The Structure of Information: A Protection of Reality

Arming People to defend the reality from at present’s warfare on info

Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the floor, these latest additions to our each day vocabulary seem to have little in widespread. However collectively, they’re driving an epistemic disaster: a multi-front problem to America’s means to differentiate reality from fiction and elevate reality above falsehood.

In 2016 Russian trolls and bots almost drowned the reality in a flood of faux information and conspiracy theories, and Donald Trump and his troll armies continued to do the identical. Social media firms struggled to maintain up with a flood of falsehoods, and too typically didn’t even appear to attempt. Specialists and a few public officers started questioning if society was shedding its grip on reality itself. In the meantime, one other new phenomenon appeared: “cancel tradition.” On the push of a button, these armed with a cellphone may gang up by the 1000’s on anybody who ran afoul of their sanctimony.

On this pathbreaking ebook, Jonathan Rauch reaches again to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to elucidate what he calls the “Structure of Information”—our social system for turning disagreement into reality.

By explicating the Structure of Information and probing the warfare on actuality, Rauch arms defenders of reality with a clearer understanding of what they need to defend, why they need to do—and the way they’ll do it. His ebook is a sweeping and readable description of how each American may also help defend goal reality and free inquiry from threats as far-off as Russia and as shut because the cellphone.