Everyone should care less about politics than they currently do, so this is not a detail I share proudly, but I spent a good portion of my July 4th weekend working my way through a two-hour conversation between Ezra Klein and Chris Rufo. The pair offered diagnoses of the problems on the left and right, agreed on a variety of fronts, and articulated cogent, competing visions of the institutional and ideological tensions that define our times.
There was also a bit on conspiracy theories that has stuck with me, so if you’ll forgive a midsummer zag, today’s post will focus on the state of the information landscape online. This was Rufo, describing the rise of antisemitism among the online right:
How do conspiracy theories work? Conspiracy theories work for people who want to forfeit agency. For people who do not foresee the possibility of constructive action in their personal lives or in public life. And therefore the conspiracy theory gives them the rationalization and justification for their nihilism.
That explanation is insightful, but of course lately the answer to the question “how do conspiracy theories work?” could just as easily be “they work quite well.” That was one of the predicates for Rufo’s conversation with Klein. They discussed the growing popularity of conspiratorial narrators like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, the troubling direction that Tucker Carlson has taken his career, and Rufo’s stated concerns with fact-indifferent extremism that’s increasing on the right and increasingly institutionalized on the left.
Indeed, the rise of bizarre, unhinged and often antisemitic conspiracies has become a meaningful problem on the fringes of the new right, and it’s been mirrored step for step on the left. And yes, roughly 90% of those conversations are happening online, where opaque algorithms and the competition for attention incentivize charged language and broad, sensational accusations. Hence the months or years of conversations about how Israel killed Charlie Kirk, AIPAC controls U.S. foreign policy, Donald Trump is a pedophile, AI data centers are uniquely poisonous to the planet, etc.
I’ll come back to all of that, but let me first take a hard turn away from Charlie Kirk conspiracies to an area of comfort and expertise: professional basketball. Last Thursday, I opened Twitter to read about the Jaylen Brown trade and was amazed by how insane some of the takes seemed.
Low Stakes Madness
Don’t get me wrong, I’m open to the argument that various private equity principles around efficiency optimization and revenue maximization are in fact ruining sports, but no, sorry, Brown was not traded last week because private equity money is secretly controlling and ruining the Celtics. Nor do I buy the explanation that Brown was traded because white NBA front offices had long ago diagnosed that Brown was sick, and “the disease was intelligence.” Was his presence wearing on his teammates in Boston and perhaps tipping the scales on a close call for the front office? Different question, and the answer there is unclear.
In any event, I invoke those examples only because this is kind of how everyone talks about everything now, at least on social media. When Flo Balogun was cleared to play earlier this week after lobbying from President Trump and the U.S. side, the Europeans treated it like a literal declaration of war from Trump, while an editor at the Wall Street Journal tweeted: “If I’m a US athlete, why would I not dope myself to the point of superhuman capacity, safe in the knowledge that if the IOC disqualifies me after I win gold, I’ll just get the president to appeal and overturn it?”
I would say more about Balogun’s situation, but unfortunately I’ve decided to never discuss American soccer again after the U.S. performance against Belgium Monday night. With respect to basketball: Jaylen Brown was traded because he’s making $185 million over the next three years, he may have expected a contract extension that would have paid him $140 million over two additional seasons, and the Celtics were convinced that pairing Brown and his potential $325 million salary with Jayson Tatum was not going to work at a championship level. Moreover, for a variety of interpersonal reasons, the partnership between Brown, the Celtics, and Tatum could have become more dysfunctional from here, including later this summer. In that case, Brown’s trade value would have been even worse than it was for the past few weeks.
All of the above is why the deal got done how it did, when it did, and for less value in return than most expected. Reality in this instance was pretty mundane (and on GOAT, we predicted exactly this sort of outcome). Also, I found the entire Balogun affair hilarious, and no, I don’t think Belgium should have withdrawn from the World Cup. Nor do I expect every U.S. athlete to be doped to the gills at the L.A. Olympics in two years.
The obvious and borderline trite observation here is that whether we’re talking sports or messaging in national politics, sensational explanatory theories or extrapolations are the coin of the realm on social media. It’s like this every day. Platforms amplify the craziest opinions, everyone gets a little crazier themselves, and it all snowballs to a wild place that’s often totally disconnected from reality. Speaking of which: with apologies to Candace Owens, I’m fairly confident Charlie Kirk was murdered by a leftist college student and not the Israeli government. AIPAC is a powerful lobby, but not an omnipotent one. There are no credible allegations that Donald Trump is a pedophile. AI data centers do not use 1,000 times more water than a city does.
The Unsatisfying Truth
Zooming out, I think Rufo’s explanation for the allure of conspiratorial thinking is insightful but incomplete. For me, three reactions come to mind.
First, any honest reckoning with the rise of conspiratorial narrators as a problem should also acknowledge how many fringe ideas that began on social media have since proven to be true. Two years ago this week, Joe Biden was still running for president and Democrats had just spent six months vilifying anyone who questioned his mental and physical fitness, claiming that inconvenient videos had been doctored. Six years ago, the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop were declared to be foreign disinformation and stories about its contents were censored on American social media.
There was also the lab leak hypothesis, a scientific theory that was deemed racist and unscientific and relegated to the margins of polite conversation, until it wasn’t. Six years later now, were elements of the scientific establishment working to obfuscate America’s role in gain-of-function research in Wuhan? It sure seems like it! And of course, anyone who claimed Donald Trump presented an unprecedented anti-democratic threat to the United States could have been branded a paranoid hysteric stirring panic for clicks—and then Trump contested the outcome of a presidential election and encouraged mass protests at the Capitol the day the results were certified. Four years later he was president again, Tulsi Gabbard was our DNI, and RFK Jr. was HHS secretary. As Klein pointed out to Rufo, that was even crazier than the resistance cranks would have predicted.
None of the above should be confused with an argument that the increased prevalence of false information and hysterical, incendiary language is somehow a good thing because sometimes the folks shouting on the margins are more right than wrong. What I’m saying is only that anyone thinking hard about the broadening appeal of fringe, conspiratorial ideas should consider that some of the most irresponsible voices in the ecosystem have burnished their legitimacy with the help of mainstream institutions that have obscured facts and legitimate debate in all kinds of ways over the past several years.
Second, Rufo is right that conspiracies about the people in power offer a satisfying rationalization for the worldviews of people who feel like they lack power of their own. Blaming immigrants or the Jews, for one, is not a new phenomenon. To the extent that sort of political extremism is becoming more common on both the right and left, I think it’s a reflection of, on one hand, economic disenfranchisement that poisons how younger generations see the world, and on the other, social media platforms that both reward sensational explanatory messaging and also make it easier than ever for confused, angry people to find one another. Here, it’s fair to conclude that connecting the whole world digitally has probably been more bad than good. Social media creates an illusion of community and human connection without any of the psychic benefits of leaving your home and connecting in real life, and we also lose the interpersonal friction and social stigmas that have traditionally gated our worst human impulses.
Finally, if we grant that not all fringe ideas are factually incorrect or morally bankrupt, while some are genuinely horrible and antithetical to a civilized liberal society, the unsatisfying truth about the worst online discourse is that any call to take tangible action is probably worse than doing nothing. Sure, incentives on social media can be tweaked and algorithms can be improved (for example, YouTube comments are far less depressing than they once were), and political parties should aggressively gatekeep the most corrosive ideas on either side. But at the broadest levels and under exigent circumstances, the most attractive “cure” for incendiary speech online was exemplified by deplatforming Donald Trump after January 6. Look how that story ended.
Another example was the censorship effort during COVID. When the government leaned on social media companies to censor vaccine posts, that initiative not only failed to suppress false information, but also suppressed information that was true and led to a massive rise in global skepticism of vaccines generally. The lesson from that affair should be that attempts to centralize control of what can and can’t be shared online will inevitably make mistakes, and those mistakes will eventually legitimize conspiratorial thinking rather than eradicate it. Which, again, is a solution to precisely nothing. And so unless the U.S. decides to ban social media or we can all merrily return to 1997, we’re kind of stuck, and may have to tolerate disturbing, semi-regular reminders that there’s all kinds of bizarre paranoia on both ends of the political spectrum.
The Touch Grass Imperative
The best that can be said about the current state of affairs online is that the counterfactual reality where information is controlled and regulated is almost certainly worse. But there are two other countervailing positives worth considering here. First, if you’re reading this article and you’ve gotten this far, you probably don’t think that the Israeli government killed Charlie Kirk, and you probably love the internet. I do, too. Most news consumers are far more reasonable than the most popular posters, and among the well-adjusted people who are good at separating signal from the increasingly unhinged noise, today’s internet can be both wonderfully entertaining in its absurdity and more informative than any resource in human history.
Equally important, last weekend when I heard Rufo talking about nihilists looking to blame shadowy forces like Israel or Elon Musk or private equity to rationalize their perceived lack of personal agency, my first reaction was to say that’s absolutely right. My second, more comforting thought, was that I almost never have conversations about any of this in the offline world.
The antidote to nihilism or cynicism is faith—if not necessarily in the durability of modern institutions or a higher power, then at least in people. Offline and in daily conversations where discretion is still a virtue, most people are more concerned with jobs, friends, and their kids than they are with whoever is corrupting X, controlling Y, or presents an existential threat to Z. To that end, the best way to avoid undue stress about the state of online discourse on any given day is to try explaining a digital controversy to someone who’s been off social media. There is nothing more restorative than the blank, baffled stare that inevitably follows.
Online insanity can certainly bleed into the real world in all kinds of horrifying ways and I don’t want to minimize that concern, but even so, I think the challenge for everyone in the modern environment is to build habits and take constructive actions to ensure that the amusingly and sometimes distressingly psychotic language of our time doesn’t bleed into our own real worlds, interfering with real emotions and interpersonal dynamics. “Try to remain media literate and consistently interact with a community of real humans” is frustrating advice to offer here because it seems to solve nothing systemically, but in practice, I’m increasingly convinced it’s the only solution that matters for any of us.
Sharp Text is extension of the Stratechery Plus podcasts Sharp Tech, Greatest of All Talk, and Sharp China. To subscribe and receive weekly posts via email, click here.