No News... Can Be Good News

Especially if it's about dirty fruit

Yesterday my phone informed me that, on average, over the last week my screen time has plummeted by 77%. Bear in mind that includes the day of the election, and the one before, both spent relentlessly scrolling from dawn until way past dusk. I can’t be arsed to do the math but I suspect this suggests that since Wednesday my actual screen time has dropped by something like 85%. Possibly more.

How? Because of no time spent on social media, except for firing off a few furious snarls. And through zero consumption of news.

Literally none. Over the last decade I’ve been a voracious consumer of The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, a slew of political and cultural Substacks and a bunch of other ad hoc sources — consulting them multiple times a day and settling down for cover to cover reads at the weekend. This week, that stopped dead. I simply couldn’t bear it. It wasn’t the fact of Trump’s victory I was unable to face (I’m not a child) but the metric shit-ton of earnest think-pieces from opportunist hacks who’d spent the campaign sane-washing a dangerous felon who could fuck up this country beyond repair. Even if there are salient points to be made about how Democrats dropped the ball in both the short and longer terms, I’m not currently receptive to them in the face of a populace that’s gone ahead and handed over the most powerful country in the world to Elon Musk and his capering fascism-curious orange lunatic. Because make no mistake: the billionaires are playing the piano now. Trump is merely a greedy angry monkey, with a limited lifespan.

As a result of bailing on news the world has gone very quiet — and you know what?

I don’t hate it.

It’s certainly the gift of time. On some of the occasions when I’d normally be scrolling and news-absorbing and info-gathering I’ve read a few pages of my current book (Richard Rorty’s Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism, which is fantastic, and a sketchy understanding of which informs this piece). For the rest I’ve stared into space, or watched the world go by, or rolled ideas for fiction around my head — as I used to before the advent of the smartphone. I’ve always been perfectly happy in my own company and without external stimulus, but I’d kind of forgotten how fine it could be. It feels weird not to be “keeping up”, almost transgressive, but also… rather peaceful.

And this made me think about an obvious underlying issue in this last election. The low-information voter, and their susceptibility to horseshit. Because a potential danger with extreme epistemological utilitarianism or pragmatism comes when some people use a privatized perversion of “utility” to determine that any given statement’s value lies not in its power not to describe reality, but in whether it gets them elected.

The “low-information” tag was popularized by conspiracy nuts and MAGAs who used it to troll people who didn’t “do their own research” — aka spending five minutes on Google and then watching a video by some flaming nutjob on YouTube — and instead were willing to accept the pronouncements of people who know what they’re actually talking about. But of course it applies much more accurately… to the nuts themselves.

It used to be that politicians of all sides would stick at least to within shouting distance of the truth, however much they might massage or mis-contextualize it. Being caught in a deliberate publicly-uttered falsehood could end a career. Trump briskly blew all that out of the water. An inventive, enthusiastic, and committed exponent of the flat-out and bare-faced lie, in a staggeringly short time he normalized the practice across the political sphere — but far, far more so on the far right, who’ve always regarded truth as a “nice to have” feature rather than a dealbreaker.

If you’re a dedicated consumer of reliable news, that’s not a problem. Within half an hour of any given lie you’ll have been promptly presented with coherent evidence that such-and-such politician or pundit or cable “news” channel is talking out of their ass. But if not? If you’re a low- or zero-information voter? You’re told a lie — about the economy being worse, or murderous heathens flooding across the border, or schools forcibly changing the sex of your first-grader, or one of a hundred other MAGA talking points — and you simply think: “That sounds BAD”. These lies are repeated with such hypnotic frequency that eventually you forget any consideration of whether the assertions have any basis in observable reality, and thus eventually you vote for the “strong man” who claims he’s going to fix all these things… that aren’t even true.

It’s not only lies about facts, either: there are also mistruths about whether or not to care. I am naturally aware that there are people whose lives don’t leave the space or spare processor cycles to invest in certain issues. But back in the day, they might have at least tried. Now they’re told it’s fine not to give a shit about distant others, in fact probably better not to — a view I cannot accept. I acknowledge that some people don’t care about Ukraine or woman’s rights or racism or what’s happening in Gaza. I can even understand why that might be so. But I cannot respect it.

And the most serious problem is: we’re not gonna be able to fix this.

You’re not going to be able to make vast swathes of the population suddenly take a serious interest in news and politics, using critical faculties to judge the validity of what they’re told, and deep-diving into the issues in an informed fashion. They either don’t care, or they can’t afford the news sources, or they’re too busy leading lives that are far more difficult or precarious than those of an educated elite who have the leisure to suck up all this info-news probably while listening to classical music and making quiche. They will therefore always be susceptible to gaudy lies.

I know saying this makes me sound dismissive and privileged and a snob. But am I wrong? The real problem lies within imbalances of equality and equity and opportunity. Our societies and histories are simply not set up to provide a level playing field of attention, understanding, or compassion. That will not change.

So what the hell are we supposed to do about this? Do Democrats simply have to lie more? Do centrists and the liberal left have to accept that we’re living in a post-truth society, and the only road to success is telling the most engaging falsehoods? Do we therefore to pick our candidates on the basis of their celebrity and entertainment value, rather than them having character and some kind of plan? Have the media in general — and social media in particular — brought us to the point where all that matters in politics is who can shout bullshit the loudest? Is that where we are?

Maybe. Perhaps. In which case the news is an utter waste of time, except as a rarified intellectual hobby predicated on the out-moded idea that “truth” is a real value corresponding to some kind of objective thing-out-there. This country was at least partly founded upon people demanding an individual relationship to God: now the demand has shifted to requiring an individual relationship to reality. So let’s save ourselves a lot of time and trouble, ban all news, and instead award prizes for whoever can produce the most compelling pattern of interlocking lies.

Oh, we just have. That prize is called “the presidency”.

I’m not serious. Of course it’s important to know what’s going on, and to be determined to learn from educated and reasoned views (including from people whose political orientation differs from our own, because no single one of us is right about everything all the time). It will always be critical to a functioning society, and I’m sure that before too long I’ll slink back to consuming all this stuff, all these news and views, and to trying — however pointlessly — to change hearts and minds: like some inveterate drinker slipping back into the pub after a period of being on the wagon.

But not this week. For now I’m going to keep spending more time with my wife, and cats, and reading things that are about our world — though not as it obtains in this moment — and staring into space. As I’ve been writing this, one of my trusty news aggregation apps has served up ten suggestions of articles to read, less than a week after the most potentially disastrous election in American history.

One is titled: “Wait, should I have been washing my bananas this entire time?”

The world rolls on. People are still out there eating and drinking and dying and falling in love and fretting about fruit cleanliness. Sometimes, however, for the sake of our own lives and mental health, we need to remind ourselves that all this doesn’t need our constant and obsessive attention… and instead take the time to gently recalibrate: before girding our weary loins, and going back to fighting the good fight.

The sky has not fallen in. It has merely gotten a good deal darker. Which makes it all the more important that we keeping trying to bring the light.