I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about America’s descent into a new dark age – and I don’t use this word lightly – of stupidity.
Trump, Musk and their cronies are engaged in a deliberate assault on public servants, scientists, higher education, and every other agency and institution whose purpose is either to educate people, to expand the borders of our knowledge, or to generate fact-based research for the purpose of guiding policy. They’ve adopted a policy of willful rejection of expertise, evidence, and the scientific method, and the predictable, disastrous consequences are already happening.
In this column, I ask whether there’s any role left for intelligence, in the sense of respecting expertise and wanting to be guided by facts and evidence. Is it now a suboptimal survival strategy, or is it a vital means of survival in the coming era of intensified chaos?
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:
What’s going on here can’t simply be chalked up to ignorance. Ignorance just implies a lack of knowledge, and that’s not the root problem. There’s no shame in ignorance — all of us are ignorant about some things. More importantly, ignorance is correctable with education, something that Trump and his cronies have no inclination to engage in.
It’s also not just poor judgment. That term implies that the person in question was aiming at a good goal, but made bad decisions and so failed to achieve that goal. Again, this can be tempered and tamed by experience, but it too isn’t an adequate descriptor of the situation we’re facing.
The mindset I’m referring to is more malicious than either of these. It encompasses both ignorance and poor judgment, but also an aggressive disdain for the very concept of expertise. It’s a mindset which refuses to admit that some people can know more than others. It refuses to admit that reason and evidence should guide our decisions, or that there are facts which don’t bend to political ideology.
letting soldiers back in the army that were originally bounced for refusing the covid vaccine is some tactical winning.
Going to be a bit of a pedant and point out that “dark age”, as used by historians, means that records from that time period in that part of the world are scarce, whether they were lost or destroyed or because people mostly didn’t keep them. One can expect that there would be a major loss of technical and/or institutional knowledge early in a dark age, but that’s not guaranteed nor is that a permanent state of affairs. Neither are those losses a guarantee of a dark age, only a new age which may or may not be “dark” – a designation which can only be reasonably be applied long after that time has passed.
In this sense, a “coming dark age” would imply the collapse of both the internet and all the major physical archives, or alternatively, for there to be so much nonsensical revisionism drowning out everything else to the point where future historians have a nightmarish time figuring out what was actually happening during the 21st century in some parts of the world.
There is a more casual use of “dark age” meaning “times which were probably pretty horrible for everyone”, though that’s more reasonably referred to as “dark times” when talking about the present or immediate future, particularly if it’s not expected to last long enough to be called an “age”. (The Great Depression was “dark times” for an awful lot of people, but nobody calls it the “Depression Age”.) And then there’s the sense of it as being “a period full of religiously-enforced ignorance”, which AFAIK is mostly used by younger people who are in the process of questioning the value of religion. Though even in those senses, it’s rather relative; there’s quite a ways to fall just to reach historical norms.
I’ll admit that I really wouldn’t be looking forward to a reversion to something closer to historical norms. Even if my broad knowledge gives me some kind of major advantage, that’s not something I’d be happy to have.
@snowberry, #2:
But isn’t that exactly what we are heading for?
Such records as we are keeping are often stored in proprietary file formats on proprietary media. This will pose its own challenges to future archaeologists: even if it isn’t encrypted with a view towards deliberately thwarting recovery, just uncompressing compressed data is hard enough when you know how the encryption works. At least an analogue recording contains a sort of scale model of a waveform embedded right into it somehow; whether that be a miniature picture perhaps with inverted colours, a wobbly groove cut into a surface, or a pattern of magnetisation. The recording also contains clues embedded into it for the benefit of the reproducing equipment. PAL and NTSC video signals literally tell you where each picture begins and how it is divided up into lines. I don’t doubt that, if some future archaeologist were to analyse the patterns of magnetism on an analogue videotape, even without access to 20th century textbooks on television theory, they would eventually be able to extract at least mono pictures from it.
Digital recordings really don’t have any of these clues. It’s just a bunch of zeros and ones. The data may have been encrypted deliberately to thwart attempted recovery by anyone else but its intended recipient; or it may be compressed, requiring a further mathematical operation to retrieve it, and hence functionally equivalent to encrypted if the procedure for uncompressing it is not known. Even in the case of a simple, unencrypted text file, we know today that 01001010 represents a capital letter J; but will future archaeologists know that?
Also standing against future archaeologists trying to peek into artefacts of the early 21st Century is an attitude where many people seem keen to wipe out every trace they ever existed. There’s a whole generation of computer equipment that will be useless to tomorrow’s retro enthusiasts for want of storage media, because short-sighted idiots smashed up disk drives to prevent anyone from finding out where they lived three house moves ago or what their credit card number used to have been long after the bank have invalidated it, without a thought for future generations.
I think “dark age” might actually be entirely apt.
I used to think the problem with the world was people who are stupid. I have since come to believe that the problem is people who are actively malicious.
It’s not that they don’t know better. It’s that they don’t want better.
¿Por qué no los dos? There’s a wide and fuzzy border between stupid and evil, not to mention that occasionally something can clearly be both for different reasons. Where they overlap, an awful lot of it seems to be people who identify themselves as “good people”, and identify certain others as “bad people”, and with occasional exceptions that’s the full extent of their moral judgment. I suspect that some of them can’t even imagine a “better” for themselves, beyond being a hero or assisting / associating with a hero who stomps on the faces of all the designated “bad people” forever.
In our present crisis, I think the problem is both.
The persecution of immigrants and trans people is out of malice, clearly. But the tariffs and the trade war can only be chalked up to stupidity. Anyone who knows anything about economics could have predicted that suddenly cutting the trade links that the world has been dependent on for decades was going to bankrupt thousands of businesses, plunge us into recession and make America a pariah state. Regardless of your opinion on free trade and globalization, this was the most chaotic and destructive way possible to go about changing it; it benefits no one.
It was both stupidity on Trump’s part, and to a lesser extent, stupidity on the part of his voters and donors who assumed he wouldn’t do the thing he campaigned on doing.
*Reads full article*
So the title is clickbait? I’m disappointed. Relieved, but disappointed that you are not above clickbait.