Joe Rogan and Digital Democracy
Author’s Note: Late to the party on this one. Blame my son’s gas. Insert my typical apologies about having no sleep here.
Joe Rogan, a comedian, professional MMA commentator, and host of the world’s most popular podcast -who has never held political office or any other position of public trust- has decided to defy the received wisdom of the mainstream press, the CDC, and the World Health Organization. I’m speaking, of course, of his decision to host the renown epidemiologist Michael Osterholm in March of 2020, when most of these same bodies were still dismissing the threat of COVID-19 and smearing any attempt to raise concern or urge preparation as racist. When the great institutions of the world failed, repeatedly and in the face of mounting evidence, Joe Rogan was there to fill in the gap.
Score one for Joe Rogan.
Joe Rogan has again drawn the ire of these same institutions for asking questions about the efficacy of the vaccine. I am deliberately not going to state my own beliefs about the vaccine here, because I shouldn’t have to do that and I’m growing increasingly tired of half-apologetic defenses of free speech. The point being, all of the same institutions which have been wrong repeatedly, and lied openly, now insist that Joe Rogan is too dangerous to leave uncensored as given his large influence -which he amassed by talking to other people the way most people talk to one another, i.e. speaking openly without first assuming some inhuman corporate affect designed to be uninteresting and inoffensive- it’s possible a person listening to his podcast might be persuaded not to take the vaccine. Press Secretary Jen Psaki, a senior member of government, even went so far as to encourage Spotify to do more to censor his podcast. If that’s not putting your toe over the line of the First Amendment, it’s certainly dancing along the edges.
This statement was of course followed by an in-depth technical presentation of all the evidence available about vaccine safety, a full end-to-end explanation of how the evidence was gathered and scrutinized, and a break down of relative risk by cohort that gave a perfectly clear and logical explanation for why the vaccine is now being given to all children regardless of comorbidity. This statement was so precise, well-crafted, and clearly presented it reassured the American people that top minds are involved in our Coronavirus response and hold positions of supreme authority. Resources were then presented where concerned citizens could go themselves to be assured that everything being presented was truthful as an act of humility before the public in whose name these bodies serve.
I’m kidding. Of course that didn’t happen.
These bodies want us to trust them because we always have. They want us to maintain a faith they have repeatedly broken. Except there’s a brand new problem. They’re wrong all the time, we have video records of them being wrong, along with video records of other people being right, and it’s no longer that hard for you as an individual to make better choices than these institutions anymore. They’re so bad at their jobs that they’re threatened by a guy talking like a regular person.
So who the fuck are they to demand silence from Joe Rogan?
Let’s talk about the world as it is, and then let’s talk about the world as it should be. If we have to have these massive moderation organizations, then why in the hell do we not get to vote on what the rules are or elect our own representatives to enforce them?
THE WORLD AS IT IS - WHY WE TRUST PEOPLE
There’s a man I always talk to at the hardware store anytime I need to do something I’ve never done before. He’s amazing. It’s like he has downloaded every single book on wood-working, painting, joinery, small-engine repair, gardening, plumbing, household electronics, etc you can imagine. He’s incredibly cranky, as well as slightly autistic, and seems genuinely offended when you don’t know the exact thermal rating of paint you’re planning to use near your fireplace. He once talked to me for an hour about the manufacturing process of a weed-whacker I was going to buy.
I trust him because he is always right. Out of the hundreds of times I have interacted with him, he has literally never been wrong. Rarely, he has told me he doesn’t know something but he’s never just made something up. Not only does he answer my questions, he answers questions I l didn’t even know how to ask. He answers are clear and crisp, proving he knows every single angle and contingency that I might encounter. He is able to demonstrate, repeatedly, and with great elaboration that he simply has more skill than I do when it comes to home improvement.
I often think about him when I hear Anthony Fauci speak.
The following may sound like an exaggeration, but it is not intended to be. If you have a counter-example I would love to see it. During two years into this pandemic, I have literally never heard Anthony Fauci explain a single fucking thing. I’m serious about that. I have seen him say something and refer to someone else having said it, but I have never seen him breakdown a problem into parts, talk through each part, and use that explanation to justify his conclusion.
“Someone came up with this.”
“Well, can you explain how they came up with that?”
“It’s technical.”
“What if you simplified it for us?”
“It’s too technical to even be simplified.”
As a society we are repeatedly referred to a black hole of educational attainment, where you can presumably read so many books and attend so many lab sessions that you will end up knowing things so esoteric there is no way to explain them to anyone on the other side of the event horizon. We have to trust in this black-hole of knowledge, even when it’s repeatedly wrong, because it knows how to fill out all the right kinds of forms and cozy up to the right kind of people.
I personally know someone who died because they kept waiting for Anthony Fauci to explain how the vaccines would work. He was African American and because of his people’s unique experience with medical malfeasance in America he was unwilling to get vaccinated until someone in a position of power was able to walk through a spreadsheet and explain specifically how they came to their conclusions. Statistics say he isn’t alone in his distrust.
And what are our institutions doing to address that distrust?
In the same way terrible businesses blame their customers for their failures, instead of their total refusal to communicate and take responsibility for their own actions, they’re trying to censor Joe Rogan. Who was right on COVID in the beginning, who presented the more complex science on masks before it became popular to do so, and also discussed the lab leak hypothesis before it was popular to do so. A regular guy who kept out-predicting our gatekeepers.
We live in a society where if people have the right credential, and the right job title, it literally doesn’t matter how effective they are at actually doing things in the real world. You could be wrong ninety-nine times out of a hundred and if you went to Harvard well, then, who can say you failed? As the proverb says, only a diamond can cut a diamond. If the CEO of a cell phone company had lost the trust of half the customer base, refused to explain why he had made unpopular design choices, and said that the half of the customers that hated him were stupid and racist he would be fired for failing to do his job. And everyone would know that was the right decision. In American Expert Land, instead of being open, honest, and explaining how you reach certain conclusions, Anthony Fauci and the mainstream press think you’re an asshole for even noticing their repeated and massive fuck-ups.
I personally told friends -the gentleman who died was unfortunately not among them- in November of 2019, that they needed to wear an N-95 when traveling through the airport. I have texts proving this happened. They all still talk about it like I was Nostradamus. I explained there was a novel virus in Wuhan, China. I explained that I didn’t know a lot about it but that it kept replicating at an alarming rate and that the precautionary principle led me to believe that they should use the same precautions as used in hospitals. This is how I solve most problems. I figure out who is smarter than me that would have had a similar problem and lots of time and money to solve it, and then I just do my best to copy their answer. I had googled this previously and found that hospital safety protocol was for staff to wear N-95 masks. I reasoned that the existing hospital safety protocol was probably the best we had to address an unknown virus. I bought out the supply at my local pharmacy the next day, which was only two boxes. I shared them with family and friends.
No one wore the masks, because it was still too much of a social stigma, but later when Fauci urged people not to wear masks I explained what I knew which was that respiratory viruses tend to travel on other particles, only rarely become free-traveling aerosols, that cloth masks would help a little bit, but that N-95s were going to do the best job. I gave my honest opinion that I thought Fauci was telling people not to wear masks to influence public behavior in an effort to conserve the supplies for hospitals, and I said I was worried about this because when people found out he lied that they’d have a hard time trusting anything he said again. I took a bit of a hit credibility-wise because most of my friends thought I was a conspiracy theorist.
When Anthony Fauci later admitted to congress that he’d lied to preserve supplies for hospitals, everyone I interacted with about COVID-19 trusted every single thing I said from that point on.
Why?
Because I had been repeatedly right, and been honest about what I knew.
They then came to view the CDC with suspicion.
Because Anthony Fauci had been repeatedly been wrong, and lied about what he knew.
For the record, I told all of them to get vaccinated -so I guess I am giving up my stance there- and they did because I had earned their trust. I was ready to tell them how I had come to the conclusion the vaccine was safe, which was largely because I followed the twitter account of Balaji Srinivasan who has been right far more often than myself -following my pattern of finding someone with a similar problem who is smarter than me and has had more time and money to throw at a given problem- but they didn’t even ask. They trusted me.
This is the level at which many people are currently making decisions because our organizations are so completely incapable of proving they are worthy of our trust.
THE WORLD AS IT SHOULD BE - THE ALGORITHMIC REPUBLIC
It’s not that Fauci was wrong, or that he lied. Or that CNN, or MSNBC, or even FOX was wrong and lied. I mean, that’s terrible and about a hundred people should be fired but that’s not the main problem.
The main problem is that whenever a decision has to be made about which side of an issue is correct, Fauci/mainstream media/the government repeatedly bet their chips on the wrong position. The stakes of these bets are something like “Prove to people we have some clue about what we are doing.” And… here’s where I have to take a deep breath to calm myself down… it’s not really their fault. Structurally, there’s no way for our institutions to win these bets because to win they’d have to somehow be smarter than every single other person on the planet with a megaphone.
Thinking about the way the world is now. Everyone has a voice. Everyone has a record of what they said attached to their name. What are the odds that out of millions of people the CDC has all the people inside of it who will be right out of that sea of experts? Or CNN? Or FOX? It’s a numbers game that these organizations can’t win.
Oh, they could do a million times better and I’d still fire a couple hundred people. Instead of making small bets and small wins, proving they are being cautious and judicious, our institutions double-down on things like “Definitely not a lab leak” and “attending protests won’t spread the virus” and “the vaccine will stop you from getting the virus or passing it onto others.” That’s even passing over the months long period where “flight restrictions are racist” and “you should got to Chinese New Year and mingle with everyone to show support for the Asian community.” They dropped the ball repeatedly. This is about the larger problem, though. How can they ever be right compared to the crowd?
When someone is wrong often enough, you stop trusting them. When a whole group of people is wrong all the time? You avoid them. When institutions are wrong repeatedly and don’t replace the people who are wrong with people who are right? Civilization crumbles.
It’s not a matter of “the science is evolving.” That’s a cop-out defense. It’s a matter of “when was it possible for you to know the correct answer, and when did you act on the correct answer?” and “how does your performance doing that compare to other people’s performance?” Our current institutions can’t win this game anymore.
I can point to dozens of people that were right well before the CDC, made their opinions known, and stood up for the truth despite CDC guidance only to be punished. And when they were later vindicated, it didn’t even matter. The problem was that they had been temporarily out of sync with the authoritative voices and what or was not the truth was irrelevant. The only fact that mattered was their disobedience. There was no system to elevate and reward them for being correct.
Intead, our institutions have repeatedly taken the following position: “people are too stupid to understand a complex story that would actually capture reality. Therefore we have to tell them something dumb that covers the basics.” Except now everything is so interconnected if you dumb anything down it doesn’t come close enough to the basics.
An institution that deserved its power and trust would be right more often than anyone else, right before anyone else, and transparently demonstrate its decision-making process. And if an institution could do that, you would stop having to check their work after a certain period of time because they would have demonstrated they knew what they were doing.
Has anyone in our government done that for you?
As I described in my post “Magical Glasses” the problem is the game itself. In an advertisement-based news environment, and with government elections that require massive fundraising schemes, nobody has the right incentives to be honest. So everyone tells you things that they think you want to hear in order to capture your business or your attention. Nobody works for you so nobody does right by you.
Social media companies have two powers that have not existed together since the Magna Carta. They can simultaneously wash their hands clean of anything hosted on their platform and say, “Well, I’m not publisher” while at the same time wield the divine right of kings to remove anyone or anything that they don’t like.
One person making these decisions is a dictator.
A group of people randomly assembling to demand these actions is a mob.
We’ve long ago decided we can’t have dictators or mobs. We can’t have a law that goes backward from when it was passed. We can’t have law that is enforced by whim only against those who are disliked by those in power. We can’t have invisible rules nobody can understand, so that nobody knows when they’re breaking one. So what does that leave?
A republic. A body of people organized around the idea that individuals have certain inalienable rights and that ensures when these rights are infringed upon that a jury of peers is gathered in order to render judgment.
Your social media company calls you a “user.” In a better world you would be a Digital Citizen, you would vote on the rules you have to follow or elect a representative to do so for you. You would be the owner of the system of government, in the same way you own the system of government over the physical land of your country. Social media companies may have started as companies but they have evolved into public squares and the kind of power they wield -to make people disappear, to silence dissent- are the kinds of power no one person should be able to wield.
In a better world -read “Magical Glasses”- Joe Rogan’s content is challenged openly for misinformation. His record is judged by a jury of his peers and not a random mob of hyper-partisans on twitter. No one voice in that jury holds more sway than the others. He can give his own defense in whatever format he chooses, be it video, text, or audio. His freedom of speech is weighed against public danger. He gets a fair game and a fair deal with a real outcome. Whatever the case, for those who want to find it, better resources of COVID information -which have been written by people who have been proven repeatedly correct- are made available. There is an appeal process if needed.
I think I know how a jury would judge a comedian talking like a human being to a medical doctor. And I don’t think they would silence him.
I also have a feeling I know how Fauci would stack up to other expert voices. And I don’t think he comes out on top.