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Heh, it's funny you mention this.
While I was writing through it (maybe this is plainly obvious, but I don't always know where the piece is going when I first start writing it) I was reading this, in Freddie deBoer's Substack: freddiedeboer.substack.…
I was thinking through it while walking the dog — by the time I got back, I had so many i…
Heh, it's funny you mention this.
While I was writing through it (maybe this is plainly obvious, but I don't always know where the piece is going when I first start writing it) I was reading this, in Freddie deBoer's Substack: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/many-conspiracy-theories-have-in
I was thinking through it while walking the dog — by the time I got back, I had so many ideas that I decided to put a pin in it for a future dispatch. So it's missing because I'm saving it for a future edition.
On 2: I'm always in favor of better education on this sort of thing. I think you could so far as to add media literacy and critical thinking — and more fundamentally, the theory of knowledge itself — to every single class at every single grade level throughout 6-12. Couldn't agree more.
But also, same conclusion as the above: It won't solve this problem, not even in the ~20 years it will take to come into effect. As I occasionally plagirize: The problem with misinformation isn't ignorance, it's overconfidence.
In some cases, a really robust education ends up making you *too* critical. Sometimes focusing on a long list of the horrible things we've done to each other makes you a cynical, paranoid crank.
This piece is actually a little preview of a thing I'm doing for Foreign Policy, on the right-wing effort to go after misinformation researchers. One of the worst culprits is Matt Taibbi. Here's a guy who is the epitome of being awake to how business, media, and politics colludes to make us crazy. Then he falls into many of the same traps, and finds himself perpetuating this bullshit.
I think the logical extension of what I'm getting at is: Misinformation, and the broader trust issue it indicates, isn't a personal issue that can be fixed by fixing people; it's a societal issue that will be fixed by solving out collective relationships.
I guess I should blow some dust off some old Foucault books.
Yeah, I have this boundless faith that people will just make the right choice with the right education. There's not a lot of evidence out of the Ivy League for that, I admit.
Robert Putnam probably has it right: we need more bowling leagues and choirs.
Thanks!