Watchmen All: Why Eternal Vigilance is the Price of the Information Age
A little bit of news dropped last week that should have been huge. Look, I get that we’re all tired, and that it’s easy to tune out all the noise in the wake of the ending of mask mandates across the country, widespread vaccination, and excitement at the prospect of getting to finally have a life again, but I want to bring this to your attention because it has massive ramifications for our society: the vast majority of anti-vaccine information propagating across our Facebook feeds can be sourced to just twelve people.
You did not misread. Twelve. A dozen. Six and six. Ten and two. A smallish get-together. Smaller than an NBA team. That’s all it has taken to inoculate millions of people against getting inoculated in the middle of a global pandemic that’s taken almost six-hundred thousand lives in the United States alone. Just twelve people. We literally know their names. They are “alternative medicine” advocates, quack physicians, and cynical entrepreneurs who make money by selling health supplements.
Now, I’m not naive enough to expect that banning them across mainstream social platforms will fix everything; ideas are remarkably hard to kill, and the vaccine skepticism and anti-science attitudes they’ve helped to spread have deep roots. If you cut off any of the Hydra’s heads, you can reasonably expect another to replace it. Deplatforming works, but it’s efficacy only goes so far during a time when so much of the population seems positively allergic to the truth. How do you give someone good information when they’ve decided a priori that the only people they can trust are the people telling them the tool that gives us our lives back is really a secret government plot to control us all?
There is an undeniable through-line that unifies anti-masking and anti-vaxxing attitudes: fear. Fear that someone is trying to pull one over you. Fear that some nebulous “they” wants to hurt you. Fear of a world that can’t be explained simply or easily. Fear, over all things, of change. Incidentally, those same fears are at the heart of the entire modern reactionary movement; as the world has slipped out of their grasp, many started looking around for any explanation that would give them someone to blame and (most importantly) fight. Conspiracism is empowering, in a sense; you know the truth, and that means you know how to stop it.
Conspiracy works on people because it uses small truths in its big lies. There has been an increase over time of diagnoses of autism and related neurological disorders, attributable to increased understanding of how the brain functions and how the specific dysfunctions of autism manifest. That’s led to a wider range within diagnostic criteria. That’s created a very vulnerable population of parents who fear for the wellbeing of their children — and those who have little interest in examining whether they, too, might have autistic traits. Predatory capitalism, aided and empowered by our unregulated information infrastructure, took advantage.
The results are without a doubt deeply concerning, and speak ill of our ability to navigate these strange tides of lies and misinformation. It makes me think of Tommy Lee Jones in Men In Black: “A person is smart,” he says to Will Smith, “but people are dumb, panicky, stupid animals.” Group dynamics shape our beliefs as much as our reason, and “truth” often means little beyond “what the group has agreed is true.” That can function for good — as during the long public consensus that anti-semitism is bad actually or that vaccinations are vital to reducing childhood mortality — as well as for ill, as evidenced in the unraveling of both. It treats facts as relative, up for debate. Numbers lie. Nobody gets to say they’re smarter than us.
I’ve spent my life in the communications industry because there is something very profound in the practice. Communication is arguably the greatest ability human beings have — to make known our own minds, and to know the minds of others — and has been vital for our survival since the beginning of time. If I know where food is, and you don’t, your survival hinges on my ability to make sure you know, too. Communication has the ability to make the world better. But it just keeps running up against hard cognitive obstacles: confirmation bias, simplicity bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect, the backfire effect. We have the unique misfortune on this planet of having brains smart enough to build rockets to the moon but congenitally unable to examine themselves. That’s the whole reason therapy requires two people.
I am confident that we’ll get through this present crisis. That is itself optimism bias; as a rule, I prefer to look on the bright side. But misinformation is hardly new. What’s changed is a matter of scale, which is going to force us to rethink how we operate in these new social, political, and institutional realities that scale has created in the same way industrialization did. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were upended by worker uprisings and revolutionary movements as society grappled (or largely refused to) with the new world it had created.
The spread of misinformation has been paralleled by the spread of true information: modern gender equality and racial justice movements have spread over the exact same apparatus. We are capable of using these tools for good. But, to mangle an old cliche, the price of instant communication is eternal vigilance. We must be watchmen all.
I’ll take this watch if you take the next.
