March 6, 2025

À Propos Current Events

A survey of one small aspect of the current (geo)political situation, and what I'm doing about it.

I am slated to present at the Information Architecture Conference in Philadelphia on May 3rd. The talk is about my work over the last several years creating information infrastructure for strategic planning, situational awareness, and organizational memory. In response to the US president’s continued threats on my country’s sovereignty, I will not be entering the United States for this conference. If any of you are planning to attend, I am working with the organizers to present my talk remotely.

18F Got DOGE’d

18F, the US government’s elite internal tech development agency, was fired en masse by midnight email the other night, a move characteristic of one Elon Musk. A few weeks prior, this de facto prime minister—​by way of presidential decree—​had gutted its sister agency USDS, and is now inhabiting its taxidermied corpse, in a bid to make his own ambitions legal. I refer of course to the pseudo-entity, the “Department of Government Efficiency” (a pun referencing a stale internet meme based on a now-deceased shiba inu), which is the group of college-aged interns—​colloquially referred to as “child soldiers”—​currently going around firing everybody and breaking everything. Rumour has it that Musk—​or one of his minions—​had pleaded to the 18F team to move over to DOGE, and when they predictably declined, wiped out the entire organization.

As many people more familiar than I with 18F have remarked, these were the people who were genuinely making government more efficient—​that is, what Elon Musk is disingenuously pretending to do. I am not an expert on 18F—​being from another country—​but I have interacted with enough people who have been through there✱ to know that these are every bit consummate professionals as dedicated public servants, and their work product is top-notch.

✱ 18F had the notable constraint that employees were limited to a term of four years. The purpose of this was the continual injection of fresh ideas and to prevent the accumulation of “lifers”. Since 18F was founded in 2014, this would have been its third full cycle.

Many 18F work products were globally influential, such as its various publications and guides—​perhaps most prominent of which is their de-risking guide. This document is notable because it steps well outside the perimeter typically accorded to “IT consulting” and considers the very serious matters of institutional politics and money. It is a testament to the calibre of the work carried out in that organization.

Those abruptly (and likely illegally) terminated have responded by setting up a private website mirroring the published work of 18F, the front page of which is an open letter that signs off “We’re not done yet”. Civic tech leader Dan Hon has scheduled one of his Hallway Track gatherings this Friday with 18F emeriti to discuss the situation.

Corrupted Epistemology

I never miss an opportunity to take in the work of Kate Starbird, who last week presented on behalf of her lab at the University of Washington’s annual faculty lecture. Dr. Starbird warns us that the far right has developed sophisticated organizing capabilities, and the purpose of her lecture is to provide both an empirical account and theory of how it functions. She goes over the arc she and her colleagues took, from researching rumours, to election interference and pandemic conspiracy theories, to January 6th and beyond. For those of you who aren’t familiar, her work deals with the following typology of concepts:

• Misinformation, which is simply any information that is false or misleading, irrespective of intent or mechanism,
• Disinformation, which is misinformation uttered on purpose,
• Lying, the concept we have all been familiar with since childhood, considered here as a special case of disinformation (I include it to help situate the other concepts),
• Bullshit, a concept recovered as a technical term by the late philosopher Harry Frankfurt to carve a meaningful distinction out from ordinary lying, referring to speech acts for which the speaker is indifferent to whether they are true or false.

I suppose an expanded lexicon could include terms like dissimulation, propaganda, and even fake news, but I feel like the bulleted concepts represent the core.

Dr. Starbird posits that the kernel of this dynamic is the rumour which she defines as an unofficial story, spread through informal channels, that contains unverified—​though not necessarily false—​information, for the purpose of “collective sensemaking”. The function of rumours, through the lens of mass psychology, is to alleviate the anxiety that comes from the uncertainty and ambiguity of a situation.

Her team found in these dynamics, that contrary to their hypothesis, the truth does not in fact prevail. The crowd does not self-correct when better information presents itself. Furthermore, the stories are so numerous that professional journalists and fact-checkers can’t keep up, and narratives quickly get co-opted by influencers who increase their reach by promulgating conspiracy theories.

Dr. Starbird considers a dual structure of claims✱ and frames: reports of events and the mental contexts through which they are interpreted. She speaks of how the participants in these dynamics develop a “corrupted epistemology”: viewing all new information through a lens of distrust and conspiracy. In other interviews she has signaled moving away from a framing of misinformation and disinformation, to considering an alternate information ecosystem with its own separate reality.

✱ She actually said “facts”, but I like “claims” better because it’s about what people say about things happening, whether or not the thing actually happened. Plus, it rhymes: claims and frames.

This right-wing (dis)information ecosystem is highly participatory, per Dr. Starbird: “improvised collaborations between witting agents and unwitting though willing crowds of sincere believers”. It’s a free-for-all improv theatre with all sorts of incentives for various actors to participate, from individual curiosity-seekers, to media personalities, to hostile state actors. It rewards participation and affords a conduit for any participant to get up on stage and perform for the audience, influence elite talking points, shape policy, and win fabulous cash prizes. The right-wing disinformation ratchet operates as follows:

• Political elites set the frame (“immigrants are criminals”),
• random participants make spurious claims (“they’re eating your pets”),
• the claims get boosted on social media by various influencers,
• they get aggregated and concentrated on—​and further boosted by—​fringe websites and blogs,
• Joe Rogan (or whoever) repeats the most salient claim on his podcast,
• the claim eventually makes it on Fox News,
• and is then rebroadcast from the bully pulpit,
• which energizes the mob and motivates them to continue.

The rest of the media ecosystem, by contrast, still adheres to a top-down model of broadcasting polished and vetted messages, researched and workshopped by professionals of rapidly dwindling efficacy.

Remarks

Dr. Starbird finishes her lecture with an exhortation to “rage against the bullshit machine”, to “build the infrastructure to counter this bullshit machinery”, to “become the opinion leaders and influencers in our families, on our social feeds, in our classrooms, our churches, and our sports teams.” She asserts, and I agree, that we can’t wait for the New York Times or the Washington Post (such as they are) to run a story or make a polished infographic, but rather have to harness the participatory dynamic that the far right has deployed so successfully.

I see a number of complications with this plan. For (I paraphrase) teachers to keep teaching, researchers to keep researching, and journalists to keep reporting, we have to recognize that it is no longer a given that these erstwhile uncontroversial activities can continue unmolested. These societal roles specifically are now under constant siege, and the people carrying them out need not only their livelihoods protected, but also their physical safety.

One prominent feature of the new right-wing media ecosystem is a concept termed elsewhere as “stochastic terrorism”, whereby a political elite need only name a person he doesn’t like, and hordes of people will instantly start hurling abuse and death threats at the target, and even show up at their house. This is entirely separate from interference through official channels, beginning in the US with harassment campaigns by sitting congress members and special interest groups—​including the campaign aimed at Starbird herself, which ultimately took down her group’s sister organization, the Stanford Internet Observatory—​and culminating (so far) in the destruction of the US government’s research grant infrastructure.

So table stakes for this to work, in my mind, is a support network to protect not only the jobs of teachers, researchers, and journalists, but also their physical bodies and those of their families. Such a network would furthermore have to assume that the government, in all its incarnations, is anywhere from unreliable to openly hostile. In her post-lecture interview, Dr. Starbird remarks that the University of Washington supported her in a manner that Stanford (vis-à-vis SIO) ostensibly did not. Such support took institutional leadership that may not come naturally to most. Universities, moreover, are relatively well-positioned to defend their faculties, should they choose to. Journalists have been in an increasingly precarious position for decades, to say nothing of teachers, who, especially in the US, are in the most vulnerable position.

Especially given the breaking news that the US Department of Education—​now that pro wrestling czarina Linda McMahon has been confirmed to her position as Secretary—​is slated to be dismantled.

On its face, fighting back against the right-wing bullshit apparatus amounts to a massive collective action problem—​the very kind, with some adjustments, that said apparatus is great at mobilizing. So step one is to copy them. They have an advantage, though, which I find troubling: they don’t have to worry about reality.

I’ll define reality for this purpose as the situation that is as close to objective as objectivity can get; whatever is the case irrespective of whether or not you—​or anybody else, for that matter—​believe it. I have a hypothesis about why these people mostly don’t need to worry about reality: it’s that reality doesn’t matter nearly as much as you’d expect it to. Indeed, reality arguably never matters, except when it does.

What I mean by this claim is roughly that the world is a very big place, and most of the events that happen in it will not affect you in any meaningful—​and certainly unambiguously attributable—​way. Many mistaken beliefs are simply not acutely deleterious enough—​at least on average—​to make a person stop believing them, and promulgating those beliefs to others. This, I submit, is how flat-earthers and anti-vax movements, cults and conspiracy theories, can continue to survive. To put it crudely, these beliefs simply don’t kill their believers faster than they can spread.

A flat-earther can still ride in—​although perhaps not long-haul pilot—​an airplane. Statistically speaking, furthermore, an anti-vaxxer can manage to escape a pandemic without themselves or anybody they care about getting killed, and moreover have plenty of alternate explanations and justifications for any adverse effects they do experience.

There’s a monologue by the historian Jacob Bronowski that I revisit from time to time, in which he asserts that war is a uniquely human activity with no analogues in nature, and should be understood not in terms of obligate predation or defending a nesting territory, but as “a highly planned, and cooperative form of theft.” That is, war is first and foremost about robbing your target, and every belligerent excursion needs a story to justify it. People want to feel morally righteous about looting the ruins of your house, but what they really want is your stuff.

This is what I see in the subscribers to the Bullshit Improv Theatre: they perceive themselves to be at war. The conspiracy theories are just a pretext for plunder. Who are they at war against? Doesn’t really matter: “woke”, “the deep state”—​Democrats, presumably. I wager a lot of people initially get involved because of the dopamine hit of being part of a community, but they also see themselves benefiting from winning what can be roughly, yet accurately described as a revolutionary war. For evidence of this, one need look no farther than January 6th, 2021. The rioters, notably thick with suburban petits-bourgeois, stormed the US capitol expecting to win. (They arguably did win, it just took them a little longer than they initially anticipated.) Presumably they can drop the conspiracy-mongering once they have vanquished who they perceive are their enemies—​or more likely, transmute it into legend.

A few weeks ago I was listening to a podcast that featured a psychologist talking about certain conditions under which people take bold and potentially risky action. Apparently the ingredients are a combination of affordances: the intersection of recognizing “that’s something I can do” with an assessment that “I am confident I will succeed”. Her example (the psychologist) was saving somebody from drowning, but the content of the situation didn’t matter. I am kicking myself for being unable to recall the source, so if anybody else caught that or otherwise knows what I’m referring to, please let me know.

What makes this war unusual is that it the territories are not cleanly delineated. Both sides occupy the same cities, live in the same buildings—​even belong to the same families. As McLuhan remarked, “World War III will be a guerrilla information war, with no divisions between civilian and military participation.” This is where we’re headed as a civilization, if we aren’t already there.

How do you fight an information war when you’re on the side of reality? When reality usually doesn’t matter? The key, I am beginning to suspect, is except when it does. Reality, if you don’t sufficiently attend to it, has a tendency to kick your ass. This can be wielded as a weapon.

I strongly suspect, moreover, that a big chunk, if not most of the belligerents fighting on the side of Bullshit are not strongly committed to their targets. Again, war is theft, and they’re only participating because they want (and expect) a windfall. My bet is they aren’t actually too picky about who they get their pound of flesh from. I think it’s possible to get at least some of them to turn on their leader, if you can attribute to him (and this is important) acute harms that can’t be plausibly explained away, even by master contortionists. Consider:

• Trump take egg
• Trump crash plane
• Trump break stonks
• Trump take job
• Trump take school
• Trump take medicine
• Trump take retirement
• Trump sell America to Putin

These are statements a toddler can understand. The prompt against Musk is a little more grown up, but not by much: “Elon Musk is a fucking drug-addled nazi con artist in the midst of executing a coup”, and for extra effect, “and if you drive a Tesla, so are you.” The Tesla Takedown movement is simultaneously educating the public and denting Tesla stock—​and Musk’s chief cash source along with it.

I need to vent for a second about the Scrooge McDuck-like honorific attached to Elon Musk’s name. Never mind the fact that Vladimir Putin is almost certainly—​and more meaningfully—​richer than he is, nearly all his wealth is tied up in Tesla stock which he can’t sell except in dribs and drabs. It’s not like the man can sashay up to an ATM and take out half a trillion dollars. Rather, he has to borrow against his equity, and if the value of his stock drops past a certain point, the bank will do a margin call. Which means he has to sell stock, which means the stock goes down, which means he has to sell more of it, until he loses control of Tesla, it goes bankrupt, and he is fucking broke.

Anecdata, moreover, suggests that it isn’t difficult to find die-hard Trump fanatics who can’t stand Elon Musk (or JD Vance, for that matter). They think he’s a conman and a traitor—​two attributes they mysteriously don’t observe in their king—​but the overarching implication is that there is daylight between them.

On the subject of kings, the slogan NO KINGS is also eminently succinct and has plenty of purchase from Maine to Alaska. Even the trend of just calling them “weird” was working until some milquetoast campaign strategist convinced people to stop.

Anyway, I don’t want to make this segment about Trump or Musk any more than as exemplars, though they are the most salient current players in the Bullshit Improv Theatre. They are also the direct consequence of what happens when it gets too powerful.

Some combatants in this global information war are essentially stuck without an offramp and will have to be defeated. They’ve burned their proverbial boats. Musk in particular has painted himself into a corner, and the only way out for him now is through✱. Others likewise have said and done things that they won’t be able to live down in polite society, so the options for them at this point are either victory or ruin.

✱ Trump could pardon Musk, to be sure, but he could just as easily throw him in prison himself, citing any number of crimes Musk has committed, in front of everybody, just in the last few weeks. Trump himself is of course the recipient of the golden ticket from the Supreme Court, so his situation is considerably murkier, and he would have to transgress in ways his immunity doesn’t cover to be eligible for punishment, should it ever come to pass that he is still alive and out of power.

For the committed adversaries, in lieu of a shooting war—​which I have no idea how you would prosecute, given that the respective sides don’t have distinct territories—​attacks on them are necessarily, or at least nominally, constrained by the law. This doesn’t, however, mean that you can’t still make their lives miserable. If you have money, for instance, pull a Peter Thiel and fund somebody’s lawsuit against one of them. I’m sure there are plenty to choose from. If you own a restaurant and one of them shows up at it, loudly and publicly kick them out. It is also perfectly legal to identify these people and compile dossiers on them, and circulate them so interventions like the ones I just mentioned are easier to do.

You can bet they’re sure as hell doing that.

The other thing to do, is to constantly drum the message at them: You will lose; there are more of us than there are of you. Use data and evidence to prove it.

The final component, the one that I am concerning myself with, is a technical solution. In an ocean of bullshit, it is essential to be able to tell good information from bad. It is furthermore essential to be able to recall information from the past to use it in, and/​or compare it to the present, to transmit and interpret it quickly, to rapidly gain situational awareness, and, importantly, to determine where the information came from. This has always been my niche, but these capabilities are particularly salient right now.

We Need This More Than Ever

A couple years ago, I received a grant to reshape a bunch of work that I had been doing for years in and around a thing I called dense hypermedia, into what eventually became the application server Intertwingler. The purpose of this piece of infrastructure, now that I’ve had some time to reflect, is to make it possible for people to understand more while having to read less; to dramatically increase the rate of uptake and comprehension per unit of content, while preserving the global linkability and shareability of the Web. In the process, I had to surmount a number of mundane but serious challenges, like making addresses (and their referents) durable, so they’re robust against link rot. I did this because an important strategy for ensuring your information is correct, is to reference it rather than copying it, and you can’t reference something that isn’t there.

Or, if it is still there but has been altered, which is called content drift—​the subtler, more pernicious sibling to link rot.

It’s taken longer than I anticipated—​it was unexpectedly hard, though also I had other things to do—​but I’m in the home stretch of shipping the first application that makes use of Intertwingler’s unique capabilities. Indeed, I’d have completed it already if I didn’t break to write this newsletter. It’s a tool for collaboratively attacking so-called wicked problems, like the kind you normally see in the analysis and design of products and of policy, as well as other places. This is the germ of a suite of capabilities that I am eager to expand into, as a large part of why I made Intertwingler in the first place was so I could further develop this tool.

You would also not believe the profound feeling of irony that stems from the thing that would help you most in your endeavour is the very thing you’re trying to make.

The tool is very simple; I’ve no doubt described it here a dozen times before:

• There are issues, which are states of affairs in the world that you want to do something about.
• You respond to issues with positions, which are specific proposals for how to resolve a given issue.
• You can then advance arguments which either support or oppose a particular position.
• Each of these elements, furthermore, can raise new issues, which get positions in response, arguments for and against, and on and on it goes.

The tool I created manages this collaborative process, and the resulting structure has many benefits for resource planning, policy analysis, and design rationale. As stated, though, this is just the germ of the system, and I have ambitious plans for both the tool and its substrate.

Intertwingler itself is still a nascent and pretty fragile prototype; I anticipate it’ll take the rest of the year at least to tidy it up and get it to “internet-scale”, as they say. The tool running on top of it—​I will give it a name, eventually—​is likewise fairly rough, but mainly because it began life (the prototype is 11 years old now) as a sort of laboratory for various technical experiments. The system, however, is still perfectly serviceable for the time being on a private basis. More to the point, though, the tool is really just a slim prosthesis for an idiosyncratic human process, and thus requires some essential training and support to use correctly. That said, it’s undergoing rapid change as I port it over to Intertwingler, so that won’t be the case for long.

I should also add that Intertwingler is open-source and relies heavily on open standards, and the tool itself is designed to be completely transparent with its data. This means you could export 100% of a running instance and spin up an identical copy on your own hardware. This is an essential aspect of the system’s design.

As such, my plan to commercialize Intertwingler (or rather the as-yet-anonymous tool running on top of it), is to put it at the centre of my consulting practice, which you can understand as a kind of strategic resource planning and system design. I can also see, in the very near future, donating instances of the tool and concomitant training services to civil society organizations. As the tool matures, along with material on how to use it, I intend to spin it out into a stand-alone product.

If you are interested in any of this—​that is, if you are helming an organization or department that needs to plan around the current chaos—​kindly reach out.