It was last spring when the Supreme Court heard arguments on free speech and social media censorship. The details are less important than what the scene at the court revealed about a bigger problem in American life today.
I arrived at the rally a bit late but in time to catch the last of the exchanges going on inside the court. We stood on the sidewalk outside, livestreaming what the justices were saying inside. It had already become clear that most of the justices did not understand the range of the problem. There were a few that did not even understand the meaning of and need for the First Amendment.
It was a shocking moment for me personally. It was my first experience like this. Here I was surrounded lawyers, activists, technologists, and newshounds. They knew all the receipts that had emerged from court discovery. They had heard all the depositions. They knew the details on how the past four years of censorship had unfolded and who funded it. They could cite memos, emails, budgets, and navigate 10,000 pages of documentation.
They were experts. Among them, I knew what was what, but not like many people there on the sidewalk with me. These people were simply remarkable.
None of us had any power. We were just people—highly informed, highly passionate, very sophisticated in knowledge and understanding—but with absolutely no power and only the influence that social media and dissident journalism give us. Meanwhile, we had to stand there and listen to exchanges that revealed a small fraction of the knowledge we had.
Even the plaintiff’s attorney came across as unknowing but he was far more aware than most of the justices themselves. At some point, the Chief Justice himself said something along the lines that he would have no problem if government officials called the New York Times to correct the record: this is not censorship.
When those of us outside heard this comment, we were gobsmacked. This scenario had nothing to do with the issue, which was about government agencies working with third party NGOs to suppress a huge range of opinions, including true information, with pressure amounting to force. We were all astonished that the person who would exercise the main influence in how the case turned out could be so uninformed.
This was a fascinating moment for me, standing on the sidewalk, looking up the mighty stairs ascending to giant marble pillars, leading finally to the chambers of maximum power therein, presided over by men and women in black robes. It struck me like lightning: the experts were on the sidewalk whereas the people who would decide the fate of freedom and held all the power were quite pathetic to the point of being novices.
My immediate thought was: this is not sustainable. Sure enough, the court sided against the plaintiffs in this case and the litigation was returned to the lower courts to be finally decided some other day.
If this situation pertains to free speech and court litigation surrounding it, what other subjects and issues in American life are similarly afflicted? There are many. There exists a vast divide between the rulers and ruled in terms of knowledge and awareness, probably of a size and scope never seen before in history.
This peculiar situation is partially generational—the people in power are quite elderly in general and shaped by their professional and political attachments in a different era—but it also relates to the ubiquity of information technologies.
For the whole of the 21st century, common people have enjoyed access to information streams that have grown wider and deeper, permitting democratic access to knowledge on law, medicine, policy, finance, philosophy, history, economics, nutrition, and every other area. This includes unprecedented access to what is going on in the halls of power.
Crucially, this has been available to everyone. No longer do you need to be a privileged insider to gather information. It is rather there for everyone. This has also triggered a panic among governing elites who started to worry that the information flows were getting out of hand. This is why censorship became a tool. The aspiration was to change the Internet into a controlled space of stakeholders, corporations, and governments.
The plot unravelled through exposure and budget cuts—even an executive order—and now we have AI engines that have added yet another layer to the information flow and given ever more power to the people. As a result, the gap between the knowledge of the powerful and the rest of us has grown larger in just the last year.
The Trump administration is dealing with this problem with some major steps to introduce reality into governing structures on health, economics, and foreign affairs. We’ve all watched this unfold as media elites wail in pain at the tendency. At the grassroots level, there is persistent frustration not at the fast pace of change but rather that it is not taking place fast enough.
We certainly see this in the budget struggles. The voters who put Trump and the Republicans in power had hoped for $2 trillion in cuts. It was a great campaign line and everyone cheered but that kept getting reduced further and further. Now we are seeing the first budget proposals come in from Congress and are shocked to see that rather than spending reductions, it allows for more deficits and debts and essentially no overall cuts.
This is business as usual in Washington. The difference now is that we have access to verifiable information and the means to comment and complain about what we see. You can be sure that constituents are giving their representatives an earful right now.
Yesterday, the FDA issued new guidelines on the COVID shot: they are pulling it for many people but leaving it in place for other people. It was a few steps forward but short of what many experts on the outside were hoping for. In real time, I watched as the highly competent commentary poured in, backed by vast data. All of it drew attention to the ways in which the improved guidelines still fell far short of the evidence we have now.
This just keeps happening on issue after issue. The overwhelming problem in American life today is that the distance between the people and the rulers was permitted to become too great. Trust is gone and not likely to return. The true experts out of power are just too aware of the science, the facts, the reality of corruption, the workings of the corporatist machinery that has seized control of our systems of government.
The presumption since the ancient world is that only an elite can really hold high-level scientific understanding. Even this has changed to the point that we get more reliable science from the people and the independent researchers than we do from above. So far as I can tell, this is another unprecedented shift in Western industrialized democracies.
The time in which the people trusted centers of power to give valid, accurate, and scientific guidance on matters of public life is over. Incredulity spread with the hysteria about climate change that gradually melted over 20 years. The infectious disease panic of 2020 and following killed off what was left of trust. Now even science—always an elite concern—is seen as more responsibly guarded by the people.
Indeed, as I saw that day last year in front of the Supreme Court, the real experts are on the outside, standing on the sidewalks, and the knowledge and judgment of those inside the palaces of power pale by comparison.
