San Francisco is once again fighting over billionaires’ philanthropic power.
Billionaire philanthropy is once again on the defense in San Francisco, the home of many a tech billionaire.
The latest backlash centers on a city proposal to get 20,000 schoolchildren some in-person teaching and playtime this summer, after city public schools have been closed for more than a year during the pandemic. But a liberal lawmaker has temporarily derailed the initiative to raise questions about the involvement of a volunteer group that she worries is pushing a political agenda.
The saga is another flashpoint in the debate over the proper role of billionaire philanthropists — and their affiliated nonprofits — in society. And it is a window into how the city that is home to tech wealth is increasingly suspicious of civic projects from those tech leaders. Late last year, San Francisco officially condemned Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for his errors at Facebook after he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated $75 million to a local hospital.
Here’s what happened: Earlier this month, San Francisco announced that a foundation called Crankstart, funded by famous Sequoia venture capitalist Mike Moritz and his wife, Harriet Heyman, was donating $25 million to help start a city initiative to offer free summer school or day care programs to kids. The program would be aided by an outside advocacy group called TogetherSF that was formed last year to work on civic projects in the city and has also, separately, been funded by Crankstart. Crankstart brokered the arrangement between TogetherSF and the summer school program.
But TogetherSF’s involvement has become controversial — and is being cast by one San Francisco supervisor, Hillary Ronen, as a possible political play by education reformers. And Ronen this week convinced the board, on a 10-1 vote, to delay approving the program to educate San Francisco students until she could investigate TogetherSF and its political ties.
Ronen is suspicious in part because Together SF is not a typical nonprofit organization that is a 501(c)3 group, but is instead organized as part of a bigger lobbying or advocacy organization, a 501(c)4. The group is also co-led by a former aide to multiple San Francisco lawmakers. And Ronen believes that the group may have loyalties to activists who push for school privatization and charters schools, which are lightning rod issues in urban education policy.
Ronen conceded she didn’t have any hard proof of ties from Crankstart or TogetherSF’s ties to the education reform movement, but said based on its 501(c)4 structure and her limited research, it “looks and smells like” they are seeking to promote a “political agenda.” She is concerned, for instance, that the group could seek to use the volunteers it recruits for future political campaigns in support of anti-union candidates.
“There has to be, in my book, unprecedented transparency and agreement that funders of this initiative are doing so because they’re very concerned about children — and aren’t trying to advance some alternative privatization, charter agenda that is meant to dismantle our public schools,” Ronen told Recode.
Together SF’s founders, Kanishka Cheng and Griffin Gaffney, say their work is non-political and that they merely are seeking to mobilize a network of volunteers to serve their hometown in crisis. They are helping the city with work like collecting donations from private employers and creating a website for the program.
“We’re incredibly surprised by it, honestly. This is the first we’re hearing about this privatization, charter agenda come up as a reason to question the program and our involvement,” Cheng told Recode. “It’s not at all what Together SF has been involved in.”
For now, Ronen has just delayed the vote on the program by two weeks. She told Recode she doesn’t expect it to jeopardize the summer program, but that she was open to voting against it if her investigation revealed new information. But regardless of the final vote, some observers are concerned that the conflict — along with the high-profile Zuckerberg censure in the spring — could dissuade more and more wealthy philanthropists from donating money if it only brings them more scrutiny. The city is also about to embark on a $2 billion fundraising drive, also led by Ronen, when it will need more money from wealthy people.
Moritz, a former board member of Google, and his wife Heyman, an award-winning novelist, have long made local causes a focus of Crankstart, which has a private profile but is one of the Bay Area’s biggest foundations by total assets at almost $2 billion. Crankstart has donated over $50 million to San Francisco nonprofits in 2020, funding efforts during the pandemic that paid San Francisco essential workers to quarantine if sick and local efforts to feed the hungry.
Moritz told Recode that he was trying to help local schoolchildren “and nothing beyond that.”
“All we want to do is to help people who don’t necessarily have a great, wonderful ticket for a great education to get that ticket. That’s all,” he said. “Does it pass the litmus test of is this good for San Francisco, or for a portion of San Francisco? I think the answer is yes.”
Moritz is technically the funder of TogetherSF’s parent company, Civic Action Labs, which runs TogetherSF and a second organization that has also faced tough questions about its political ties. That organization is Here / Say Media, a new media publication focused on San Francisco news that has drawn raised eyebrows from journalism ethicists because it is owned by the 501(c)4 parent company. Almost all nonprofit newsrooms are traditionally structured as 501(c)3 groups rather than as “dark money” political groups, as 501(c)4 organizations are sometimes called.
What unites these two stories is that Here/Say Media, which is also run by Cheng and Gaffney, originally declined to disclose its donors — and that troubled media observers. But then on March 9th — the day before the city of San Francisco announced the involvement of Cheng and Gaffney in the summer program — Here/Say quietly updated its website to disclose that Crankstart was a funder.
“We knew the [summer] program was launching. We’d be more visible. So we wanted to be more transparent about that,” Cheng said when asked about the timing.
Cheng and Gaffney are trying to unwind the intertwined controversies; They are in the process of trying to turn Together SF into a new 501(c)3 organization, which will theoretically reduce suspicions about their political agenda. They said that they will also spin out Here / Say Media into a new, to-be-determined, non-political structure, too.
But political critics of San Francisco government — which is managing several concurrent crises, including one involving its school board over racist tweets — are concerned that the damage has already been done. And that philanthropists will find other things to fund with their billions rather than a city that makes their life difficult.
Asked if this brinkmanship sent a bad message to private philanthropists who want to get involved in city life, Moritz said “actions speak much louder than words.”
“We live in a bit of a political cauldron, and so you know it’s just part of life,” Moritz said. “It certainly won’t deter us if people who don’t even know us, people we’ve never even talked to, ascribe various motives to us.”
Ronen, though, insists it is merely about transparency.
“If their investments is free and clear, and don’t involve a political agenda — fantastic, that’s very generous and wonderful,” Ronen said. “But if they involve an agenda, no thanks. We don’t want your investment. You have enough power as it is.”
A guide to the jurors, charges, and defense strategy in the trial of the former officer charged with killing George Floyd.
The quest to seat the jury in the high-profile murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has reached the finish line.
In the last two weeks of the televised jury selection process, viewers got a sense of how the judge, defense attorney, prosecutors, and jury would perform when the actual trial starts Monday.
Selecting 15 unbiased jurors was a challenge in itself — the killing of George Floyd is world-renowned. The 46-year-old Black man died in Minneapolis last May after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground for nearly nine minutes by Chauvin. Video of the incident — with Floyd pleading, “I can’t breathe” and bystanders calling on Chauvin to give him some air — spread around the globe and sparked thousands of protests calling for police accountability and racial justice. It seemed an impossible task to find jurors who didn’t come with strong preconceived notions regarding a case that has been highly publicized for almost a year.
Chauvin — who, along with the three other officers involved, was immediately fired following the incident — has been charged with second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. Eric Nelson, the lead defense attorney, will argue that Floyd did not die because of Chauvin’s knee on his neck. He also told a potential juror during the jury selection process that the trial is “not about race.” However, his line of questioning for prospective jurors suggested otherwise, asking them their views on racism, policing in communities of color, and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Meanwhile, the prosecution will have to prove that Chauvin’s actions during the arrest ultimately caused Floyd’s death. And because prosecutors believe it is a race-sensitive case, they struck out prospective white jurors who expressed police-friendly views or who had negative thoughts about the Black Lives Matter protests.
“it’s obviously about race,” said D.A. Bullock, an organizer with Reclaim the Block, a Minneapolis grassroots group calling to divert funds from police departments to community resources. “Given the history of white police officers not being charged in the killing of many unarmed Black men, it’s clear that the justice system is not blind to race. It comes with inherent biases that work against us Black people.”
About a week into the jury selection, the city of Minneapolis agreed to settle a historic $27 million with the Floyd family over a wrongful death lawsuit. Because of this, Nelson asked to delay the trial and for a change of venue, arguing that the timing would prejudice the jury. Several potential jurors were dismissed after bringing up that their views were swayed by the settlement. Hennepin County District Court Judge Peter Cahill rejected Nelson’s motions, though, saying Chauvin wouldn’t get a fairer trial anywhere else.
Now that the jury and venue are settled, opening statements for the trial are slated to begin at 9 am CT on Monday. Chauvin’s trial, which is expected to last at least four weeks, is the first in Minnesota to be streamed and broadcast live in its entirety — a decision approved by Cahill since the pandemic has upended the public’s ability to watch the proceedings. In the courtroom, people are masked, jurors are socially distanced, reporters are limited, and attorneys along with Chauvin are divided by plexiglass.
Here’s what else to expect:
What the defense has planned
During the jury selection process, Nelson tried to humanize Chauvin beyond the image of the white police officer who knelt on a Black man’s neck as he struggled to breathe and begged for his mother.
When the first batch of potential jurors was being questioned, Chauvin — with half his face obscured by a black mask — sat taking notes and rarely making eye contact. At one point, a juror said she could not forget the “hateful look” on Chauvin’s face in the videos. The comment altered the way Nelson later introduced his client to potential jurors, with Chauvin removing his mask to show his full face and nodding at the group.
To avoid convicting Chauvin of the second-degree unintentional murder charge, the defense must prove he did not cause Floyd’s death while also committing a felony — in this case, assault. The defense will argue that Chauvin did not cause Floyd’s death, that it was a combination of excessive drug use and preexisting conditions that killed him. They will call on the county medical examiner who said Floyd’s toxicology report showed high traces of drugs during the incident — but the examiner also noted that it’s hard to say whether Floyd would have died of other causes, like Chauvin’s knee on his neck. If convicted, under Minnesota law, the charge is punishable by up to 40 years in prison.
To avoid conviction on the second-degree manslaughter charge, the defense needs to prove that Chauvin didn’t cause Floyd’s death due to negligence that created an unreasonable risk — meaning, he didn’t know that pinning him down by his neck for nearly nine minutes would lead to severe injury or death. In Minnesota, this charge carries a maximum sentence of up to 10 years.
The third-degree murder charge, under Minnesota law, means the perpetrator acted in a way that was reckless at the risk of causing death and carries a sentence of no more than 25 years. Prosecutors argued to add the third-degree murder charge because not only is it easier to prove than second-degree unintentional felony murder, but it also gives jurors more options about how to convict. If convicted of any of these charges, Chauvin’s status as a first-time offender will also play into how long his prison sentence will be.
Ultimately, the defense’s central strategy is proving that something else ended Floyd’s life — and that it was not Chauvin’s knee. Nelson pushed for a pre-trial motion to include evidence of Floyd’s drug-related arrest by Minneapolis police in 2019. After reviewing Nelson’s arguments, in which the attorney called Floyd’s “emotional responses” during both arrests a “common modus operandi,” Judge Cahill has allowed the defense to show only a portion of the 2019 arrest video as evidence during the trial, adding that Floyd’s interactions with the police in 2019 mirrored the 2020 arrest that led to his death. Cahill also agreed that there were signs that Floyd may have taken drugs in both incidents.
The defense has also tried to argue that Chauvin was terminated due to prejudice, not for cause, and that Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo only fired him out of public pressure. However, prosecutors successfully motioned to exclude any evidence or testimony that speaks to the police department’s decision to fire Chauvin and the other three officers involved since it’s unrelated to how and why Floyd died.
Nelson’s arguments so far give observers a glimpse of how he expects to approach the trial — that the entire investigation leading to Floyd’s death was fundamentally biased against his client, including the ongoing federal civil rights investigation and Chauvin’s immediate firing. Arradondo, the city’s first Black police chief, said he fired the officers after reviewing all the evidence including body-camera videos.
During the month-long trial, several witnesses are expected to testify, including Arradondo, the county medical examiner, and the bystander who videotaped Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck.
The prosecution also plans to introduce “spark of life” witnesses, which under Minnesota law allows family and friends to be called to the stand to deliver testimony that would humanize the victim. Floyd’s brother, Philonise Floyd, and former girlfriend Courteney Ross are among those expected to speak.
However, the spark-of-life testimonies won’t be considered “evidence” and will be tightly managed by Cahill. The judge said he would draw a line if witnesses talk about Floyd’s character rather than how much they loved him since it would “open the door” for the defense to introduce Floyd’s criminal history as evidence, which so far has been ruled inadmissible. Cahill, nonetheless, added he may allow witnesses to talk about Floyd’s struggles with opioid addiction.
“This is not a hard case,” Ben Crump, the attorney who helped the Floyd family secure the $27 million settlement, said in a news release after the jury selections were completed. “George Floyd had more witnesses to his death than any other person ever — white or Black. We all saw the same thing — the indisputable and unjustified torture and murder by a police officer of a Black man who was handcuffed, restrained, and posed no harm.”
What we know about the jury
The initial jury pool had 326 people, but only about 60 were questioned. Cahill decided 15 needed to be selected, including two alternates and another who will be dropped if the first 14 jurors show up for duty (only 12 will be on the actual jury).
Even though the jury selection process was broadcasted live, the faces of the prospective jurors were not shown to the public for their safety and privacy, and they will not be seen for the duration of the trial. Among the 15 selected jurors, we do know six are people of color — one Black woman, three Black men, and two mixed-race women — while nine are white, six of whom are women. Despite being a white majority, the jury is actually more diverse than the county and the city: According to 2019 data from the US Census Bureau, Hennepin County is about 74 percent white and 14 percent Black while Minneapolis is about 64 percent white and 19 percent Black.
The jurors also come from an array of backgrounds, ranging from an accountant to a chemist to a nurse who has been caring for patients throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. Some are extremely familiar with the case while others haven’t been actively following monthslong developments. According to USA Today, seven are in their 20s or 30s, three in their 40s, four in their 50s, and one in her 60s.
Prior to the selection, each potential juror was asked to fill out a 14-page written questionnaire. During the selection process, the jurors were questioned and vetted by Judge Cahill, prosecution, and defense lawyers. The general line of questioning included if their views have changed since filling out the questionnaire, whether they could set aside their personal opinions on the case and social movements to remain impartial, and also about personal safety concerns. Those who expressed major anxiety and fears of being on the jury were ultimately dismissed.
The jurors were also asked about their thoughts or whether they’ve seen the video of Chauvin pinning his knee on Floyd’s neck as well as their views on the Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements. One of the selected jurors, who said he plans to move out of Minnesota in late May, noted he has a neutral opinion of Floyd and also generally favors the Black Lives Matter movement but also believes it was “a contributing factor” in the unrest that erupted following Floyd’s death last summer.
Another juror, a white man who works in sales, called the Blue Lives Matter movement “not offensive but shortsighted.” The man, who is supposed to get married in May but said he is willing to postpone the wedding if the trial continues, noted he generally supports law enforcement.
Some of the jurors’ responses also indicated how they would approach the final verdict of the trial. One juror said she wanted to know more about police training and whether placing a knee on someone’s neck was allowed while another said he wanted to hear Chauvin offer his side of the story.
However, one potential juror last week was dismissed by Chauvin’s defense attorney after sharing his thoughts and personal experience with the Minneapolis Police Department and the criminal justice system as a whole.
“As a Black man, you see a lot of Black people get killed and no one’s held accountable for it, and you wonder why or what was the decision, and so with this, maybe I’ll be in the room to know why,” the potential juror told the court.
Although the Army veteran said he could put his personal opinions aside to hear the case solely based on the evidence presented in court, he was still dismissed by the defense arguing that he was biased against the Minneapolis Police Department.
“That was his actual lived experiences with the Minneapolis police, but he was disqualified because it was assumed he couldn’t look past that in order to look at the facts of the case,” Bullock told Vox. “It’s an insult to Black Minneapolis residents because we have to forgo our bias and lived experiences all the time to fit in the system. It just shines a light on some of the inherent unfairness about the system.”
Cahill said he plans to reveal the names of the jurors when it is “safe” to do so. In the meantime, government buildings in downtown Minneapolis remain heavily barricaded by fencing and concrete barriers while members of the Minnesota National Guard remain stationed outside the courthouse. The heavy police presence, Bullock said, has left the community on edge.
Still, activist groups like Reclaim the Block and Black Visions Collective will keep a close eye on the trial while also protesting outside the courthouse and rallying at what’s now George Floyd Square. What they ultimately hope comes out of Floyd’s death is what they’ve always wanted: replacing Minneapolis police with a new public safety department, which means first changing the city charter and knocking door to door to collect signatures to do so.
“Regardless of the outcome of the verdict, we know that true justice would have to reflect in a fundamental change in the way we address public safety. If we’re not doing that, true justice is not served,” Bullock said. “We want justice for George Floyd and his family, of course, but we know that true justice means changing our public safety system.”
We have lost faith in elites and public institutions. The problem is nothing has taken their place.
One of the greatest challenges facing democratic societies in the 21st century is the loss of faith in public institutions.
The internet has been a marvelous invention in lots of ways, but it has also unleashed a tsunami of misinformation and destabilized political systems across the globe. Martin Gurri, a former media analyst at the CIA and the author of the 2014 book The Revolt of the Public, was way ahead of the curve on this problem.
Gurri spent years surveying the global information landscape. Around the turn of the century, he noticed a trend: As the internet gave rise to an explosion of information, there was a concurrent spike in political instability. The reason, he surmised, was that governments lost their monopoly on information and with it their ability to control the public conversation.
One of the many consequences of this is what Gurri calls a “crisis of authority.” As people were exposed to more information, their trust in major institutions — like the government or newspapers — began to collapse.
Gurri’s book became something of a cult favorite among Silicon Valley types when it was released and its insights have only become more salient since. Indeed, I’ve been thinking more and more about his thesis in the aftermath of the 2020 election and the assault on the US Capitol on January 6. There are lots of reasons why the insurrection happened, but one of them is the reality that millions of Americans believed — really believed — that the presidential election was stolen, despite a complete lack of evidence. A Politico poll conducted shortly after the election found that 70 percent of Republicans thought the election was fraudulent.
That’s what a “crisis of authority” looks like in the real world.
And it’s crucial to distinguish this crisis from what’s often called the “epistemic crisis” or the “post-truth” problem. If Gurri’s right, the issue isn’t just that truth suddenly became less important; it’s that people stopped believing in the institutions charged with communicating the truth. To put it a little differently, the gatekeeping institutions lost their power to decide what passes as truth in the mind of the public.
So where does that leave us?
I reached out to Gurri to explore the implications of his thesis. We talk about what it means for our society if millions of people reject every claim that comes from a mainstream institution, why a phenomenon like QAnon is fundamentally a “pose of rejection,” and why he thinks we’ll have to “reconfigure” our democratic institutions for the digital world we now inhabit.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
Have elites — politicians, corporate actors, media and cultural elites — lost control of the world?
Martin Gurri
Yes and no. It’s a wishy-washy answer, but it’s a reality.
They would have completely lost control of the world if the public in revolt had a clear program or an organization or leadership. If they were more like the Bolsheviks and less like QAnon, they’d take over the Capitol building. They’d start passing laws. They would topple the regime.
But what we have is this collision between a public that is in repudiation mode and these elites who have lost control to the degree that they can’t hoist these utopian promises upon us anymore because no one believes it, but they’re still acting like zombie elites in zombie institutions. They still have power. They can still take us to war. They can still throw the police out there, and the police could shoot us, but they have no authority or legitimacy. They’re stumbling around like zombies.
Sean Illing
You like to say that governments have lost the ability to dictate the stories a society tells about itself, mostly because the media environment is too fragmented. Why is that so significant?
Martin Gurri
When you analyze the institutions that we have inherited from the 20th century, you find that they are very top-down, like pyramids. And the legitimacy of that model absolutely depends on having a semi-monopoly over information in every domain, which they had in the 20th century. There was no internet and there was a fairly limited number of information sources for the public. So our ruling institutions had authority because they had a very valuable commodity: information.
So I was an analyst at the CIA looking around the world at open information, at the global media. And I can tell you, it was like a trickle compared to today. If a president, here or somewhere else, was giving a speech, the coverage of it was confined to major outlets or television stations. But when the tsunami of information hit around the turn of the century, the legitimacy of that model instantly went into crisis because you now had the opposite effect. You had an overabundance of information, and that created a lot of confusion and anarchy.
Sean Illing
I’m curious how you weigh the significance of material factors in this story. It’s not just that there’s more information, we’ve also seen a litany of failures in the 21st century — from Hurricane Katrina to the forever wars to the financial crisis and on and on. Basically, a decade of institutions failing and misleading citizens, in addition to the deepening inequality, the deaths of despair, the fact that this generation of Americans is doing materially worse than previous ones.
How big a role has this backdrop of failures played in the collapse of trust?
Martin Gurri
I would say that what matters is less the material factors you mention than the public’s perception of these factors. Empirically, under nearly every measure, we are better off today than in the 20th century, yet the public is much angrier and more distrustful of government institutions and the elites who manage them. That difference in perception arises directly from the radical changes in the information landscape between the last century and our own.
With few exceptions, most market democracies have recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. But the public has not recovered from the shock of watching supposed experts and politicians, the people who posed as the wise pilots of our prosperity, sound and act totally clueless while the economy burned. In the past, when the elites controlled the flow of information, the financial collapse might have been portrayed as a sort of natural disaster, a tragedy we should unify around our leadership to overcome. By 2008, that was already impossible. The networked public perceived the crisis (rightly, I think) as a failure of government and of the expert elites.
It should be a truism that material conditions matter much less than expectations. That was true during the Great Depression and it’s true today. The rhetoric of the rant on the web feeds off extreme expectations — any imperfection in the economy will be treated as a crisis and a true crisis will be seen as the Apocalypse.
Take the example of Chile. For 40 years, it had high economic growth, rising into the ranks of the wealthiest nations. During this time, Chile enjoyed a healthy democracy, in which political parties of left and right alternated in office. Everyone benefited. Yet in 2019, with many deaths and much material destruction, the Chilean public took to the streets in revolt against the established order. Its material expectations had been deeply frustrated, despite the country’s economic and political successes.
Sean Illing
Just to be clear, when you talk about this “tsunami” of information in the digital age, you’re not talking about more truth, right?
Martin Gurri
As Nassim Taleb pointed out, when you have a gigantic explosion of information, what’s exploding is noise, not signal, so there’s that.
As for truth, that’s a tricky subject, because a lot of elites believe, and a lot of people believe, that truth is some kind of Platonic form. We can’t see it, but we know it’s there. And often we know it because the science says so.
But that’s not really how truth works. Truth is essentially an act of trust, an act of faith in some authority that is telling you something that you could not possibly come to realize yourself. What’s a quark? You believe that there are quarks in the universe, probably because you’ve been told by people who probably know what they’re talking about that there are quarks. You believe the physicists. But you’ve never seen a quark. I’ve never seen a quark. We accept this as truth because we’ve accepted the authority of the people who told us it’s true.
Sean Illing
I’m starting to hate the phrase “post-truth” because it implies there was some period in which we lived in truth or in which truth was predominant. But that’s misleading. The difference is that elite gatekeeping institutions can’t place borders on the public conversation and that means they’ve lost the ability to determine what passes as truth, so now we’re in the Wild West.
Martin Gurri
That’s a very good way to put it. I would say, though, that there was a shining moment when we all had truth. They are correct about that. If truth is really a function of authority, and if in the 20th century these institutions really had authority, then we did have something like truth. But if we had the information back then that we have today, if we had all the noise that we have today, nothing would’ve seemed quite as true because we would’ve lacked faith in the institutions that tried to tell us.
Sean Illing
What does it mean for our society if an “official narrative” isn’t possible? Because that’s where we’re at, right? Millions of people will never believe any story or account that comes from the government or a mainstream institution.
Martin Gurri
As long as our institutions remain as they are, nothing much will change. What that means is more of the same — more instability, more turbulence, more conspiracy theories, more distrust of authorities. But there’s no iron law of history that says we have to keep these institutions the way they are. Many of our institutions were built around the turn of the 20th century. They weren’t that egalitarian or democratic. They were like great, big pyramids.
But we can take our constitutional framework and reconfigure it. We’ve done it once already, and we could do it again with the digital realm in mind, understanding the distance we once had between those in power and ordinary citizens is gone forever. It’s just gone. So we need people in power who are comfortable in proximity to the public, which many of our elites are not.
Sean Illing
I do want to at least point to an apparent paradox here. As you’ve said, because of the internet, there are now more voices and more perspectives than ever before, and yet at the same time there’s a massive “herding effect,” as a result of which we have more people talking about fewer subjects. And that partly explains how you get millions of people converging on something like QAnon.
Martin Gurri
Yeah, and that’s very mysterious to me. I would not have expected that outcome. I thought we were headed to ever more dispersed information islands and that that would create a fragmentation in individual beliefs. But instead, I’ve noticed a trend toward conformism and a crystallizing of very few topics. Some of this is just an unwillingness to say certain things because you know if you said them, the internet was going to come after you.
But I think Trump had a lot to do with it. The amount of attention he got was absolutely unprecedented. Everything was about him. People were either against him or for him, but he was always the subject. Then came the pandemic and he simply lost the capacity to absorb and manipulate attention. The pandemic just moved him completely off-kilter. He never recovered.
Sean Illing
But we’re in a situation in which ideas, whether it’s QAnon stuff or anything else, are getting more hollow and more viral at the same time — and that seems really bad moving forward.
Martin Gurri
I’m not quite that pessimistic. You can find all kinds of wonderful stuff being written about practically every aspect of society today by people who are seeing things clearly and sanely. But yeah, they’re surrounded by a mountain of viral crap. And yet we’re in the early days of this transformation. We have no idea how this is going to play out.
There has always been a lot of viral crap going around, and there have always been people who believe crazy stuff, particularly crazy stuff that doesn’t impact their immediate lives. Flat earthers still get on airplanes, right? If you’re a flat earther, you’re not a flat earther enough to not get in an airplane and disrupt your personal life. It’s not really a belief, it’s basically giving the finger to the establishment.
Sean Illing
It’s a pose.
Martin Gurri
Yeah, it’s a pose of rejection. QAnon is a pose of rejection. There are very many flavors of it, but what they have in common is they’re saying all these ideas you have and all the facts you’re cramming in my face — it’s all a prop for the powerful and I’m rejecting it.
Sean Illing
It’s an important point because a lot of us treat QAnon like it’s some kind of epistemological problem, but it’s not really that at all. It’s actually much more difficult than that. And even if we set aside QAnon, the fact that the vast majority of Republicans still believe the 2020 election was fraudulent speaks to the breadth of the problem.
Martin Gurri
Right, it’s a problem of authority. When people don’t trust those charged with conveying the truth, they won’t accept it. And at some point, like I said, we’ll have to reconfigure our democracy. Our politicians and institutions are going to have to adjust to the new world in which the public can’t be walled off or controlled. Leaders can’t stand at the top of pyramids anymore and talk down to people. The digital revolution flattened everything. We’ve got to accept that.
I really do have hope that this will happen. The boomers who grew up in the old world and can’t move beyond it are going to die out, and younger people are going to take their place. That will raise other questions and challenges, of course, but there will be a changing of the guard and we should welcome it.