Dysfunction

The information system, now dominated by giant corporate platforms like Meta and Google, fractures our thinking by offering up, without qualitative distinction, every sort of fact and fantasy. The purveyors of such “sludge” offer a “confirmation” excuse by saying that they are merely confirming our preferences, some more reasonable than others. Actually, they have corrupted the marketplace of ideas promoted by thinkers such as John Stuart Mill who envisioned a post-Enlightenment forum that would moderately and respectfully assess propositions in order to try out “tentative truths,” thus seeking “knowledge” rather than “opinion.” But the current “marketplace for ideas,” conducted via “information system” instruments such as televisions and smart phones, is overloaded with so much information and disinformation that the shared understandings known to history as “common sense” cannot emerge from there, and citizenship is thus deprived of its major potential source of “wherewithal.” In such a time, community-wide “narratives” could take up the slack and point citizens in desirable directions. But such “Stories,” according to Neil Postman and Yuval Harari, do not emerge, because they are destroyed by relentless competition or undermined by academic debunking of historical Stories incorrectly framed before the rise of Science and Reason.