The Politics of Epistemic Fragmentation

How the illusion of consensus was always a power play, and what to do now that it has shattered

Over the past few years, it has seemed as though the only thing ‘real news’ outlets can agree on is the danger of ‘fake news’. Foreign powers or domestic traitors are accused of engineering political divisions, creating ‘polarization’, and seeding arbitrary disinformation for the sole purpose of making it impossible for people from different subcultures to communicate. This is blamed on ‘the internet’ (and, more specifically, social media) — and there is some truth to this accusation. However, as is often the case with new communication technologies, social media has not accelerated this tendency towards disinformation so much as it has made it more visible and legible.

When widespread internet access broke down our sense of a collective reality, what it was toppling was not the legacy of the Enlightenment, but instead an approximately 100-year bubble in media centralization. Current norms around meaning-making cannot survive the slow collision with widespread private ownership of duplication and broadcast technologies.