On our minds: Which is harder, inventing a novel vaccine or convincing people that they can trust vaccines at all? (It’s the second one. The second one is harder.) |
When you sow doubt, what do you reap? |
 | | Trump supporters protested in Detroit this month. Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s vote count in Michigan continued to grow after Election Day as ballots were counted.John Moore/Getty Images |
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I was raised to believe that technology would save us all, and that the best thing I could become was one of the people who invented it. |
My high school was on the campus of the University of Illinois, and to get from our main building to the gym we would cut through a building that belonged to the university’s computer science department. The hallways seemed to be constantly lined with recruiting tables, and we would summon our courage and demand, giggling hysterically, a cut of the swag they were handing out to the engineering students — mostly squeezy stress balls and plastic key chains, but occasionally hats or even T-shirts from some hot start-up company. |
We felt clever and transgressive, but now — when I recall how many of my classmates interned for tech companies at 17 or 18 — I realize that we were really just door prizes for recruiters who hadn’t managed to nab enough undergraduates. |
Our teachers and parents were all for that, of course. If we studied hard, they’d tell us, maybe we could start a company like that and help the world find what it was missing. |
I never wanted to be a writer of programs or inventor of robotic arms. But it never occurred to me to question the value that the ambient grown-ups placed on technology, or their assumption that big problems needed technological solutions. I knew that disasters would always happen, but I expected them to play out something like the movie “Independence Day.” Genius technologists would invent what we needed just in time to save the world, and then the movie would end. |
I am thinking about this because this week has harshly illuminated the shortcomings of that worldview. The two biggest news stories in the United States were the promising results of two vaccines against Covid-19, and the ongoing wave of misinformation about the election. The vaccine story fits the worldview I was raised in. It is a story of brilliance, hard work and technology coming to the rescue. But the misinformation story shows what was missing from my teenage vision of the world to come: that technology would not just protect us from human weakness, but also, sometimes, exacerbate it. |
Last year, I interviewed Danah Boyd, a researcher Data and Society Institute, for a piece about YouTube’s role in political extremism. When we think about misinformation, she said, we tend to focus on the presence of bad information — but really we should be focusing on the presence of doubt. |
A platform like YouTube or Facebook can claim to be building a “marketplace of ideas” by algorithmically presenting, say, a story about a new vaccine alongside a story claiming vaccines are dangerous. But what it is really doing is building doubt. |
For the YouTube story, Max Fisher and I interviewed mothers in Brazil who had diligently searched for information about Zika but found conflicting claims by people who all seemed to be trustworthy. When they were faced with conflicting information from people claiming to be doctors or nurses or researchers, doubt took hold. Misinformation about the virus began to spread among the mothers’ WhatsApp groups and text chains. Public-health experts debunked misinformation when they heard about it, but by then they were just more voices offering conflicting claims. By the time I met them, the mothers had become fearful of vaccines and other medical interventions, unsure of whether they could trust them. |
And now something similar is playing out in the United States, except with the presidential election subbed in for Zika. There is plenty of good, trustworthy information out there about the election, including from The Times. But in an effort to call Joe Biden’s election victory into question, President Trump, his associates and his supporters are building doubt the way Mr. Trump used to build flashy apartment buildings. Rudolph Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, spread falsehoods and conspiracy theories about the election on social media and during press appearances. Mr. Trump falsely claimed on Twitter that Michigan’s election had been a “giant scam.” And Mr. Trump’s supporters have spread false stories about voter fraud on conservative websites and social media. |
None of it is true. Little of it is remotely plausible. But it may be enough to muddy the waters, to create doubt, and thereby to erode trust in the validity of Mr. Biden’s presidency and the legitimacy of American democracy. |
That wasn’t part of the story I was told when I was a teenager rattling a new start-up’s key chain between my fingers. But we need a new story that includes it. We haven’t found a way to invent our way out of human frailty or failures of social trust, but it turns out we’re great at inventing our way into more of both. |
- Commonwealth, by Ann Patchett. I loved the gentleness of this novel. I hate it when reading a book feels like witnessing the author bullying her characters, but Ms. Patchett manages never to treat anyone as beyond redemption, even as she shows them making bad choices and leaving trails of damage in their wakes.
- Wife Guy: “Neither of us remarks on the joke of I got a woman, which is that — though I got a nurturing, domestic partner with waist-length hair, and he got a partner with a uterus we could make a kid in — neither of us got one.”
- How a deadly police force ruled a California city.
- A worrying crackdown on human rights defenders in Egypt.
- Meet the Substackerati.
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