancer cells do the same, they mutate and diversify over time (phenotypic heterogeneity), some lineages might die out after a short run while others gain traction, overall making sure the system stays alive through environmental change (Ortega-Sabater S., et al., biorxiv, 2022).
That is why there is no magic bullet, in fact, even a magic shotgun might not be enough
So while we might need acute technological treatment in the short run, we also need cures that can defeat ever-changing autocratic systems in the long run.
´For that, society’s immune system might need a software update.
Resolving our epistemic crisis
“A democracy, if we can keep it”
…to borrow from Ben Franklin’s sentiment when prompted by Elizabeth Willing Powel; holding up any form of government comes down to the people.
Because each one of us is a constituent part of a democracy, and also contributes to creating the epistemic crisis, all of us also have to be part of any solution. Sorry, it is not only going to be about defeating bad actors, by now you should know it is more complex than that.
This need for societal participation and empowerment is also clearly outlined in e.g. Lewandowsky S. et al., Publications Office of the European Union, 2020, and should be plainly obvious to democratic citizens.
But where to start?
When we talked about the complex functions of ‘living’ in Chapter 1, we noted a somewhat trivial observation:
Largely similar autonomous units (cells) behaving a bit differently can produce vastly different complex functions, behaviors, and emergent phenomena.
Conversely, this also means that changing emergent phenomena might only require largely similar autonomous units to just behave a bit differently.
After all the asymmetries we talked about, I think this symmetry is worth exploring.
How can we, individually and collectively, act a bit differently to support the democracies we are part of?
It is a question I have been struggling with for a long time, and often, I discover that inspiration can be found in literature. In one of my all-time favorite books named “The Demon-Haunted World”, written almost 30 years ago by Carl Sagan, the famous science communicator, talks about his dangerous vision of the future:
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness… — Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted world
As you might now realize, his vision hits a bit too close to home for comfort. When I read his book the first time maybe eight years ago, I was baffled by the prevailing conspiratorial thinking at the time. Horoscopes, UFO abductions, psychics… Carl Sagan, a full professor at Cornell at the time, playing a leading role in American space missions, spend great personal effort and the full arsenal of scientific tools to debunk them. Why would he care? It all seemed so alien to me (pun intended). How could these obviously wrong and lunatic ideas (and their believers) ever be more than just fringe? How could these conspiratorial ideas and their proponents ever exert any real political power in a democracy? How could this magical thinking impact the lives of people who are way too smart to fall for them? Why did Carl Sagan even bother to put in the effort debunking them? In a way, I had the sense that these conspiracy theories were something to laugh at, or at most feel compassionate for the few people who fell for them.
Turned out, I was wrong. Or more precisely: I was arrogant, ignorant, and too short-sighted to see the larger picture. Technological advancements of information sharing technologies did not only make our communication capabilities more powerful, but also made us more vulnerable to an arsenal of information drugs. Drugs few of us would ever come in close contact with in the past, but that are now ubiquitous today. Nobody is immune to holding beliefs that are not supported by scientific evidence, or even contradicted by it. It is in part our human nature. Magical thinking is widespread. Intelligence is not the issue, because smarter people are just better to justify their own irrational beliefs to themselves. A large proportion of the population is especially susceptible to conspiratorial ideation that unfortunately lends itself to be weaponized by politicians and other powerful actors. Our human biology has not changed much in the last 40.000 years, but our society and our technology has.
We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. — Edward O. Wilson
Carl Sagan was fond of history. In his book, he explored how humans had held supernatural beliefs for thousands of years, the way they justified those beliefs, and why they held onto them, often doubling down despite the evidence against them. He foresaw not only the allure and danger of magical or conspiratorial thinking rooted in our human cognitive biases and preferences, he understood them at a deeper level as the threat to democracy as they are. Bad epistemology makes for bad democracies, and bad democracies are not stable.
If the light of science were to ever drop, he prophesied, we would return to a demon-haunted world we hoped to have left behind for good. Take this metaphor as you will.
For Carl Sagan, as for me, science is a critical public good for a democratic society, both through its body of knowledge and as a way of thinking. It is a tree planted many generations ago by the aspirations of our most hopeful fore-bearers.
“Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” ― Anonymous Greek Proverb
The scientific endeavor is our only true humanity-spanning collaborative project, the motor that powers our civilization and the one method we have to ground the fragmented realities of our messy human beliefs in shared larger truths. It is the antidote to epistemic nihilism. Science also provides the necessary cool against the heat of public discussion, the pace of day-to-day commentary, and our hot-headed human immaturity that resurfaced with the new information systems.
Enlightenment is the human being’s emancipation from its self-incurred immaturity. — Immanuel Kant (translation)
That is why science as a global public institution for humanity is a threat to populist influencers and narratives, powerful individuals, businesses, and state actors, all forces who dominate in the current world of fragmented realities and have an interest to entrench their separate little epistemic fiefdoms. Is it really a surprise we observe these forces are doing everything in their power to poison, subvert or limit access to the fruits of the tree of the scientific process and its positive knock-on effects on society?
Good epistemology works like a vaccine against bad ideas, it inoculates us, makes us less susceptible to being manipulated and empowers us to knowledgeably make our decisions.
So how does the epistemic vaccine work? What metaphorical ingredients do we need? Even when talking about democracy as a dynamic complex system, the answers and solutions are not really new.
First and foremost, science is not alone in the fight (complex systems!). The public’s defense against antidemocratic forces abusing our current epistemic crisis relies on at least three interconnected factors: education, journalism, and science. The trifecta of good epistemology in the modern world. Because we are a bit more accommodated to system’s thinking now, lets quickly sketch out their systemic functions:
Education is the innate immune system of a democratic society. Education has the potential to thwart many information threats to democracy, it teaches humans how to think for themselves (ideally). From history (those who forget history are bound to repeat it) to media literacy (how to identify propaganda and manipulation tactics), from STEM to social science (how do the world and humans function), from liberal arts to literature (what makes us human and what should we want for ourselves and others), education allows individuals to get a baseline grip of the world and their place in it, thereby giving us agency over our lives. Education also outlines the borders of uncertainty between what is known and what is made up. A solid education is like a strong innate immune system, it might not protect against some very viral threats, but at least it protects us against most of the half-baked informational pathogens (think flat eartherism), that are surrounding us.
Public interest journalism ought to become an adaptive immune system against information threats
Independent journalism is a signal processing hub and a critical feedback loop for society’s robustness against information combatants. Journalism in a democracy has the duty to filter, disseminate and qualify information to make it accessible and useful for the wider citizenry. Gatekeeping for good information is not censorship, it is noise filtering. We talked about our catastrophic signal-to-noise ratio, and public interest journalism has the duty to help. Free speech and free information flow is currently threatened because it is drowned out by noise, often deliberate and motivated, as we have seen in chapter 2. In the 21st century, even more important than freedom of speech might be freedom from manipulation, and that requires access to reliable information and institutions that protect us from becoming casualties of information warfare, and I believe public interest journalism ought to become part of an adaptive immune system against information threats to democratic society (How to thread that needle might be a different topic)
Science is the central control hub when it comes to information, it has the inherent authority to create, assert, dispute, and correct information, thus it is the ultimate arbiter of solving informational conflicts or contradictions and defines shared reality. Only when information and reality perceptions are grounded in scientific reality, will we be able to ensure that productive cooperation towards shared goals remains possible for any democratic society.
The public’s defense against antidemocratic forces abusing the epistemic crisis: education, journalism, and science.
We have to empower, strengthen and upgrade these epistemic institutions collectively, as well as put them in charge of information and information distribution systems, rather than making them subservient to the economic and political whims of the attention economy.
It is certainly possible, but that will require all of us to just do a little bit better too. Small changes can have disproportional outputs, after all.
Conclusion Chapter 4
Our information systems are in dire need of a democratic software upgrade for the digital age. The infosphere 2.0 will contain technological enhancements to already existing democratic mechanisms that kept our info spheres stable even through transformational change and never-ending environmental challenges.
There are multiple approaches to do so, from using the power of learning systems to detect and destroy informational pathogens, cutting out infected amplifiers, to reshaping the network structures to reduce the risk of epidemic spread.
Technological interventions and initiatives can also help to inoculate democratic citizens on a large scale against informational pathogens and manipulations.
The most important technological intervention we need is however not found on these platforms, but about these platforms. We need regulation, from transparency and oversight to anti-trust and consumer protection; we need benefitial algorithms, data protection and taxation. The European Digital Service Act is a necessary start to box democratic values back into these authoritarian companies and aristocratic systems, but it will be a prolonged fight. Democracy usually is.
Even more importantly, we humans need a democratic software upgrade too. Democracy presupposes an equality of influence, yet even before our voices are drowned out by the noise on social media, or overwritten by information combatants, we lose our agency and decision autonomy to systems we don’t fully understand. Even worse, systems that too many of us do not even care to understand.
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. — Carl Sagan
The whole point of the enlightenment, the scientific revolution, our educational and epistemic institutions was to empower individuals to find a way out of their self-imposed immaturity, to take agency over their lives and make informed decisions. We need epistemic clarity about reality, for without it, our agency will be blunted and our freedom limited.
It is public-interest education, journalism and science that truly make individuals in a democratic society free, not the right to cast a vote or to elect a representative. So that part is on us, collectively.
And that hard work has just started.
Epilogue:
So, you might ask, after all these ills our technologically empowered epistemic crisis brings to the outside world and democracy, why have we not at least shut down these destructive social media platforms for good? Why have we not yet tackled big tech, like Nobel laureate Maria Ressa is demanding? Why have we humans not stopped participating in the failed social experiment online? Or at least shut down the anti-democratic conspiracy theories flourishing on them?
Unfortunately, we cannot travel back in time, only move forward. It is also worth noting that the attention economy goes beyond social media, shutting platforms down would not make outlets like Fox News go away, would not dismantle alternative hate networks, nor would journalism magically regain the authoritative role and quality it once had.
There are circumstances beyond technology that make people susceptible to conspiratorial thinking and acting, that motivate and drive them towards political extremism, polarization, and authoritarianism. The cat is out of the bag, so to speak, and powerful actors will continue to abuse any and all information systems in the 21st century to create fragmented realities to their benefit. They have seen their opportunities and learned their lessons, so the real question is: Why have we not learned ours?
I do not have a great answer for that, but I believe it is largely because we have created a world that has few things to offer to vast numbers of people who find themselves trapped in fragmented realities, often created and nudged towards by specific engagements algorithms on these manipulative social media platforms.
The addictive dopamine kicks from sharing, responding, and liking are one thing. However, the psychological dependence on confirmation (and other cognitive) biases to make sense of our uncertain world, the feeling of control, community, and belonging are all somewhat to be found on social media, albeit in the worst and most abusive way possible; for the extraction of our data and at the cost of our sanity and often humanity.
We are not only the products, but we are also dependent on the attention economy and many cling to its distractions to avoid another crisis of modern times; a quest for meaning and purpose, a quest for belonging, and a quest for being part of something bigger than ourselves. These are fundamental needs that make us human, yet how many avenues does modern society offer for average people to participate and self-actualize meaningfully?
This already too-long article cannot talk here about the flawed meritocracy of our times, about inequality of opportunity, about the lack of hopeful narratives in a world heading towards dystopias written by technocratic, political, or financial elites and systems we have no or little control over. We should make no mistake that when we find ourselves pulled towards customized fragmented realities, or when we get sucked into believing conspiracy theories, it is not solely by their inherent attractiveness, we are also pushed towards them by other complex systems, interactions, and mechanisms.
In nature, no complex system stands alone, it would be naive to believe that we can switch off, or even dramatically change, the fragmented realities we live in without changing the lived reality of people currently stuck without other options. Education, journalism, and science have the power to elevate us out of our limited perspectives and return to a shared reality, if we let them. There are no technocratic interventions that will solve our human problems for us, only aid in our endeavors.
So even fixing something small and technical like the obviously flawed social media ranking algorithms pushing conspiratorial garbage will require a struggle on multiple fronts, inside and outside of the complex information system itself.
It would be naive to believe we can dramatically change the landscape of fragmented realities without changing the lived reality of people currently stuck in it
Scientists, journalists and citizens have outlined several promising strategies to turn the tide on democratic decline. Some politicians are acting on it, but they will need their citizens to help and participate.
There is always hope.
Dynamical complex systems do not have to rest in equilibrium until an unprecedented dramatic shock or disruption kicks them out of it. We do not need autocratic strongmen to change the system, they will only make it worse. Truly understanding this means that we do not have to succumb to violent revolutions, wars, or catastrophes for systems to change. I reject that proposition, and so should you, because evolving systems such as ourselves, and democracies, are non-linear, chaotic, and complex. Nobody can say for certain how they will play out in the future, and small inputs can have disproportional outcomes. Collective actions matter in such systems. In the rarest of cases, even the (metaphorical) unexpected beat of a butterfly wing can ripple forward in time and be the impetus for changing the system we are all part.
Most likely none of us will ever be that butterfly causing dramatic change, and yet, wouldn’t we be foolish to collectively give up flying when a better tomorrow is possible?
In non-linear complex systems, individual or collective actions inevitably shape the future. For better or worse. So I say let’s try to do better, fellow humans, with science, ingenuity, and compassion for our shared humanity.
Please share this article if you think it is worth it.
Disclaimer:
Please consider that no single article can summarize all the valuable scientific contributions that scientists, journalists, and citizens have made in support of investigating the interface of technology and democracy. It is a large and growing body of evidence, and often a paradox wrapped in a contradiction inside an irony, as Prof. Stephan Lewandowsky puts it.
My contribution to this topic was to focus on explaining key scientific ideas and arguments for non-experts, connecting various different fields of thought under a complex systems framework. While I did go to great lengths to avoid misrepresentations, I cannot always control how my words will be interpreted, nor am I a domain expert in the fields covered here. If there are uncertainties arising from my simplifications, omissions of brevity, or bad analogies, I advise you to first consult the primary literature for clarification rather than presume there is an obvious mistake in the science or reasoning of scientists. My goal is not to influence policy, nor to influence your political views, but to educate and equip citizens with conceptual tools and new perspectives to make sense of the world we inhabit.
This article took a lot of time and effort to conceptualize, research, and produce, actually almost irresponsibly so given that I do not monetize my scicomm and certainly do not plan to start with it now.
I see this work as a public good that I send out into the void of the internet in hopes others will get inspired to act.
You are also invited to deepen this work or just derive satisfaction from understanding our chaotic modern world a bit better.
So feel free to use, share or build on top of this work, I just ask you to properly attribute (Creative Commons CC-BY-NC 4.0).
Cite this work:
Markolin P., “Asymmetric power in the information age”, October 7, 2022. Direct access link: https://protagonist-science.medium.com/1a6d6f2634c6?source=friends_link&sk=4c7abb9354138ca629858102e0ace8bc
Also, since this topic is close to my heart, I’d be happy to hear your thoughts. I’d be even happier to hear what you plan on doing next.
If you feel this work should have some compensation, please consider donating in support of the Ukrainian people, who do their utmost to defend themselves and democracy in wider Europe from the terrorist assault of Putin’s Russia. Decades of asymmetric misinformation warfare have contributed to gradually shaping the Russian nation and people of 150 million to become cynical, disengaged, or ignorant enough to allow a kleptocratic madman in power to usher in a new dark age of imperialist war, slaughter, and nuclear escalation. While absolutely terrifying, this is merely one outcome of a broken info sphere & epistemic nihilism on a population scale. Let’s not find out all the others.
When nothing is true, everything becomes possible
But the buck has to stop here. With us.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Stephan Lewandowsky, Carl Miller, [more] for discussions, as well as Laura de Vargas Roditi, Chris Boutte, [more] for giving critical feedback on the draft version of this article.
PS: Despite writing opinionated and sharing it online, I try hard to not be a person who prides himself on coming up with unique “hot takes” (I leave that to influencers…) about a topic that many smart people have already worked on, and where much of our knowledge is already available. While marketable in the attention economy, re-inventing the wheel is a stupid waste of time, and having amateur influencers selling their USP-optimized “hot take” about how ‘we all should try to make square wheels for a change’ encapsulates much of what I hate about the current epistemic crisis. Expertise is important in a civilized society.
In that sense, I prefer being a rather less popular “cold take” guy. If you have found the above suggestions of strengthening our defenses and institutions boring and predictable, well tough luck.
It had to be said, is agreed upon by experts, and is the most direct path forward we have.
Defending education, sponsoring and reviving public-interest journalism, and sticking to science remain brilliant strategies for maintaining an information sphere compatible with democracy.
It might even be foundational to democracy. These interventions are however a struggle to implement properly, they are the bitter and boring pills we have to make our entertainment-addicted immature society swallow to get healthy again, every day from here on forward, and that will demand hard work, time, money, and resources from all of us. There are no quick & easy fixes. It’s up to us.
So how is that cold take for you?