Frank Bruni’s recent column (which I thought was the past Sunday, but is dated December 19) is dead on. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/opinion/donald-trump-promises.html
Donald Trump and Republicans simply will not, and cannot, be ‘held to account.’ These are people who believe verifiably false information. Trump will claim victory no matter what the actual conditions or consequences of his presidency. I feel like we already learned this lesson during the early stages of the Mueller investigation. The American people don’t need to be duped by malicious foreign agents — we are willing to run with misinformation as long as it confirms our biases and ‘owns the libs.’
Separately, read the comments section on an Wall Street Journal article. I hope it’s not representative of WSJ readership as a whole. (After all, these are people screaming online in the middle of a workday.) Conspiracy theory and white supremacist groupthink that barely wafts through their op-ed shitstable is rampant.
So: a subsequent Atlantic piece labels The Internet (more precisely, Social Media) as The Justification Machine: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/01/january-6-justification-machine/681215/. That distills our situation quite nicely.
Freddie deBoer also complains about reportage (very broadly speaking) of scientific topics in his Substack earlier this week: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/wouldnt-it-be-cool-if-science-is?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Although deBoer seems interested in quantum physics and “Elegant Universe”-type explanations of science, I think his complaints are broadly valid. There are a lot of repackaged press releases that lack critical analyses or context, there are a lot of TED-style talks, and there’s just a lot of gee-whiz style expositions even in the New York Times. He blames The Algorithm.
For as much junk as The Algorithms foist upon us, I think it’s still us as consumers to blame. After all, if The Algorithms gave us what we want, we would have recipes without eight paragraph expositions. The Algorithms are just a rerouting of The Justification Machine, and unfortunately, people who get science “news” from YouTube are just really into gee-whiz explanations of the multiverse hypothesis. Sorry, Freddie. Read Nature, Science, or STAT if you want straightforward reportage.
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