Oddbean

Meta insists that it's impossible to have digital social relationship without having your friendships surveilled and commodified. While they're not lying about encryption, they *are* lying about these other things, and sorting out the lies from the truth is the job of regulators, but that job is nearly impossible thanks to the fact that everyone who runs a large online service *tells the same lies* - and the regulators themselves are alumni of the industry's upper eschelons. 31/

Logging companies know a lot about forests. When we ask, "What's the best way to remediate forests," companies may well have useful things to say. But those useful things will be mixed with harmful lies. The carefully cultivated incompetence of our regulators means that they can't tell the difference. #Conspiratorialism is characterized as a problem of *what* people believe, but the true roots of conspiracy belief isn't what we believe, it's *how* we decide what to believe. 32/

It's not beliefs, it's #epistemology. Because most of us aren't qualified to sort good reforesting programs from bad ones. And even if we are, we're probably not also well-versed enough in cryptography to sort credible claims about encryption from wishful thinking. And even if we're capable of making *that* determination, we're not experts in food hygiene or structural engineering. 33/

Daily life in the 21st century means resolving a thousand life-or-death technical questions *every day*. Our regulators - corrupted by literally out-of-control corporations - are no longer reliable sources of ground truth on these questions. The resulting #EpistemologicalChaos is a cancer that gnaws away at our resolve to do anything about it. It is a festering pool where nihilism outbreaks are incubated. 34/

The liberal response to conspiratorialism is mockery. In her new book *Doppelganger*, #NaomiKlein tells of how right-wing surveillance fearmongering about QR-code "#VaccinePassports" was dismissed with a glib, "Wait until they hear about cellphones!" https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine But as Klein points out, it's *not good* that our cellphones invade our privacy in the way that right-wing conspiracists thought that vaccine passports might. 35/

The nihilism of liberalism - which insists that things can't be changed except through market "solutions" - leads us to despair. By contrast, leftism - a muscular belief in democratic, publicly run planning and action - offers a tonic to nihilism. We don't have to let logging companies decide whether a forest can be cut, or what should be planted when it is. We *can* have nice things. 36/

The art of finding out what's true or prudent didn't die with the #Reagan Revolution (or the discount Canadian version, the #Mulroney Malaise). The truth is knowable. Doing stuff is possible. Things don't have to be on fire. eof/