A little bit dystopian. The New York Times is read by the most powerful people in the country, almost all of whom desire the Times’ institutional approval — including, or perhaps especially, the people who say they don’t care. Interest in the company is perfectly natural, as it occupies a wildly outsized position of prominence in our media ecosystem. Stories in the Times are read by millions of people, then amplified by social media and the 24-hour cable news garbage world. Why? Because every journalist and media personality not working at the Times is obsessed with the company. For most, it’s the dream, and it’s certainly the industry standard. As we all live on social media together, the “paper of record” has therefore become a kind of character in the lives of the too online, for which it seems everyone has an opinion. Even the company’s internal HR drama generates entire national news cycles. All of this is to say that a relatively small handful of writers at the Times have incredible and disproportionate influence over national and corporate policy, so when one of their tech columnists employs the phrase “It sounds a little dystopian, I’ll grant. But let’s hear them out”? We listen.

Last week, Kevin Roose published a piece on our “Reality Crisis,” the basic premise with which I agree and have written about myself at length: there is increasingly no dominant, collective sense of reality among Americans, and this is dangerous. But from here, and these basic points agreed upon, we pretty much part ways. In the first place, Kevin seems to believe the “truth” is generally obvious, even when concerning contentious and polarizing subjects. He is also notably confident in his grasp of the “truth,” something I have become increasingly less confident in as our world grows ever more strange and chaotic. But mostly where I disagree with Kevin is the notion, now table stakes in the op-ed pages of the Times, that top-down corporate or federal moderation of wrongthink is the answer to our problems rather than, itself, a new and dangerous problem. As disinformation has existed for as long as humans have been able to lie, while our present information crisis has not, I tend to suspect our problem is actually the relatively new phenomenon of virality — broadly, conceptually. Still, Kevin’s confidence is compelling. For a moment, just before I was introduced to the horrifying phrase “Reality Czar,” I even wondered: does this man who would police the truth simply have a grasp of the subject I myself do not? The question was quickly resolved.

At the top of his piece, Kevin helpfully references the widespread belief that COVID-19 may have come from a lab as one of his obvious “hoaxes, lies, and collective delusions.” For proof that the lab hypothesis is crazy, he links to the opinion of an NPR journalist (???). As any good-brain person must obviously accept, the virus emerged randomly in a Wuhan wet market, not the lab conducting extremely rare gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses down the block. The proximity between the market and the lab? A simple coincidence. As COVID-19 has unfortunately become a flashpoint in our ongoing culture war, questions pertaining to its origin have become taboo on the further extremes of the media left. For many, the impulse appears to go something like this: Trump is bad, Trump is mad at China, therefore China can’t be all that bad.

Meanwhile, back in “reality” according to the “experts,” the origin of the virus is sufficiently unclear that even the World Health Organization has decided to investigate the matter. While the WHO is still committed to the position that the lab hypothesis is “extremely unlikely,” it’s worth noting WHO leadership has been inadvertently assisting CCP disinformation efforts since March. Elsewhere, there is abundant, mainstream evidence indicating the virus could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or Centers for Disease Prevention and Control. Curious to learn more? Check out this exhaustively-cited, literally 12,000 word piece in New York Magazine. If that’s too long, here’s a little something from the Editorial Board of famously alt-right disinformation engine The Washington Post. Like, I’m not finding this shit on “China Lied People Died Dot Com.” This is the mainstream discourse — “mainstream,” by the way, still not equivalent to the word “true.”

I would love to not care about Kevin’s wrong opinions on, for example, the complicated questions surrounding COVID-19. But in any future world with a federal “reality czar” charged with determining what is and is not “true,” how will truth be determined? I’ve only ever seen two speeds here. First, there’s the centralized “truth moderation” innate of every fascist and communist dictatorship we’ve ever seen, in which reality is defined as that which is advantageous for people in power. Second, there’s what we’ve seen more recently from the technology industry, in which truth has been determined by public opinion, with censorship delivered in response to greatest public outcry, itself fomented and driven by the media. In other words, in a world of censorship so constructed, we will have to care about Kevin’s wrong opinions. That is concerning.

On an incredible roll last week, the New York Times’ intrepid tech team followed their “maybe” pitch for the Reality Czar with a cordial, casual discussion on the topic of whether or not something might need to be done about misinformation on messaging apps like Signal and Telegram. People with whom we disagree, it seems, are privately talking to each other. Is this bad?

Beyond the premise of the conversation, the absolute craziest piece, for me, was the casual equivalency between misinformation and actual crime. “The possible downside,” notes Brian Chen of apps like Telegram and Signal, “is that it’s tougher for the companies and law enforcement to hold misinformation spreaders and criminals accountable.” Key words and phrases: “misinformation,” “law enforcement,” “hold accountable.” The charitable read, here, is the Times is simply concerned about things like the storming of the U.S. Capitol. If law enforcement can’t access the personal communications of criminals, how can we stop crime? This is the latest incarnation of a privacy vs. security conversation we’ve been having at least since the invention of the telephone, previously settled (at least legally) by the institution of the wiretap warrant. The American compromise was thus: a judge can grant a narrow violation of an individual’s right to privacy if the state can prove probable cause that the tap will help police solve a serious violation of the law. But encrypted-messaging apps like Signal make “wiretapping” incredibly difficult.

What is to be done about the criminals!

Okay, this is a complicated question, and it is absolutely deserving of nuanced discussion, but what does any of it have to do with believing, or sharing, “untrue” information? The argument we’re starting to see is misinformation is making people crazy, crazy people are killing people in the streets, ergo spreading misinformation is akin to killing people in the streets. Ergo we must do something about the misinformation. But people have always believed a lot of weird shit. I myself believe some weird shit. Believing weird shit is not a crime. Killing people is a crime, and we have laws against killing people. Let’s not get this twisted. My god, we cannot get this twisted.

Several commenters pointed out the Times’ ultimately landed on “private messaging apps do more good than harm,” as if this explains away the casual nature of the implicit question presented in whether or not fully private conversations should be allowed to exist — for anyone. But as we are now casually entertaining actual authoritarianism, let’s try another question: should our democratic republic be suspended in favor of dictatorship? An interesting notion, many perspectives worth exploring on the matter, here are 2,000 words thoughtfully parsing the issue, but ultimately, for now, let’s hold off on the god king.

Hello – what?

This is really getting kind of crazy!

Blocked, week three. The spectacular, improbable drama surrounding the ethics of blocking journalists on social media breached its third ridiculous week on Saturday, and evolved, when the New York Times’ Taylor Lorenz, blocked by Marc Andreessen on Clubhouse, reported that Marc Andreessen was “openly using” the word “retarded” in a Clubhouse chat. The implication of her reporting, at least by my first read of the admittedly ambiguous tweet, was that Andreessen used the slur more than once. Taylor further accused everyone on stage with Andreessen of standing by in silence while the man — presumably — mocked the mentally handicapped. The accusations were of course utterly divorced from reality.

In a now deleted tweet, Taylor herself proved the accusations were untrue when she shared a sample of the chat, recorded in violation of the Clubhouse terms of service. While the audio was apparently intended as a defense of her reporting, it proved only that Ben Horowitz accurately referred to a group of redditors by their chosen, if offensive, name as he prompted a benign discussion on the ongoing meme stocks story. As Nait Jones tweeted, the offensive word was qualified by Felicia Horowitz at the top of the chat as explicitly not language of her own, and was then discussed in a manner indistinguishable from reporting on the Reddit group we’ve seen from many major media outlets, including, of all places, the New York Times.What did Marc Andreessen have to do with this? Nothing, of course. Taylor just seems to really not like him, his venture capital firm, or Clubhouse. For her, all of this is extremely, hopelessly personal, which is a good reason she should be prohibited, by the Times, from covering Clubhouse. But I digress.

The initial reporting, either malicious or extremely reckless — and by the way still not formally retracted — provoked considerable backlash not only from tech, but from many in the media. It also prompted, perhaps inevitably, a movement to block the New York Times.

I’m not a supporter of a broad Times block. The company still produces some really fantastic reporting. I cite journalists from the Times in my own writing almost every week. Then, as discussed at the top of this wire, the Times occupies a lot of headspace in America, and exercises unique influence over our political and industry leadership. It’s worth knowing what these writers are talking about, especially when we disagree. But the sort of growing backlash we’re seeing against the media broadly, and the Times in particular, doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Part of the problem is just our culture, which is presently, deeply at odds with itself. Then it’s all the obvious points of tension: is the Times a professional institution, with professional standards, or not? Can we trust hard facts reporting from the Times, or not? If a mistake is made — and mistakes are always made, by all of us — will it be corrected, or not? But increasingly I think much of the backlash is actually coming from a place of fear.

Disagreement with the perceived opinion of a Times journalist is one thing, but the argument we’re presently hearing from many at the Times is overtly on behalf of power over what the rest of us can say. It was always going to be an uphill battle for the hall monitors. Censors are never popular, and especially not in America. But if your public position is in favor of some top-down policy of truth, where truth is determined by you and your colleagues, you really can’t drop the ball on basic, verifiable facts.

If you want to be the thought police, you better come correct.

-SOLANA