“The emails showed the world’s leading climatologists busily working to organize a research cartel. Peer review was a legitimate source of authority when the process supported their positions. It was compromised, if not malicious, when it offered critics of the orthodoxy a platform. The wish to crush dissenting views, in their minds, had become indistinguishable from the pursuit of truth.”
– Martin Gurri
Over the last two decades, exafloods of Internet content have educated and entertained beyond imagination. Exponentially-growing communications bandwidth and data transparency empowered regular people, elevated previously unknown geniuses, and helped expose deep dysfunction among many existing “experts.” A tsunami of social media also generated psychedelic confusion, not least among the experts themselves, leading to, in Martin Gurri’s words, a “crisis of authority.”
Now, artificial intelligence is about to amplify this infowarp a million-fold, for good and ill, producing both unprecedented knowledge and wealth and new epistemic challenges.
If you thought the battles over social media “misinformation” were intense, just wait for the A.I. era.
Lots of failed experts are engaged in a tactical retreat, regrouping for the coming battles. They passively admit “mistakes were made” but dodge specific accountability and refuse to acknowledge those who got the big questions right.
At the same time, they are busy establishing new gatekeepers, taboos, and approved voices. The very people who got so many giant questions so very wrong over the last two decades are attempting to build a new information fortress for the next 20 years.
Journalist Douglas Murray, who once backed free speech but also celebrated America’s forever-war disasters, is threatening misbehavers with excommunication. After a dismal recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, the prolific podcast guest warned against listening to the wrong podcasts.
What the standards are in the new media — especially on podcasts — is still being worked out.
But there must be some.
Otherwise the new media will lead people into errors and evils far greater than the old media could ever dream of.
What a turn of events. In recent years, on varied topics from Covid to Ukraine, the highly imperfect and diverse new media demolished the lockstep old media. Years from now, we might conclude the new media helped save Western civilization. Murray himself owes much of his impressive influence to new media. But now, suddenly, if Joe Rogan and alternative outlets don’t bow to Murray and his friends, they might be more “evil” than the people who lied about Joe Biden’s health, the origin of the virus, Iraqi WMD, Russia collusion, climate apocalypse, and so much more.
But doesn’t Murray have a point? Don’t standards matter?
Of course, standards matter. Credibility matters. Expertise, editorial judgment, and curation are all important – perhaps more so in an era of information overload. No single person can navigate the infowarp alone. We need trusted sources and guides.
When Murray balks at defining any standards, however, his tsk-tsk-ing is exposed as an arbitrary threat. If you don’t toe the party line, he and his friends will smear you out of polite society.
The question is not whether we value standards and expertise. Obviously we do. The question is: at what layers of the stack are these judgments made?
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