I used to think knowledge was dead. Now I think it’s just sick.
In 2016, I wrote a blog post, later incorporated into a book, titled “The Death of Smart.” In it, I argued that knowledge had taken a cultural hit. Americans once valued knowing things. Those who had knowledge must have earned it by hard work over long hours in classrooms, libraries and labs. But in the internet age, when almost all knowledge is accessible by almost all people, “smart” has become a less-desirable descriptor than others like “influential” or “disruptive.”
I asserted that, ironically, knowledge would be devalued in our knowledge economy. Now I see I was only half right.
Instead, what has happened is that the supply of knowledge has fractured, and a certain kind of knowledge — namely, the kind that is not universally available and reliably verified — has gained value over its well-documented competition.
Jennifer Nagel was the first to point this out to me. Nagel is a professor at the University of Toronto and an expert on the subject of knowledge, which is a very cool thing to be an expert on. I called her last year when I was thinking about a column about willful ignorance — a trend, particularly among evangelicals, that warns the faithful away from exploration. Though not new (rural Americans, for instance, have long been wary of sending intellectually sheltered children off to cities and universities where they might “get ideas”) this willful ignorance seems to be growing, at least in my estimation.
But Nagel proposed another explanation. Rather than being drawn away from knowledge, many Americans seem to be flocking to what we might call exclusive knowledge. In a world where facts are available to everyone, scarcity (and therefore value) is found in facts available to only a few, or more precisely, facts discernible by only a few. A news report is overlooked if it delivers the same set of facts reported by every other news outlet.
Of course, wanting to get a story first is not new. Reporters have always wanted to scoop the competition. What seems to be different is the content. What used to count as a scoop was being first to publish independently verifiable facts which indeed would be independently verified later by publications who didn’t get there first. Now, what wins is suggestive questions alone, or a fuzzy, novel narrative.
That may be what has driven the wildfire of political conspiracy theories in recent years. If you can claim to know what really happened at Sandy Hook, what’s really on Hunter Biden’s laptop, how Donald Trump really colluded with Russia, or what Catholic charities are really doing on the border, then you have knowledge that is valuable in our cultural economy.
In our flattened news landscape, many imagine themselves as modern media 49ers, panning for gold in the hopes of hitting a nerve, announcing a trove and converting it to followers.
Some of the reasons for this trend are plain. The institutions we used to trust to inform us have sometimes betrayed that trust. Few trust the media (or the church, or corporations, or pro sports, or any number of other sectors) because we don’t want to be dupes. Again.
Nagel pointed out that there are also more exposed spots in our knowledge base than ever in human history. The things we know are more complex than the things our forebears knew.
Nagel used the example of vaccines, a popular category for those attracted to exclusive knowledge of late. She pointed out that makers of the COVID-19 vaccine had to rely on new research, which itself relied on complex science. Testing and manufacture of the RNA vaccines relied on complex machines. Those machines were built upon other technology with still deeper underlying science. The human race has been building onto its scientific knowledge for centuries, hoisting us all atop a tower of scaffolded knowledge. Any naysayer looking to undermine confidence in that scaffolding has plenty of options for where to start chipping away.
All of this leads many news consumers to retreat to skepticism, or to look for narratives that can never be proved wrong.
I see two side effects of this trend, and once you start to look for them, you’ll see them everywhere.
First, conversations about the news have become riddled with shibboleths. To mark the gate between those with insider knowledge and those without, we create cultural buzzwords with a hint of exclusivity: woke, IYKYK, let’s go Brandon.
My rainbow flag or upside-down flag signals to my neighbors that I’m tapped into the same exclusive knowledge sources they are. So do the words I use, the references I make and the things I post. “I read an article in the Times about that” is not just a way to participate in conversation about current events; it’s a signal that I’m informed by the same sources as my liberal friends. “Did you see the Matt Walsh video about that?” offers the same conversational entré in conservative circles.
Like our gated communities, we’re privatizing knowledge, putting it behind walls of homogeneity.
The second thing about this trend is that it rewards imprecision and fear. If a report is ambiguous enough to receive any narrative, it gets a lot of attention.
In 2021, NBC news anchor Brian Williams retired. His final broadcast was a hazy, ominous cloud of warning. He told viewers, “The darkness on the edge of town has spread to the main roads and highways and neighborhoods. It’s now at the local bar and the bowling alley, at the school board and the grocery store. And it must be acknowledged and answered for.
“Grown men and women who swore an oath to our Constitution, elected by their constituents, possessing the kinds of college degrees I could only dream of, have decided to join the mob and become something they are not while hoping we somehow forget who they were. They’ve decided to burn it all down with us inside. That should scare you to no end...”
The monologue generated a lot of buzz. I discussed it with my friends on both sides of the political aisle. My liberal friends were sure that the barbarians at the gate were Jan. 6 insurrectionists and the authoritarian tendencies of the far right. My conservative friends just knew that Williams was warning viewers about the woke mob and creeping socialism. Both sides were absolutely convinced they knew the real meaning that Williams was hinting at — a meaning too precious, too revolutionary, to be voiced in clear terms. Williams had to send them secret signals that only a chosen few could decode.
This is what has become of reporting. In our current media climate, this is the kind of story that gets rewarded with clicks and shares — vague, scary and adaptable to any narrative.
Williams had gotten into trouble years earlier for embellishing his reporting, including what turned out to be a false claim that he was in a helicopter that took enemy fire during the Iraq war. Perhaps he was only responding to the market’s demand for heroic, exclusive knowledge. I reached out to the speakers bureau that manages Williams now, and got only an automated response.
Professor Nagel said one more thing about knowledge that seems to apply to our media landscape. She noted that the words “know” and “think” are very high-frequency words in every language on Earth, meaning our conversation is riddled with their use. And we are constantly drawing distinctions between what we know and what we think.
Sometimes that line gets fuzzy and conviction outstrips observation.
A freelance contributor once told me, in response to one of my fact-check questions in an op-ed, “That’s conjecture but I know it’s true.” That seems to encapsulate the weakness of our news consumption. We parse every detail of news reports from the opposing side, but we excuse all manner of sloppy journalism if it fits our preferred narrative.
What we know and what we think have become the same thing. We are not dumber than generations before, but we’re less curious, more defensive, and credulous toward news reports that confirm our view of things. Our knowledge isn’t retreating; it’s metastasizing.
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