In the aftermath of the interest in Yonatan Zunger’s piece “Trial Balloon for a Coup?” I’ve seen a number of responses, some of them fantastic analyses by academics who study the workings political systems, such as “Weak and Incompetent Leaders Act Like Strong Leaders” by Cornell associate professor Tom Pepinsky. But I’ve also seen a variety of troubling responses, including calls by journalists for people to stop sharing Medium posts and stick to established media outlets, and a nontrivial degree of concern-trolling about creating panic.
Why We Read Medium (and Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
It’s important to attempt, as much as possible, to verify information. Journalism is useful because it is supposed to do much of this work for us.
However, I disagree that we should stick to mainstream outlets: operating under the tenet of objectivity, mainstream publications effectively privilege those with the least dogs in any fight, meaning the bulk of coverage comes from people with significantly more privilege than the people affected by policy in the stories we’re writing about.
We like to believe that great journalism can get to the bottom of anything given enough time, but I’ve seen us drop the ball again and again because we cannot shed the blinders of privilege in just a few weeks, months or years in order to see the bigger picture. Increasingly, we’re no longer getting either months or years. We cannot always identify the people who are nodes of a community. We cannot always build the trust necessary to get at information that informs the issues we’re writing about. We cannot always get all the context. We cannot always know the many ways policies, laws, enforcement, and so on play out on the ground.
I’ve been writing and following news about labor abuse and trafficking for over a decade and only recently have I seen more mainstream outlets release articles that penetrate the issue. This is for the most part a result of journalists who are former sex workers getting a foothold at mainstream publications — and just barely, as these outlets find people with lived experience in the issues they write about suspect. If they’re employed at all, it’s usually for blogs, where their otherness can be used to draw eyeballs as part of a vertical.
There is an echo chamber problem, and a big part of that is lack of real intersectional diversity in our newsrooms that enable us to begin asking the right questions. And if we aren’t doing that, our readers have nothing.
Medium posts and blogs, like social media, provide a lot of that lived experience to those willing to look for it. They’re a useful starting point to better approach the bigger picture from angles we may not know exist. Lacking intersectional diversity in media, we need these angles. I’m not saying we should believe everything we read, but we should be open to collecting the data points the things we read represent, if only so we know what kind of questions to begin asking.
Asking questions is crucial not only to journalism, but to participation in a democracy.
Why We Analyze Information
More than ever before, people who interact with me online and off are asking me what they should do to “resist.” They want to take action, but they don’t know how. For the few for whom action is clear, the action they’re considering is whether to leave — but they’re not sure what signs to look for.
I’m not the only one getting these questions. Indeed, the first post about the new administration on Zunger’s blog (“What ‘Things Going Wrong’ Can Look Like”) — an examination of threat models for certain marginalized groups — is a direct response to one such question. The second, Trial Balloon, is about the possible consolidation of power in the current administration and the corrosion of mechanisms that we depend on. It is, without a doubt, a brutalizing interrogation of our faith in institutions to save us.
I recognize that it is a scary thing to think about a worst case scenario, but evaluating threat models is a reality for many people. For some marginalized groups, it’s always been the case; for others, it hasn’t been for some time but looks likely now. It is a matter of survival. For those for whom it isn’t, it’s a matter of determining where to begin.
I believe that it is important — especially as humans with lived experience or generational memory — to discuss our assessments of incoming data. And there’s a reason the title of Trial Balloon ends in a question mark. These are assessments made on incomplete information on a changing landscape.
In my own assessments, I tend to see this further corrosion of democracy (I’ll get to why I think this Administration is only escalating an existing threat on our institutions) toward kleptocracy. Its signs are seared into my memory — they are what I look for. Likewise, Zunger’s experience reflects a corrosion that aligns more closely with ideology. Those are the signs he sees. There is a risk, always, of confirmation bias, which is why worrying about this in isolation is never a good idea.
Putting these assessments out there and, in his case, reaching a significant readership, has had the effect of generating various responses that derive different forecasts from the existing data points. The isolated assessments have become a conversation. It is a scary conversation, and I’m sorry for that, but it is a necessary conversation. Perhaps it isn’t for you, dear reader — and I’m glad for that. But it is a necessary conversation for a lot of individuals who are trying to make important decisions, many of whom are also isolated or have been paralyzed in the hailstorm of activity in these first 12 days of the new administration.
I do not regret seeing more people consuming news and feeds and interrogating the structural integrity of our institutions. I should have liked to have seen this sooner. As I’ve mentioned, this corrosion was underway long before Trump took office, and it’s of critical importance that we, as people who live in this country, become a lot more watchful and a lot less certain that our institutions will magically save us when we have for so long ignored our responsibility to know, enforce, uphold and protect them.
Journalists keep telling people to read the Real News even though we, as journalists, recognize that our industry isn’t doing particularly well: it’s cutting costs by ditching beat reporters in favor of contractors who are free to pitch anything and who are disincentivized from riskier reporting because contracts make it very clear we’re on our own if we get sued; it’s rewarding virality over dense, researched pieces; it’s deprecating long form in favor of collections of tweets and hottakes; it’s ignoring entire issues that have no “wide” appeal (how long did it take for anyone from a “respectable” mainstream publication to get to NODAPL protests and write something that wasn’t a churnalist press release from the Morton County Sheriff’s Department? How many covered the burning trashcan during DisruptJ20 versus those who covered that J20 was a call for a nationwide strike proposed by Seattle councilwoman and socialist?), and so on.
I’m not saying don’t read news. I’m saying read news, but don’t stop there. And I’m reminding you, as a reader of news, that you have the privilege and responsibility to demand more. If Trial Balloon has done anything, it is show editors everywhere that the corrosion of our institutions is something everyone from nerds to pop stars care about. They would be foolish not to be green-lighting these stories. I can live with that.
But It’s Scary
To everyone who is scared by the calculations in Trial Balloon or other readings of the tea leaves, I say this:
- Ask the publications you trust to do more — and pay for them if you can.
- Read the news but don’t expect the news to give you everything you need to know. Collect those data points.
- Read the orders, rulings, and laws themselves and watch for their application on the ground.
- Pay attention to Congress especially when there is an uproar online. (The attack on the Ethics Committee that Trump “rescued” obscured the simultaneous reinstitution of the Holman Rule that empowers legislators to reduce the salaries of federal employees to one dollar, effectively pushing them out without having to fire them. Meanwhile, the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act turned into an issue over abortion, obscuring the attack on Section 230 safe harbor protections for online publishers that comes bundled into it. It passed and Obama signed it, by the way.)
- Pay attention the use of the filibuster in the Senate but remember the reason it exists and carefully consider the implications of recent changes and the even more recent threats to it.
- Pay attention to shuffling in leadership positions.
- Pay attention to the creations and expansions of law enforcement agencies. Especially the power wielded and abused by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an agency under the Department of Homeland Security that operates within 100 miles of any national boundary, including coasts (that means two-thirds of Americans, an estimate of 200 million people, live in a zone where your Constitutional rights may not always apply).
- Pay attention to gerrymandering and the way it’s messing with elections. The issue is heading to the Supreme Court this year. While you’re doing that, start thinking about why we haven’t established a system for vote auditing.
- Pay attention to how different the response is when companies or industries “stand up” for human rights than when regular folks do it. (What does it mean for Amazon and Microsoft to support the lawsuit over Trump’s immigration order? This kind of thing isn’t new — we’ve even seen what can happen when corporations step in to challenge legislation we agree with. And how reasonable is it to rely on corporations to get things done when, ultimately, they depend on profits to exist? Remember when the Obama Administration launched an operation to extralegally choke money from payday lending and gun businesses, both legal under the law? The groundwork has been laid. It’s still being used, most recently to kill pornography hosted by a social network that isn’t even headquartered in the U.S. What does it mean that this is possible? What happens when it’s leveraged against things we want to have access to, like birth control? The aforementioned Justice of Victims of Trafficking Act includes a provision that undermines 230 safe harbor protections when it can be said that online publishers are “benefiting” from trafficking and “cyber crimes” — if Congress can do this for some crimes, what does it mean for others? Remember all those attorneys general and senators — a nontrivial number of them Democrats — who argued in 2013 that Section 230 has served its purpose and needs to be retired? What does this mean for free speech?)
- Think. Ask questions. Ask them out loud. Have these hard conversations.
- Don’t let anyone tell you that conversations that might scare you are a bad thing. You are being concern-trolled and gaslit about being a softie liberal who needs a safe space from other people’s questions. You aren’t. You’re stronger than you realize. Remember, the Left and even moderates have been eating our own over ideological purity in this country for a long time. We can handle a conversation about worst case scenarios. We need to have it in order to begin recognizing the threats to the institutions that we expect to rely on. Which brings me to —
- Fight for the institutions you want to save you, even when they are being corroded to favor your own beliefs.
