A little bit dystopian. The New York Times is read by the most powerful people in the country, almost all of whom desire the Times’ institutional approval — including, or perhaps especially, the people who say they don’t care. Interest in the company is perfectly natural, as it occupies a wildly outsized position of prominence in our media ecosystem. Stories in the Times are read by millions of people, then amplified by social media and the 24-hour cable news garbage world. Why? Because every journalist and media personality not working at the Times is obsessed with the company. For most, it’s the dream, and it’s certainly the industry standard. As we all live on social media together, the “paper of record” has therefore become a kind of character in the lives of the too online, for which it seems everyone has an opinion. Even the company’s internal HR drama generates entire national news cycles. All of this is to say that a relatively small handful of writers at the Times have incredible and disproportionate influence over national and corporate policy, so when one of their tech columnists employs the phrase “It sounds a little dystopian, I’ll grant. But let’s hear them out”? We listen.

Last week, Kevin Roose published a piece on our “Reality Crisis,” the basic premise with which I agree and have written about myself at length: there is increasingly no dominant, collective sense of reality among Americans, and this is dangerous. But from here, and these basic points agreed upon, we pretty much part ways. In the first place, Kevin seems to believe the “truth” is generally obvious, even when concerning contentious and polarizing subjects. He is also notably confident in his grasp of the “truth,” something I have become increasingly less confident in as our world grows ever more strange and chaotic. But mostly where I disagree with Kevin is the notion, now table stakes in the op-ed pages of the Times, that top-down corporate or federal moderation of wrongthink is the answer to our problems rather than, itself, a new and dangerous problem. As disinformation has existed for as long as humans have been able to lie, while our present information crisis has not, I tend to suspect our problem is actually the relatively new phenomenon of virality — broadly, conceptually. Still, Kevin’s confidence is compelling. For a moment, just before I was introduced to the horrifying phrase “Reality Czar,” I even wondered: does this man who would police the truth simply have a grasp of the subject I myself do not? The question was quickly resolved.

At the top of his piece, Kevin helpfully references the widespread belief that COVID-19 may have come from a lab as one of his obvious “hoaxes, lies, and collective delusions.” For proof that the lab hypothesis is crazy, he links to the opinion of an NPR journalist (???). As any good-brain person must obviously accept, the virus emerged randomly in a Wuhan wet market, not the lab conducting extremely rare gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses down the block. The proximity between the market and the lab? A simple coincidence. As COVID-19 has unfortunately become a flashpoint in our ongoing culture war, questions pertaining to its origin have become taboo on the further extremes of the media left. For many, the impulse appears to go something like this: Trump is bad, Trump is mad at China, therefore China can’t be all that bad.