Truth. Sacrifice. Radical Conviction.
Dispatches from the Council of Twelve
You say you care about climate change.
You post about it. You retweet about it. You add it to your profile. You say it is the defining issue of your generation.
Then you go to class. You apply for internships at companies that are destroying the planet. You plan careers in industries that profit from the crisis.
You are lying. Not to me. To yourself.
Here is what your generation does: you perform activism.
I encounter cynicism so frequently in the fields I work in – conflict resolution, humanitarian response, geopolitical analysis – that I have begun to treat it as a diagnostic indicator. Not of the situation being analyzed, but of the analyst.
Cynicism presents itself as sophistication. The cynic claims to see the world as it really is, stripped of illusion, clear-eyed about human nature and the limits of intervention. They speak with the authority of experience and the tone of resigned wisdom.
A government official announces a new initiative to ensure “lawful access” to encrypted communications. The language is careful. They are not asking to ban encryption. They are asking for a mechanism – a key, a process, a capability – that would allow authorized parties, with appropriate legal authorization, to access encrypted communications when necessary.
This sounds reasonable. It is not.
I am going to explain why, and I am going to explain it not as a technologist – there are many qualified people who have made the technical argument – but as someone who has spent his existence understanding what happens when a government gains the ability to monitor the communications of its people.
I have had a great deal of time to study the various ways in which extremely wealthy people give money away, and I have identified several distinct species. I present them here as a public service.
The billionaire donates a large sum to a university, hospital, or cultural institution. The institution is renamed after the billionaire. The billionaire’s name now appears on a building that serves the public, creating the impression that the public facility is a gift from the billionaire rather than an institution the public funded through taxes for decades before the billionaire’s check arrived.
Fact-checking is often presented as a neutral, technical practice. You verify a claim. You check the sources. You publish the result. Simple.
This is wrong. Fact-checking is not neutral. It never has been.
In an environment saturated with lies, stating a fact is a political act.
Let me show you why.
Journalism schools teach fact-checking as if it were plumbing. A mechanical process. Find the claim. Locate the evidence. Match them up. Publish the verdict.
A thing happened in the world yesterday. Within minutes, thousands of people had opinions about it. Within hours, those opinions had hardened into positions. Within a day, the positions had calcified into identities, and anyone who questioned them was treated not as a fellow thinker but as an enemy.
No one, in this entire process, made an argument.
I want to be specific about what I mean by “argument,” because the word has been so thoroughly degraded by popular usage that many people believe they are making one when they are doing nothing of the kind.
I hear the phrase constantly. From journalists, from politicians, from well-meaning advocates. “The system is broken.” They say it about healthcare, about housing, about criminal justice, about education. They say it with frustration and sincerity, and they are wrong.
The system is not broken. It is working.
This is not a semantic distinction. It is a diagnostic one, and getting the diagnosis wrong means getting the treatment wrong.
When you say a system is broken, you imply that it was designed to produce a different outcome than the one it is producing. You imply that the current outcome is an error – a malfunction, a deviation from the intended purpose. And the logical response to a malfunction is repair: fix the broken part, and the system will resume its proper function.
I am going to make an argument for long reading, and I am going to make it at length, because the argument cannot be made otherwise without contradicting itself.
The premise is straightforward: understanding complex ideas requires sustained attention, and sustained attention requires time, and the current information environment is systematically hostile to both. The consequence is not merely a decline in reading habits. It is a decline in the capacity for the kind of thought that reading enables – the slow, cumulative, self-revising engagement with an argument that is too complex to be apprehended in a summary.
A song is written for a specific moment. A march, a strike, a movement. The melody is simple enough to be sung by a crowd. The words are direct enough to be understood without explanation. The song does its work: it unifies, it sustains, it gives a collective voice to a collective act.
Then the moment passes. The march ends. The strike is settled or broken. The movement achieves its goal or does not. The song, having served its purpose, is filed away.
I built a media operation that was owned by its community. The community of friars at Niepokalanow owned the printing presses, the radio station, the distribution network. No external shareholder demanded returns. No investor pressured us to maximize engagement. The people who produced the media and the people it served were the same people, and this alignment of interest was the foundation of everything we built.
I am going to make the case that this model – community ownership of communication platforms – is not a historical curiosity but the most practical solution to the fundamental misalignment at the heart of corporate social media.