We all live in history. A lot of the problems that face us, and the opportunities that present themselves, are defined not by our own choices or even the specific place or government we’re living under, but by the particular epoch of human events that our lives happen to coincide with.
The Industrial Revolution, for example, presented opportunities for certain kinds of business success – it made some people very rich while others were exploited. If you’d known that was the name of your era, it would have given you a clue about what kinds of events to prepare for. So I’m suggesting a name for the era we’re living through: the Information Crisis.
It’s not a single moment; it’s an epoch – we’re in the middle of it already and it is going to continue for the rest of our lives. And I’d argue that this is the third great information crisis human beings have gone through: following the invention of writing and the Gutenberg printing press, we are now witnessing a crisis caused by digital communications technology. These prolonged crises aren’t just neutral technological improvements; they change us psychologically and socially in profound ways that cannot be reversed.
What we can see from the last two information crises is that they involve enormous leaps forward in knowledge and understanding, but also a period of intense instability. Following the invention of writing, the world was filled with new, beautiful ideas and new moralities. And there were also new ways to misunderstand each other: the possibility of misreading someone entered the world, as did the possibility of warfare motivated by different interpretations of texts. After the invention of the printing press came the Enlightenment, an explosion of new scientific knowledge and discovery. But before that period, Europe had plunged into the Reformation, which led to the destruction of statues and other artworks and many institutions that had been working at least adequately until then. And, to get to the heart of the matter, the Reformation in Europe meant a lot of people got burned at the stake, or killed in other terrible ways.
I’m not just talking about literal “burning at the stake”, I’m using it as a shorthand for the things people end up doing in the throes of a doctrinal dispute that are completely against the values they would otherwise claim to hold. They are things that involve turning a living, breathing person into a symbol, something that can be treated with extreme cruelty to make a point. When I talk about “burning at the stake” I don’t mean criticising someone’s views in mature debate or protesting against government policies. I mean the things that demean you as a human being if you do them to others. I mean the point when the desire to just win an argument turns you into someone who goes against all your other values. There is never a good enough reason to burn someone at the stake.
I think the following is incontestable: the only way to get rid of all opinions that are different from yours is by carrying out unthinkable human rights atrocities. (And this doesn’t actually work: there are still, in fact, both Catholics and Protestants.)
We can already see how this type of thing becomes more common during an information crisis because we’re now in another one. We’re overloaded and overwhelmed by information. We don’t have the social and informational structures in place yet to manage it. My suggestion is that this enormous information wave makes us anxious and angry.
How? All this information introduces us to all the things we don’t know, all the ways in which we’re not experts. We might end up expressing an idea online that we’ve heard many times in our social circle only to be jumped on by 50 people who know more and tell us that our ideas are stupid, old-fashioned and even prejudiced. If this ever happens to you, it might make you feel profoundly unsettled, frightened, out of touch. That might be a good thing. It’s also an emotionally destabilising thing. It works the other way around, too. When we can see everyone else’s opinions, it turns out that someone we really liked may hold an idea that we find stupid, old-fashioned or even prejudiced. It’s the “I used to like Uncle Bob until I saw his posts on Facebook” syndrome. We’re left wondering who we can trust and whether we’re actually surrounded by upsetting idiots. All this can leave us feeling isolated and misunderstood, unsupported, frightened, worried and angry.
Well, that’s probably very much how it felt in Reformation Europe to find out that your next-door neighbour had a very different idea from you about whether the bread and wine of the sacrament were really the body and blood of Christ.
Which is to say: sadly we can expect this to get worse before it gets better. But there are tools and techniques we can use in the current information crisis. There are ways we can be better equipped to deal with the era we find ourselves in.
1 Find a fact-checker you trust
Just as after the print revolution in early modern Europe, it is now massively easier to access scientific information. In a few seconds I can find a video clearly explaining particle physics, chemical bonds or how vaccines work. And at the same time, it is also extremely easy to find very plausible-looking information that is completely false about how vaccines are actually terrible and suggesting solutions that I really don’t even want to write down here.
But unlike people living through the print revolution, we have sophisticated and trusted information-dispersal networks that are still fairly robust. The BBC has a good fact-checking service. Snopes and PolitiFact are good. There are others, and it’s worth getting familiar with them. Fact-checking is a specialised skill, though, and it is becoming more challenging as the fakes get ever more convincing.
2 Notice how you feel before you share information
Goodness knows, I have sometimes shared information on social media that turned out to be false. It’s very embarrassing, and I feel the urge every time to double down on my mistake and claim that there is some way in which it sort of is true even though it’s definitely not.
These days, I try to notice how something I want to share on social media is making me feel. If I have a very strong feeling of any type, I use that as a cue to slow down and check my facts. It could be a strong gleeful feeling of: “Oh, this is rich.” Like a tweet I saw recently claiming to be by Donald Trump from a few years ago, saying that if the Dow drops 1,000 points in a day, the president should be impeached. “Oh, this is rich,” I thought to myself. Of course, it’s fake. Or if I feel “Oh God, that’s dreadful, what those people are doing”, that’s also a good sign it might be fake. If it feels too perfectly tailored to me, if it presses my buttons, if it precisely tickles me where I like to be tickled or hurts me where I am vulnerable to being hurt, that’s a sign to check the facts.
3 Resist the urge to shame others online
We’re going to need some new social norms to survive this crisis. Getting into the habit of pausing online whenever you feel a strong emotion and a desire to repost is one new norm to learn ourselves, and teach to children. Another is how to behave when you see someone sharing something you believe to be false. Don’t embarrass them in public. It’s going to happen to you one day, too. Think about how you’d like that person to approach you. A private note, where you’re on their side. It is extremely easy to alienate people via text communication because of all the oral-culture things that are missing from text. “Argh, that made me laugh so much but I don’t think it’s true?” Probably one of the ways that we get through this is by trying not to pointlessly alienate the other humans.
4 Give institutions the benefit of the doubt
Institutions that are sources of basically truthful information are going to be particularly vulnerable when, inevitably, they do get something wrong. There is no such thing as an information system that never gets anything wrong. What we’re looking for is a rapid acknowledgment of the problem, lack of defensiveness, curiosity about how it happened, a focus on systems and not individuals as the way to make sure it doesn’t happen like that again. That’s the ideal.
Even with the ideal system, in an information crisis there will be plenty of people willing to tear down a good-faith truth-seeking organisation over errors, who will use an error or a bad member of that organisation as evidence that nothing from that source can be trusted.
So, which institutions are we being tempted to condemn root-and-branch because of some mistakes and abuses? What large, trying-to-be-helpful-but-sometimes-failing associations would various rulers like to break up and destroy because they represent alternative sources of authority to their own narrative, and also there’s money to be made?
5 Try not to ‘hate read’
The internet allows every person to access precisely the opinions that most please or enrage them – being enraged is a particular form of being pleased, actually. Finding things on the internet to “hate read” is a way of feeling great about yourself, because you’re not as stupid and wrong as those other people. The internet allows and encourages us to either find opinions that we wildly, enthusiastically agree with or conversely the most ridiculous and objectionable and stupid forms of the views on the other side of any issue.
In every information crisis, there is a tendency to cut ourselves off and look not at the community around us but at the particular information that makes us feel comfortable and right. What we lose via giving in to that tendency is shared reality. That is, a reality we all consent to. Once you’ve lost that, it’s easy to dehumanise others, to start to believe that people who disagree with you aren’t really people at all.
6 Recognise humanity
This is about not treating people as symbols. About the sense that we are not surrounded by cretinous, vicious imbeciles but mostly by careful, thoughtful people who may disagree with us but usually have good reasons for doing so and with whom we could have a reasonably civilised conversation and find many points on which we do agree. I know that saying this already makes me sound like a utopian. I know that it feels as if we probably are surrounded by cretinous, vicious imbeciles a lot of the time. That’s because we’re already right in the middle of an information crisis.
7 Ignore the opinions of others
If you agree that at least some of the reason that conversation and debate feel so fraught right now is because of our new communication technologies, maybe that helps with taking a step back, not immediately shouting angrily at someone who disagrees with you, online or in real life. Having thought about this a lot, I increasingly take everyone’s emotions seriously, and treat very few people’s opinions seriously. Everyone has an opinion. Unless the person is an expert it’s a mistake to treat their opinion as very important.
8 Use your smartphone judiciously
A smartphone designed by people who care about your wellbeing wouldn’t be asking you to log your mental health with it – don’t do that, really really don’t do that – or even give little passive-aggressive screentime notifications. A smartphone designed by people who care about your wellbeing would prompt you to choose apps to disable after a certain point in the evening, would ask to be turned off for a certain number of hours in the day. It would presume that in general your life is better if you are not spending all day looking at a device, and try to facilitate that. As smartphones don’t do that, we need to treat them with caution. Or even get rid of them; a lot of people are doing that.
Likewise, in an ideal world, social media apps would make it extremely easy not to see content that you didn’t want to see. It would be simple to “whitelist” accounts, topics, video channels, types of content. That is to say, if social media apps were designed with public service in mind, it would be straightforward to tell them, for example, “I only want to see my friends’ pictures of their family, their pets, their recipes, their updates about their career” or whatever it is that you want to see, without having to confront their political opinions. We are living through a time when we are going to be winding each other up a lot. It is all right to want to preserve relationships with family members and friends by only seeing their politics when you choose to engage with it.
And see people in person. If we rely on technology for human connection over in-person interactions, it will leave us feeling more lonely. If you’re feeling more isolated than you were just a few years ago, technology might be the reason. Start by understanding that loneliness isn’t just something that’s happening to you because you’ve done something wrong; it’s a feature of the historical era we’re living through. Make an arrangement to see someone, in person. Your friends would like to hear from you.
10 Don’t cut children off altogether
There are some online services that allow whitelisting for the children’s version but not for the grown-up one. This in itself is terrible for adults and for children. It creates a cliff-edge where either you’re – let’s say – under 13 and you can only see a few child-focused things on the internet, or suddenly you’re 13 and you get the full firehose of internet horror straight in the face. It means childhood is more denuded of opportunities for entertainment and culture – if everything is accessed via a parent’s smartphone then how do children play music for themselves, or browse radio stations? And it means that there are no helpful on-ramps where parents can slowly decide over the years which more adult-oriented content they can tell their child is ready for. “Protecting the children” is a terrible framing for this. We all need technology that at least allows us the option to take care of ourselves.
11 Campaign for better laws
Although these problems would happen to some extent without technology companies, it is clear that many tech companies now are exacerbating them. We need laws that put us in charge of our own smartphones and our own social media, that mean that we can say exactly what we want to see on them and when. We deserve smartphones and social media that protect our wellbeing and that of our children – countries need to work together on new laws to force the tech companies to do this.
12 Avoid pointless arguments
These days, on Bluesky, I have the words “not getting into pointless arguments on the internet is an act of revolution” in my profile. It keeps me honest. Sometimes I feel tempted to get into a pointless argument. Sometimes someone else has to say, “I thought you didn’t believe in doing this”. And I stand back and go, “Oh yes, arse, I haven’t lived according to my own values here”.
Here’s a rule I have developed for myself: never talk about a culture-war topic with anyone who only wants to talk to you about that topic. These conversations can only be helpful if they happen as part of a relationship. If you’re going in cold on a very hard topic, you will not be able to experience each other as people, only as opinions or symbols.
Ultimately, don’t let the worst “the other side” has done become the new low bar for your own behaviour. Don’t treat people as symbols. Consider the possibility that where reasonable people disagree there may be some useful truth on both sides, even if it’s only the truth of – as we say these days – “lived experience”. Don’t try to get anyone fired today. Don’t insult or berate someone today. Don’t trawl through someone’s social media going back decades to dredge up the worst thing they’ve ever said, today. Don’t, fundamentally, burn anyone at the stake today.
