The price of freedom. Last week, a Connecticut jury ordered Alex Jones to pay nearly $1 billion in damages for defaming the families of eight Sandy Hook victims. It was a clownish penalty many times the estimated worth of Jones, with the obvious intention of permanently silencing the controversial radio megastar. For the most part, media people cheered. This is because they’re scared.

Increasingly, Americans appear to be adopting absolutely batshit crazy opinions, and Jones is seen by many as the reason. But Jones is just a man, and his destruction won’t reverse the trend of men like him gaining traction in an attention economy. To the contrary, such draconian overreach justifies exactly the kind of paranoid thinking Jones has championed for decades, and all but guarantees a future thick with guys just like him. Then, the proliferation of paranoid upstarts itself guarantees further, fear-based draconian overreach. It’s a vicious cycle, and with the most extreme commentary from both sides algorithmically amplified online, our public trust — in every direction — has shattered. So far, with the exception of pandemic discourse, the effects of the information war have mostly been benign (if annoying (and exhausting)). But today, with the threat of nuclear war back on the table, our need for sober discourse feels a little more pressing.

Now, before we get to the part about the persecution of America’s favorite conspiracy theorist possibly paving the road to nuclear apocalypse, a quick note on the giant gay frog in the room.

A handful of readers really seem to hate it when I talk about Alex Jones. This is a man who spread lies about the families of murdered children, and — a recurring comment — “is this really the hill you want to die on?” But I don’t care how awful the man is, because I’m not writing in defense of anything he’s said. Jones is Patient Zero of the digital purge, our first example of an influential figure targeted and rooted out by powerful giants in technology, at the behest of a media in competition with him for attention, ultimately destroyed in our courts. Is this the hill I want to die on? Hi, my name is Mike Solana, this is the hill I live on.

Jones is also not the story. Jones is just the way we talk about the story. The information war is everywhere, and no offense but people have good reason to be a little paranoid.

Last week, PayPal wrote a $2,500 fine for “spreading misinformation,” or “promoting hate,” directly into its terms of service (the penalty has since been squashed). Presumably, acceptable opinions would be defined by our small, glamorous new class of “misinformation reporters,” with cases further litigated in the court of public opinion. Here, we drift well beyond the newly-standard practice of social media cancellation. The question we’re now asking is should a sufficiently bad person — where “bad” is defined as “person who says bad things” — not be allowed to use money? In Canada, the motherland of Nice Guy Fascism, this question is not even theoretical. Back in February, world renowned blackface enthusiast Justin Trudeau revoked banking privileges for political protestors. At home, authoritarians salivated.

A week before the PayPal fiasco, the American Medical Association called for the government to ‘protect hospital workers’ by criminalizing the public discussion of actual things being done to children in hospitals. The topic here so hotly debated is sexual reassignment surgery for minors, and the argument is public critique of hospitals that perform such procedures constitutes a “coordination” of violence against hospital workers, regardless of whether violence was actually called for, or if violence even occurred. If the Justice Department acquiesces, and labels critique a form of violent coordination, dissent on this topic will be criminal. In this conversation, the word “misinformation” is endlessly invoked, but here it doesn’t even matter. Explicitly, the request is accurate information also be censored in service of some nebulous, ever-evolving social good (in this case, medically unnecessary double mastectomies for teenaged girls).

But on the topic of misinformation? There’s a federal board for policing that. Or, that was the intention of the Biden administration until overwhelming pushback forced the White House to relent. The notion of a Ministry of Truth nonetheless raises the obvious follow-up: who determines what is, and is not, true? There is no answer to this question that isn’t terrifying to people who value freedom. This is also where paranoia tends to give way to the worried whisper of conspiracy.

The keystone species of our hellscape information ecosystem is the “expert,” and more recently the “misinformation expert.” These are basically partisan cops, employed or favored by major media companies. As there is no such thing as an expert position beyond the scope of raw data that isn’t an opinion, and expert opinions in conflict are almost never framed as such, the only thing “expert positions” actually establish — critically — are the acceptable borders of public speech. After the borders are drawn, technology workers, for the most part in political alignment with the media, amplify the media’s favored voices on controversial topics, and eliminate dissent. Finally, as in the case of public health policy throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the position becomes law. As media “experts” aren’t elected, our unofficial state party never exits power.

We’re living in a One Party State.

To the best of my knowledge, there are no secret meetings among the media, government, and technology elite. Further, the power class appears to have no long-term plan for the country or world. But there is undeniably a coordination here of powerful people, these people generally agree on the given topics of the day, and they have the ability to silence anyone they want, including the President of the United States. Still, it would be a mistake to paint every rebel of the information war a hero.

After the Jones order, the singer M.I.A. made headlines for wondering why the radio mogul was paying money while celebrity proponents of forced vaccination were not. A fair question. She further invoked the 2008 recession, in an apparent nod to the lies of Wall Street, and weapons of mass destruction, in an apparent nod to the lies of our government. Spicy takes, cool, I’m listening. Wait, though, what’s that you say? You’re also releasing an album? Interesting.

An article in the Guardian managed the incredible feat of covering both stories — the singer’s new album as well as her controversial week on social media — without tying them together. But the most interesting question here is just what really matters to M.I.A. Is she trying to change the public narrative on vaccines, or is she farming rage for money? At first, I was inclined to think this didn’t matter. But then I considered the fruits of the singer’s work, and it occurred to me she’s never managed anything other than the acquisition of attention. Has she simply failed for the last fifteen years in her various, evolving activist positions? Or has she succeeded in her only real goal of getting us to say her name? Is this all just modern paparazzi grift?

I think it is, and at the moment modern paparazzi grift is what fuels our world.

Friday, two young activists walked into a museum, threw a can of soup on a Vincent van Gogh painting, and superglued themselves to the wall. The entire world, myself included, was immediately enraged. A week before that, Kanye West appeared at Paris Fashion Week wearing a “White Lives Matter” t-shirt alongside right-wing firebrand Candace Owens. These performances, both the soup can and the shirt, are nearly identical. Both were done in lip service to some important cause, with climate change on one hand, and racial healing on the other. Likewise, both performances centered the defiling of a sacred object, with a cherished piece of cultural heritage on one hand, and a cherished piece of left-wing religious dogma on the other. We can debate the merits of each “important cause” for days, but it’s obvious neither performance achieved the implicit goals of saving the environment or ending racism. In fact, they seem to have taken steps in the opposite direction. The soup can incident, for example, literally makes me want to burn coal. Both performances were however smashingly successful at attracting attention.

Much like M.I.A., Kanye West is selling something. He just bought Parler, the social media app popular on the political right, run by Candace Owens’ husband George Farmer. Despite whatever mental health things Kanye seems to be working through, does it not seem his media tour on the napalm topic of racial observations and conspiracies might have something to do with driving attention toward the company he just bought that promises users the right to share their napalm observations and conspiracies?

Like, fuck the media. But can we not agree that all of these people suck?

The topic of Ukraine, which has attracted the most terminally unchill discourse on the internet, is unlike the topics of vaccination (now) or Black Lives Matter (ever) in that the discourse itself poses actual existential risk. This is because the topic is a proxy conversation for the mediation of conflict between the United States, a nuclear superpower, and Russia, a nuclear power with ambitions for a return to “super.” Unfortunately, no topic is immune to the dynamics of thought policing and attention whoring that currently shape our information war. So it’s a game of “the Russians own you” vs. “America deserves a nuclear holocaust” all the way down.

Michael Tracey @mtraceyIf tomorrow Putin launches a preemptive strike on Washington, DC or something, it will be forevermore denounced as “revisionism” to mention literally anything the US did prior to that date3:53 PM ∙ Sep 30, 20222,372Likes261Retweets

Helpful.

The boring truth is nobody wants a war with Russia. But, also, nobody wants to live in a world where Russia can take whatever country it wants, provided that country doesn’t have nuclear weapons. Concern over the invasion of Ukraine has never been some “current thing” bit of moralism, in which people speak emotionally, and insincerely, about a given pop cultural flavor of the week. The Ukrainian concern is a concern rooted in existential fear.

First, there is the short-term risk of reigniting global multi-polarity, and the lesson of history is a world of powerful rivals is a world of war. But the longer-term risk of hands-up appeasement is even more concerning. If invasion is effectively risk-free for any nuclear power, every country in the world will need weapons of mass destruction to survive. The proliferation of nuclear weapons was a dangerous problem while confined to a few nuclear giants. What is the risk inherent of a world with nuclear weapons everywhere? In every country? No matter how stable or not?

We don’t want conflict with Russia, but the argument “I don’t care what’s happening in a backwards country on the other side of the planet” really starts to fall apart when there are nuclear bombs in backwards countries on the other side of the planet that can reach New York.

We just failed a pandemic. “Expert” thought police boosted the most clownish, offensive dissent available, which was then used to justify widespread censorship. This censorship resulted in policy failures we, and our children, will feel the consequences of for years. The COVID discourse failure was bad — really, really bad — but false consensus surrounding something so significant as nuclear war could literally end our civilization.

There are only a handful of ways a situation so dangerous can be handled that will conclude in success for not only the country, but the world, and my sense is none of them are algorithmically compatible. I know it’s hard, and I know it’s boring, but my suggestion is everyone quiet down, disregard the people framing risk of nuclear cataclysm as simple, and attempt some thoughtful discourse in this information hellscape we call home. Because I hate to be a Debbie downer, but I sort of think our lives depend on it.

-SOLANA