Credit where due, Ezra Klein has another interesting interview this week. His guest this time is Martin Gurri, a former CIA agent who wrote a book about how the media was changing and how that change was changing politics and everything else downstream. There's a lot to cover here and I'm not sure I have an agenda beyond just talking through some of the interesting ideas Gurri is presenting, many of which resonate with me. So let's dive in with his description of his own book and his idea that digital media changed everything.
Around the turn of the century, this digital earthquake generated this tsunami of information that was essentially unparalleled in human history. And there’s numbers backing that up. And we just got swamped...
What became very clear was that the set of institutions that hold up modern life in the 21st century — the government, the media, business, academia — were shaped in the 20th century. Very top down, very hierarchical.
So what the internet did, what the digital revolution did, was essentially create the possibility of this gigantic information sphere that was outside the institutions. And it turned to the institutions, and the first one it turned to was media. It was this big fight between the blogs and the mainstream media, which was the enemy.
This definitely rings true because I was there. I was reading blogs when they first became a thing back in the early 2000s and by 2005 I started my own along with a friend. And coming out of an era where conservative media was really synonymous with Rush Limbaugh and talk radio, blogs were a democratizing force. Suddenly you could say a lot more than "mega dittos" to the loudest conservative voice. You could really have your own say and find other people who were doing the same. The book An Army of Davids by Glenn Reynolds, himself a blogger, really summed up the feeling of this moment in time.
And the overall result was an erosion of trust in the institutions, especially the media as you suddenly had lots of voices on the right and the far left calling into question the establishment media. And what happened over time is that most of those blogs vanished and most of the successful bloggers got jobs in the media. Certainly that was true on the left though less so on the right. The media couldn't absorb the voices on the right because it was too far left itself to tolerate what they were saying.
And then social media gradually comes to take the space taken up by blogs and now everyone can pretty easily publish their thoughts in real time. So you still have this system of sense-making in America that a) didn't exist before and b) exists outside the official organs (the major networks and major newspapers) and c) can't be ignored.
And here's where I thought Gurri had a really interesting take on the Biden administration. Biden was an old man who had spent his life in the old media system, the top down one run mostly by left-wing democrats. And so the scramble under Biden was to restore that kind of control to the media ecosystem.
First of all, I want to apologize to Joe Biden. If I had known — I mean, you could sort of see that the guy wasn’t there...
Whoever was running the White House during that time I think had that impulse to go back to the 20th century. The ideal internet for people like that would be The New York Times circa 1958 or something.
And they have converted this into an almost ideological construct. They now seem to be promoting what you might call a guided society, where ordinary people, like me and others, need Sherpas to make sure we don’t fall off the cliffs and keep going upward and onward. So we’re protected against disinformation, hate and all these other things. An attempt to erect a censorship apparatus that would de-emphasize people or silence certain voices, silence certain opinions and get experts and bureaucrats to basically proclaim that certain truths were false. It was completely futile as it was happening. And I think it paved the way to Trump.
Again, this rings true to me. Over the last decade I've written probably hundreds of blog posts responding to left-wingers who were arguing in one way or another that what was needed was to silence certain voices, to stop hate speech, to protect people from dangerous ideas. And what we all learned during the pandemic was that this effort to control speech would immediately be seized upon in a crisis by the government and its allies.
Everything from the efforts to silence the Hunter Biden laptop story to efforts to stop discussion of the origins of COVID or whether or not masking and shutting down schools were necessary or helpful. And as we approached the election even the question of whether Biden was still competent was verboten. The White House was telling the media to shut up and for a couple of years the media did. The system of "disinformation control," or whatever you want to call it, was immediately abused by the same people who said it was needed. (And frankly, I think it was always abused in exactly this way going back to Cronkite. The difference is most people didn't know it was happening back then.)
At this point, Ezra Klein tries to counter this by arguing that the right is not so different than the left (this is always his argument, btw).
Klein: The Trump administration is telling all the agencies they have to go through and look for words that are now out of favor — “diversity” and “D.E.I.” and things like that — and it all has to be erased.
So I see this world of people who understand themselves as free-expression warriors. And then as soon as they get into power — whether it’s running X or running the government — they certainly seem to me to be on a campaign of censorship.
What do you think I’m missing?
You’re missing the dimension of censorship under Biden. He basically told the platforms: You have to adhere to European standards of good behavior online.
Well, the Europeans don’t have a First Amendment. We tend to think of the Europeans as being just like us. But when it comes to speech — and this has always been the case, and it is more the case every day — they’re halfway between us and China. So I think the difference is that.
Gurri is mostly correct in that Klein often underestimates what is being done by his side and overestimates what is being done by the right. First of all, shutting down DEI in government is not censorship. Individuals are free to believe and say what they want about DEI. The issue is that the government is not required to fund the dissemination of left wing ideas with public money. We don't need a DEI apparatchik in every office on a government salary.
Secondly, DEI exists in large part to control the narrative. It is not a neutral arbiter. It is there to provide specific partisan answers to social questions. We all know this to be true because the DEI office down the hall make sure we all get the annual training about identity politics, anti-racism, white privilege, white supremacy, etc.
The fact that none of this stuff works is besides the point. The real impact is that no one is allowed to say that it is a) offensive and b) doesn't work. You must go along with it or you become suspect/problematic. DEI is a tool to silence those who would object to this new regime of top-down control. And it's people on the left who support this over and above free speech, which is America's actual constitutional system.
You have people on the left, John Kerry most recently, bemoaning the existence of the First Amendment. I had never seen that in my entire life.
Everybody always pretended, at least, that they were for free speech. Even when secretly they wanted to control it, they always talked the talk.
And now only on the left you find people saying: “No, we need boundaries. We need this. We need that — protection against.”
Anyway, there's a lot more interesting stuff in the conversation but that's probably enough for one blog post. I guess it boils down to something many people have said in the past few months: Trump was a chance to break up an ideological system of forced speech that Biden had adopted on a number of issues from trans athletes to DEI. The majority decided messy freedom was better than the kind of socially enforced unity many Democrats now accept as normal.
Corrected a typo up top. I had written "infesting" instead of "interesting." Sorry for the mistake.
