Category Archives: News & Content

Autism Conspiracies That Will Never Die

Futuristic megaphone broadcasting data across a neon cityscape

The other day, I read a report from a new study that reassures us that circumcision does not lead to autism.

To be honest, I didn’t even know that was a concern, but apparently two studies more than a decade ago said it might be. And many have been worried about it ever since.

Now, I’m not naive enough to think that this new scientific study will be enough to allay these fears. Male circumcision will continue to be one of the many things (on a list that includes childhood vaccines, the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy, environmental toxins and Wi-Fi radiation) that some will say is linked to the dramatic increase in diagnosed autism cases in recent years.

I’m not here to take sides on this debate. I will believe what I believe and you all will most likely do the same. What I’m interested in is how autism itself and its prevalence became such a hot topic in the current debate on healthcare, because it is a perfect example of the interplay between our current media ecosystem and how we chose to inform ourselves.

First of all, here are some facts we can all probably agree on. The diagnosis of autism has skyrocketed in the past few decades. The US Center for Disease Control now estimates that 1 in 31 eight years olds are somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Twenty-five years ago, the prevalence rate of autism diagnosis was one in 150. If you look at the numbers alone, that is almost a five-fold increase. It’s hard not to ask what might be causing this explosion in autism.

However, as Mark Twain noted, there are lies, damn lies – and statistics. If you look at these numbers the natural assumption would be that something has caused the explosion of autism in the past 25 years. There must be something to blame. But most professionals would agree that most of the increase, if not all of it, is simply due to the fact that we now recognize autism and diagnose it much more often than we used to.

In fact, saying that something is causing autism to explode would be roughly analogous to saying something in the last century is causing left-handedness to explode. One hundred years ago, the incident rate of left-handedness in the general population was less than 3%. Today, it’s about 11%. There are almost four times as many lefties today as there was in 1926. But the simple reason behind that statistic is this; today left-handed people are allowed to be left-handed. In schools 100 years ago, it was beaten out of them with a cane and by tying their hand behind their back and forcing them to use their right hand. Left handedness was thought to be an omen of evil. That is why Latin-based languages use some variation of the word “sinister” to refer to anything to do with the left.

But autism lives in a special place in the conspiracy-minded heart. It has all the prerequisites of something that triggers knee-jerk reactions. It is not well understood. The cause is not fully known. It is a thing that causes understandable worry on the part of a parent. And – perhaps most of all – based on the numbers alone, it appears likely that a system we should trust has let us down.

This makes autism the perfect battle ground for information vs misinformation. Science can – and has – tried to do its best to put the conspiratorial fears about the causes of autism to rest. Study after study has come out saying that there is no link between vaccines, or Wi-Fi radiation, or – apparently – male circumcision and autism. There may be correlation, but no causation has been found.

Unfortunately, this information is delivered through the same screen as the TikTok video damning the MMR vaccine as irrefutably being the cause of the autism explosion in the past few decades. There is no qualification, no vetting of source material, no threshold of reliability to cross over before the message is streamed to us. The 10-year observational study done with impeccable methodology is summarily dismissed based on a 30 second video done in the kitchen by a 32-year-old influencer with zero medical training but who happens to have 450,000 Instagram followers.

In fact, in terms of audience reach, there is no comparison. The most popular cognitive scientist I know is Steven Pinker from Harvard, a man with a 46-year academic career who has written 17 books, most of them on how brains operate. In fact, one is literally called “How the Mind Works.” He has repeatedly debunked the link between autism and vaccination, saying that, “Vaccines are one of the best things our sorry species has ever accomplished. But the link to autism is The Lie That Never Dies.”  

His Instagram follower count? A paltry 44,000.

It was never a fair fight.

Our Digital World is No Place for the Elderly

My family is discovering – firsthand – just how the world could care less about the elderly.

My stepfather just passed away. He was just a few months shy of his 91st birthday. For the past 10 years, my sister has been looking after the official side of Dad’s life – things like his income tax, pension, healthcare and other related needs. All these things have rushed online as local service counters and real, live humans whose job it was to assist their customers have virtually disappeared. The inner workings of these programs lie on the other side of either a website or a call centre. Neither of these things are designed for the elderly. They are barely functional for any of us, including those much younger than my stepdad.

For the past decade, as Dad has aged, it has become increasingly apparent that our world is not designed for the superannuated. In the last few years, his loss of hearing made it impossible for him to understand someone talking at a normal volume in the same room, let alone someone on a telephone call. This led to him being unable to follow the gist of most conversations. My sister, who has the patience of Job, acted as translator and guide for Dad but was constantly flummoxed by bureaucratic rules and privacy regulations that left no wiggle room for the elderly. A typical phone interaction (usually after waiting over an hour on hold) would go something like this:

My sister: “Hi, I’d like to ask about my father’s income tax return for 2025.”

Phone Agent: “I’m sorry, we can only give information to the person who files the return.”

“He’s here with me. I have his permission.”

“I’m sorry, I have to speak to him.”

“He can’t hear you. That’s why I’m calling.”

“I need to hear it from him. Can you hand him the phone?”

“He won’t hear you, but sure, knock yourself out.”

(Dad puts the phone to his ear, having no idea what’s going on. You can hear the person talking but Dad just looks at us blankly. My sister takes the phone back.)

“Your dad was unable to answer the security question I asked him to verify his identity.”

“As I said – repeatedly – Dad can’t hear. Can you ask me the question and I’ll ask him?”

“I need to hear the answer from him.”

“Is there an office we can go to and talk to someone in person?”

“No, all our support functions have moved online. You can use our website. Does your dad have an online account?”

“My dad has never touched a computer in his life. How would he have an online account?”

You get the gist. These scenarios always played out along the same lines but were typically spaced out so my sister had time to regain her incredible patience before the next episode. But when a person passes, suddenly all these things must be dealt with right away. Her days have been filled with circuitous phone calls trying to tie up Dad’s loose ends, stymied at every turn by the fact that while the system didn’t support him when he was alive, it’s doubly difficult now that he’s gone. Much as I’d like to help, I live in a different province and don’t have the legal authority to deal with these issues.

My Dad was caught on the far side of the grey digital divide. For the past few decades, technology has enabled companies and government services to offload the effort required to deliver their services or products from themselves to us, their customers. We now pump our own gas, do our own banking, configure our own phone plans, administer our own insurance policies and monitor our own pensions and income tax accounts. Programs and companies have gleefully eliminated physical locations and laid off customer support people to cut costs by transferring those functions to us. The only contact we have is either through a woefully designed website (I can tell you the Canadian Revenue Agency’s website is a usability nightmare) or a call center where one-hour waits are considered the norm.

Most of us, given no alternative, grudgingly jump through the hoops required to do what we have to do, which is what these agencies and companies used to do for us as part of their job. We struggle through archaic interfaces, learn new platforms every few years, constantly have to reset passwords and scramble through our various devices and authentication apps to sneak past the impenetrable security hurdles of two step verification. J.R.R. Tolkien made gaining access to Mordor look easy in comparison.

I understand that online fraud and identity theft is a real concern, but at some point, typically north of the age of 70, it gets harder for us to keep up. As our brains age, they tend to rely more on remembered strategies and routines because learning something new gets harder and harder. The world used to reward this accumulation of knowledge with age. Now it just kicks it to the curb like last week’s trash.

There are exceptions, of course. The elderly who are familiar with computers and technology can push the grey digital divide back substantially. But this was not my dad. In his life, he was a farmer, a sawmill worker and a chimney sweep. None of those things – especially in a time several decades past – required learning how to use a computer. The world literally passed Dad by. Just how far he was left behind has become acutely apparent to us in the last few weeks.

Through this all, we keep asking ourselves one very frightening question – If it was this hard for Dad, what is it like for those elderly who don’t have a person like my sister to help them?

What happens to them?

A Short History of the Long Legacy of Literacy

A man reading an old book with a quill pen and ink in a large, wooden library

Literacy has had a good run as a definer of social status. But after over 5,000 years, from ancient Mesopotamia to today, the ability to read and write and its role as a signifier of class power might finally be passé.

This is predictable, I guess. Once something becomes universal – or nearly so – it ceases to be special.

In the earliest days of days of scratching something down on paper (or papyrus) writing was the crucial link between royalty and common folk. Rulers issued edicts that required some type of record keeping. One of the first examples we have of this is from 3100 BCE and is a clay tablet that tracked beer allocation with symbols and tally marks. This type of record keeping was entrusted to scribes and priests, making them both the messengers and recorders of gods and kings.

For the next 4500 years, literacy remained a gift restricted to the few. In 1440 AD, fewer than 10% of the population in Europe could both read and write. But then, a goldsmith in Mainz, Germany was about to change the course of literacy. Johannes Gutenberg invented the first commercially practical system of mass printing using moveable type. The first mass medium was born. But it’s impact on literacy would take a while.

In perhaps the first example of media technology being well ahead of its market, the first books mass printed tended to be aimed at the same audience as before the printing press. Books were expensive, tended to be either religious or legal and were intended for clergy, universities and wealthy household. Printing would take a few centuries before it would bring literacy to the commoner.

The way this happened is fascinating to consider when we look at the impact of mass media on society. Literacy was always a way to maintain control and was historically concentrated with the church, universities and government. But the advent of mass printing began to loosen that chokehold. It began to put pamphlets and other printed forms in more and more hands, providing a printed communication infrastructure that allowed – for the first time – the questioning of authority rather than the preservation of it.

Between the Protestant Reform movement (1500 – 1600s), the Scientific Revolution (1600 – 1700s) and the Enlightenment (1700s – 1800s), the traditional seats of power were held up for scrutiny. These interlocking movements that transformed western society were all powered by the printed word. Eventually, the Republic of Letters emerged; an international society of thinkers, scientists and philosophers that reshaped how we looked at the world. And this free-form exchange of revolutionary ideas was all communicated through the written word. Literacy began to trickle down to the common people.

In the 1800’s, we began to strive for universal literacy. Public education instilled basic reading and writing skills in much of the youth of Northern Europe but was spotty in the rest of the world. Reading for leisure began to take off, now that there was a market for newspapers, magazines and novels. Writers like Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, Jane Austin and the Brontë sisters became household names. Finally – it seemed – literacy’s day had come!

But now, after waiting in the wings for thousands of years, after two short centuries, literacy seems to be waning. In a recent Atlantic essay, Rose Horowitch cites some sobering stats from recent surveys: fewer than half of all adults read a book of any kind in 2022 (from the National Endowment for the Arts). And, according to the American Time Use Survey, the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day dropped from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023.

It’s not just that we’re reading less. We’re also reading dumber. Books are simpler, sentences are shorter and vocabularies are shrinking. Books are following the leads of movies, TV shows and video games – more sensation, less intellectualization. Many of the books that do end up on the best seller charts are actually written for young adults – aimed at those with a grade 9 reading level.

Reading anything in long form is in danger of disappearing. What has happened in this market is that the middle of the market has been squeezed out to both ends. There has been an explosion of short form content, designed to be scanned quickly and digested in bite sized pieces, ala social media. But in a weird counter to this general trend, there is still a market for long-form essays in prestigious publications. In this market driven development, numbers might be down, but engagement is up, with readers spending significantly more time with longer pieces, giving more opportunity for publishers to push ads to them.

What is generally true across the board, however, is that the golden age of the printed word appears to be over. As I myself have seen in looking at the results of hundreds of eye tracking studies, we are instinctively drawn to content that instantly piques our senses: images, sounds, moving pictures. From there it’s a coin toss where we might go next – on to the next bright shiny object or to partake in that drudgery called reading, where we actually have to think about what we’re looking at.

Tucker Carlson, the Transactionalist Journalist

Man wearing a red 'Make America Great Again' cap in a library setting

Tucker Carlson is the proverbial worm in the midst of a turn. He – apparently – has now decided the approval for the Donald Trump he has been paying off-and-on support to for the past 10 years is – off again. A few weeks ago, he said this about his past lip service to Trump and the MAGA Movement, “It’s a moment to wrestle with our own consciences. We’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be. And I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”

But is he? Or is this just another pivot from a journalist that has more switchbacks in his past than an Olympic slalom skier?

There are those that are applauding Carlson for what seems to be an ethical epiphany, reasoning that it’s never too late to see the light and are quick to forgive him his past sins.

I say, “Not so fast.”

Tucker Carlson is a transactional journalist. Whatever comes out of his mouth is what he feels will immediately do him the most good. It’s not that he didn’t fully recognize Trump for what he was. He has, multiple times in the past. And he has gone on the record saying so. But then he would willingly swallow those reservations to be a MAGA team player and publicly support a figure about whom he privately said in a text, “I hate him passionately.”

This most recent turn likely comes from being released from the far-right editorial restraints of Fox News and now seeking an audience through his own podcast. This recent gnashing of teeth and clutching of pearls can simply be chalked up to just another pivot in search of an audience.

And, perhaps, this is one pivot too far. David A. Graham, a staff writer at The Atlantic, said this about Carlson and other prominent right-wing mouthpieces who have recently looked at Trump askance, “These pundits deserve no amnesty. Their second thoughts are wise, but to have erred so badly, when so many other commentators and journalists saw the truth, disqualifies them from being taken seriously on politics again.”

The casualty from all this transactionalism is trust. And it is just that – trust – that has been hardwired into us as the fundamental yardstick by which we judge all our own transactions. Yes, the real world is a place of pragmatic transactions, but when you strip trust and fairness from those transactions, you lose the very bearings you need to move from transaction to transaction with any sense of direction.

In Game Theory, there is a thought experiment called the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. This is transactionalism boiled down to its essence. Together with your partner, you can choose to either cooperate for mutual benefit or betray them for individual gain. If you only play one round of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and you go first, the best option is to betray your partner. But if you play multiple rounds, the winning strategy is something called “Tit for Tat.”

Although the name doesn’t imply it, this is a strategy that embeds trust and co-operation. You start from that foundation and only move to retaliate if you’re betrayed by your partner. The “Tit for Tat” strategy self-corrects over time, consistently moving you back to your base of trust.

It’s this long-term ethical direction that is sacrificed by transactionalists like Tucker Carlson. It’s unfortunate that this ethical rot has crept into journalism, but a far more worrying concern is the fact that the U.S. – and much of the rest of the world – has now embraced transactionalism stripped of trust as their default position. This is true of the current administration, the billionaires who have eschewed their own personal ethics to support it, and every level of government, business and society propping up this transactional regime.

Increasingly in today’s world, there is no trust. There are only decisions made solely to secure immediate gains and exchanges built to amass profit and power. It is transactionalism run amok. And – as any good Game Theorist will tell you – the only possible outcome from that is mass betrayal.

No One Was Laughing this April Fool’s Day

Men in fedoras at typewriters in a vintage newsroom with fish in unusual places.

Last Wednesday was April Fool’s Day. But I hardly saw any April Fool’s pranks. When I realized that, I thought to myself, “This is a sign of the times.”

April Fool’s probably started in 1582, when much of Europe switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, which moved New Year’s from April 1st to January 1st. Those that still clung to the old calendar were called April Fools.

An alternative theory comes from Spring festivals that celebrated jokes, chaos and role reversals, like the Roman Hilaria or the medieval European “Feast of Fools.”

But April Fool’s really hit its peak when Mass Media joined in the fun. It was the BBC in Britain that got the ball rolling in 1957, with their famous “Spaghetti Tree Harvest” news documentary. Thousands jammed the BBC switchboards asking how they could grow their own spaghetti trees. The April Fool’s News Story became a BBC tradition.

Other media outlets followed in the BBC’s footsteps. In 1977, that stiff-lipped stalwart of British journalism, The Guardian, published a travel supplement for “San Serriffe” – a tropical nation made up of two main islands, Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. The leader, General Pica, had a palace in the capital city of Bodoni. Anyone with some graphic design experience would soon realize the entire 7-page special supplement was full of typography puns, but it seems the British weren’t exactly that “type” – U.K. travel agencies received several calls wanting to book trips there.

Brands thought elaborate pranks would show how hip and relevant they were and jumped on the April Fool’s bandwagon in the 1980’s and 90’s. Taco Bell “bought” the Liberty Bell in 1996 and renamed it the Taco Liberty Bell. In 1998, Burger King introduced the Left-Handed Whopper. Even Big Tech joined the party with that wacky sense of humor computer engineers are known for. In 2013 Google introduced Google Nose, a search engine of smells. It included “Wet Dog” and had a Street Sense feature.

Ironically, Google also introduced Gmail on April 1st, in 2004, blurring the line between prank and product launch. No one believed you could get a free email account with 1 GB of storage. Competitors offered 2 to 4 megabytes.

Let’s fast forward to April 1, 2026. On that day – last Wednesday – crickets. There was no ha-ha to be found. And I thought, “What a sad state the world is in when we can’t even poke fun at ourselves.”

Maybe it’s because “Fake News” is now a real thing, 365 days a year, not just on April First.

Also, if you’re going to play a prank now, it’s probably going to be on social media. And how the hell can you compete with the wall-to-wall misinformation madness that fills everyone’s feed, every single day of the year.

But then I realized that attitudes towards April Fools have followed an arc directly related to how we get our information through media.

From the 1950s to the 90s, information was scarce and mass media outlets were the gate keepers. Trust was implied in the relationship, and it was that trust that was slyly mocked at on April the First. The April Fool’s prank hearkened back to the Medieval tradition of role reversal on Feast of Fools Day, when traditional hierarchies were inverted. This meant that – for one day – even the sober British media could play the fools. It was all done in a “wink wink” kind of way.

Then, in the late 90s and early 2000s, information became abundant. Those playing a prank expected to be fact checked. It was a way to drive viral traffic to online sources of information, which is why brands started to jump aboard with their own April Fool’s Pranks.

But now, in the age of misinformation and A.I. slop, every day is April Fool’s Day. Information (and misinformation) isn’t just abundant, it’s a pollutant. It’s everywhere and it’s often intentionally toxic. The very thing we used to smile about is a force that’s shattering our society.

It’s hard to laugh at that.

How Seniors Get Sucked into Falling for Bad Information

It happened to me last Thursday. I was tired, I was jet lagged and I was feeling like garbage. My defenses were down. So, before I realized it, I was spinning down a social media sewer spiral. My thumb took over, doom scrolling through post after post offering very biased commentary on the current state of the world, each reinforcing just how awful things are. Little was offered in the way of factual back up, and I didn’t bother looking for it. My mood plummeted. I alternated between paranoia, outrage and depression. An hour flew by as my brain was hijacked by a feckless feed.

And I know better. I really do. Up in my prefrontal cortex, I knew I was being sucked into a vicious vortex of AI slop and troll baiting. Each time I scrolled down, I would tell myself, “Okay, this is the last one. After this, put the phone down.” And each time, my thumb would ignore me.

This is not news to any of us. Every one of you reading this knows about the addictive nature of social media. And you also know the pernicious impacts of AI generated content spoon fed to us by an algorithm whose sole purpose is to hog tie our own willpower and keep our eyes locked on the screen. I also suspect that you, like I, think because we know all this, we have built up at least some immunity to the siren call of social media.

But I’m here to tell you that social media has gotten really, really good at being really, really awful for us. I didn’t notice it so much when I was on my game, busy doing other things and directing my attention with a fully functional executive brain. But the minute my guard slipped, the minute my cognitive capacity shifted down into a lower gear, I was sucked into the misinformational sh*thole that is social media.

Being a guy that likes to ask why, I did exactly that when the jet lag finally dissipated. Why did I, a person who should know better, fall into the crappy content trap?  “Maybe,” I said to myself reluctantly, “it’s a generational thing.” Maybe brains of a certain age are more susceptible to being cognitively hijacked and led astray.

A recent study from the University of Utah does lend some credence to that theory. Researchers found that adults older than 60 were more likely to share misinformation online than younger people. This was true for information about health, but a prior study showed an even higher tendency to swallow bad information when it came to politics.

Lead researcher Ben Lyons set out to find why those of us north of 60 are more likely to be led astray by online misinformation. Spoiler alert – it doesn’t have anything to do with our brains slowing down or lower information literacy rates. It appears that older people can sniff out bullshit just as well as younger people. But it turns out that if that information, no matter how dubious it is, matches our own beliefs and world view, we’ll happily share it even if it doesn’t pass the smell test.

Lyons called this congeniality bias. I’ve talked before about the sensemaking cycle. In it, new information is matched to our existing belief schema. It it’s a match, we usually accept it without a lot of qualification. If it isn’t, we can choose to reject it or we can reframe our beliefs based on the new information. The second option is a lot more work and, it seems, the older we get the less likely we are to do this heavy lifting. As we age, we get more fully locked into who we are and what we believe. We’ve spent a lot of years building our beliefs and so we’re reluctant to stray from them.

Of course, like all things human, this tendency is not a given nor universally applied. Some older people are naturally more skeptical, and some are more inflexible in their beliefs. Not surprisingly, Lyons found those that leaned right in their political affiliations tend to be more belief-bound.

But, as I discovered this past Thursday, these information filtering tendencies are dependent on our moods and cognitive capacity. I am a naturally skeptical person and like to think I’m usually pretty picky about my information sources. But this is true only when I’m on my game. The minute my brain down-shifted, I began accepting dubious information at face value simply because I happened to agree with it. I didn’t bother checking to make sure it was true.

It sounded true, and that was all that mattered.

Happy 25th Birthday, Wikipedia!

Wikipedia is perhaps the last remaining vestige of the Internet we thought we’d build, two and a half decades ago. It was born of the same stuff that fueled open-source software and freeware, open access to knowledge and a democratization of data. This was part of the Internet that was supposed to make the world a fairer and more knowledgeable place, narrowing the gap between the haves and have nots. It was an “information superhighway” that would connect the global village and, according to the McGraw-Hill Computer Desktop Encyclopedia of 2001, “help all citizens regardless of their income level.”

We know better now. But despite the Internet’s hard pivot towards capitalism, Wikipedia is still around. It just celebrated its 25th birthday a few weeks ago. According to Wikipedia itself, there are 18 edits to its content every second from Wikipedians from all over the world. There are versions in over 300 different languages, and all of this receives 10,000 page views every second. There are over 7 million articles in the English version, and 500 new articles are added per day. In the last 25 years, almost 12 million users have edited the English Wikipedia at least once.

This was not what Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger envisioned in 2001, when they started Wikipedia. It was just supposed to be a collaborative sandbox that would allow for editing and drafting of articles which would then be included in their other project, Nupedia. Nupedia was more centrally controlled and structured. This side project used the wiki platform developed by Ward Cunningham in 1994. Wiki is Hawaiian for “quick” and Cunningham thought it had a little more panache than just calling his platform something like “Quickweb.”

The concept behind wikis is all about creating and empowering collaborative communities, opening the platform up to anyone who wanted to contribute. Wales and Sanger believed this would be a perfect way to quickly draft new entries at scale, but they still envisioned themselves and a team of editors as the gatekeepers who would control what would show up in Nupedia. But the pace of contribution soon outstripped the ability of Nupedia’s editorial team to keep up. The decision was made completely open the doors to contribution and make Wikipedia the end destination.

This completely open concept was a preview of what was to come. It may have been the one of the first times we saw what would become a common theme: a web-based platform unleashing the potential of a latent market by connecting an open community of suppliers (in this case, editors and contributors) and an audience of consumers at scale. It would be repeated by Uber, AirBnB and others.

The difference with Wikipedia was that – in this case – no one was making any money. The information was free. As a comparison, the competitor, the online version of Encyclopedia Brittanica, charged a yearly subscription of $50.

This upset of the information market didn’t go down well with everyone. This was especially true for academics and researchers. Students were warned not to use Wikipedia as a source. It was roundly criticized for its open nature and lack of peer review. To this day, much of the academic community still looks down its nose at Wikipedia, even though at least one academic study has shown that Wikipedia’s accuracy is on a par with the Encyclopedia Britannica and far outstrips it terms of the number of entries and the sheer breadth of content. This ongoing hostility towards Wikipedia is unfortunate, because the very same audience that sneers at it could be its most valuable contributors, especially in their own areas of expertise.

Of course, part of this lingering resentment could come in part due to the glacially-slow resistance to change from academic publishers, many of whom are still clinging to exorbitant subscription models. These publishers are resisting to the bitter end writer and iconoclast Stewart Brand’s feeling that “information wants to be free.”

Despite all this, Wikipedia has not only survived but thrived. It is still very much a part of the online information ecosystem, 25 years after its birth. And yes, it might be an anachronistic and naïve throwback to a more idealistic time, but it has proven at least one maxim of the open-source community. Eric. S. Raymond, in his seminal and prescient essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, called this maxim Linus’s Law, named after Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel. The law states, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”  

Or, to paraphrase, “Given enough eyeballs, most Wikipedia entries are mostly accurate.”

What Authoritarianism Gets Wrong

Like the rest of the world, my attention and intentions got hijacked over the weekend by what is happening in Minneapolis. I did not intend to write this post, but I feel I must.

What is happening right now is – plain and simple – authoritarianism. Some – like Jonathon Rausch in the Atlantic –  have used the word Fascism. Whatever label you put on it, it has the same flawed logic behind it – the belief that might makes right. It’s the same calculus of cruelty and coercion that the school yard bully uses: I’m bigger than you so do what I want you to do.

Here’s the problem with that formula. Resolve, resistance and resiliency aren’t things that can be consistently quantified. They are not static. The bewildering thing about humans when we’re faced with a crisis is this: the harder you push, the harder we’ll push back.

This is the reality of the red line. We accept adversity only up to a certain point. Past that point, individual concerns give way to that of the greater good. We join together into a coalition, dismantling the smaller walls that used to separate us to unite and fight a greater enemy that threatens us all. Rather than being beaten down by adversity, it raises us up.

We have always done this. Journalist Sebastian Junger documents one example in his excellent book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. During the London Blitz, Hitler believed he could bomb Londoners into submission. For 56 days he tried, dropping over 12,000 tonnes of bombs on the city, sure that it would break the will of Londoners. On one day alone, in September 1940, over 700 tones of high explosives and 86,000 incendiaries fell, killing 1,436 people. But the resolve of Londoners never wavered. In fact, it grew with adversity. They kept calm and carried on.

I’ve seen it firsthand in my own community. Our city, Kelowna, B.C., has been threatened with wildfires a number of times. In 2003, our city of 150,000 lost over 200 homes in one night and one third of the city was evacuated.

I have never seen this city come together like it did then. Neighbours helped neighbours. Those of us who weren’t evacuated opened our homes to those that were. In many cases, spare bedrooms and pull-out couches were occupied by total strangers. Crisis centers were swamped with offers of food, clothing, blankets and volunteer assistance.

This is how we’re wired. We band together in times of trouble. We are tribal creatures. As Junger found in his research, psychological health actually seems to improve in times of crisis. He cites a 1961 paper by American sociologist Charles Fritz, which opens with this sentence, “Who do large-scale disasters produce such mentally healthy conditions?” Junger writes, “Fritz’s theory was that modern society has gravely disrupted the social bonds that have always characterized the human experience, and that disasters thrust people back into a more ancient, organic way of relating. Disasters, he proposed, create a ‘community of sufferers’ that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others.”

Humans evolved to join together to overcome obstacles. Our modern world doesn’t often ask that of us. But right now, in Minneapolis, that’s exactly what’s happening as thousands of ordinary people are coordinating protection patrols to document authoritarianism. They are using the encrypted Signal platform to communicate and direct observers to emerging trouble areas. They have established their own protocols of behaviour. It is, in the words of Robert F. Worth, again writing in the Atlantic, “a meticulous urban choreography of civic protest.”

At least two Minnesotans have paid as much as they mortally can, with their own lives.

This is the wrench that humans throw into the crushing cogs of authoritarian behaviour: the more you crack down on us, the stronger we will become as we join together to push back against you.

Of all the places on Earth, Americans should know this.  I can think of one more example of this that is particularly relevant. It happened 250 years ago, when American colonists joined together to protest against the authority of the British Crown.

We shouldn’t forget that.

The Cost of Not Being Curious

The world is having a pandemic-proportioned wave of Ostrichitis.

Now, maybe you haven’t heard of Ostrichitis. But I’m willing to bet you’re showing at least some of the symptoms:

  • Avoiding newscasts, especially those that feature objective and unbiased reporting
  • Quickly scrolling past any online news items in your feed that look like they may be uncomfortable to read
  • Dismissing out of hand information coming from unfamiliar sources

These are the signs of Ostrichitis – or the Ostrich Effect – and I have all of them. This is actually a psychological effect, more pointedly called willful ignorance, which I wrote about a few years ago. And from where I’m observing the world, we all seem to have it to one extent or another.

I don’t think this avoidance of information comes as a shock to anyone. The world is a crappy place right now. And we all seem to have gained comfort from adopting the folk wisdom that “no news is good news.” Processing bad news is hard work, and we just don’t have the cognitive resources to crunch through endless cycles of catastrophic news. If the bad news affirms our existing beliefs, it makes us even madder than what we were. If it runs counter to our beliefs, it forces us to spin up our sensemaking mechanisms and reframe our view of reality. Either way, there are way more fun things to do.

A recent study from the University of Chicago attempted to pinpoint when children started avoid bad news. The research team found that while young children don’t tend to put boundaries around their curiosity, as they age they start avoiding information that challenges their beliefs or their own well-being. The threshold seems to be about 6 years old. Before that, children are actively seeking information of all kinds (as any parent barraged by never ending “Whys” can tell you). After that, chidren start strategizing the types of information they pay attention to.

Now, like everything about humans, curiosity tends to be an individual thing. Some of us are highly curious and some of us avoid seeking new information religiously. But even if we are a curious sort, we may pick and choose what we’re curious about. We may find “safe zones” where we let our curiosity out to play. If things look too menacing, we may protect ourselves by curbing our curiosity.

The unfortunate part of this is that curiosity, in all its forms, is almost always a good thing for humans (even if it can prove fatal to cats).

The more curious we are, the better tied we are to reality. The lens we use to parse the world is something called a sense-making loop. I’ve often referred to this in the past. It’s a processing loop that compares what we experience with what we believe, referred to as our “frame”. For the curious, this frame is often updated to match what we experience. For the incurious, the frame is held on to stubbornly, often by ignoring new information or bending information to conform to their beliefs. A curious brain is a brain primed to grow and adapt. An incurious brain is one that is stagnant and inflexible. That’s why the father of modern-day psychology, William James, called curiosity “the impulse towards better cognition.”

When we think about the world we want, curiosity is a key factor in defining it. Curiosity keeps us moving forward. The lack of curiosity locks us in place or even pushes us backwards, causing the world to regress to a more savage and brutal place. Writers of dystopian fiction knew this. That’s why authors including H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury and George Orwell all made a lack of curiosity a key part of their bleak future worlds. Our current lack of curiosity is driving our world in the same dangerous direction.

For all these reasons, it’s essential that we stay curious, even if it’s becoming increasingly uncomfortable.

Saying Goodbye to our Icons

It’s been a tough couple of months for those of us who grew up in the 60s and 70s. Last month, we had to say goodbye to Robert Redford, and then, just over a week ago, we bid farewell to Diane Keaton.

It’s always sobering to lose those cultural touchstones of our youth. It brings us to forcibly reckon with our own mortality. Our brains play that maudlin math, “I remember them being young when I was young, so they can’t be that much older than me.”  We tend to conflate the age difference between us and those we watch when we’re young, so when they’re gone, we naturally wonder how much time we have left.

This makes it hard to lose any of the icons of our youth, but these two – for me – felt different: sadder, more personal. It was like I had lost people I knew.

I know there are many who swooned for Bobby Redford. But I know first-hand that an entire generation of male (and possibly female) adolescents had a crush on Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall. Her breakout role was one of those characters that carved a permanent place in our psyche. “Annie Hall-esque” became a descriptor we could all immediately understand – quirky, cute, with insecurities that were rendered as charming. We all wanted to be her port in a storm.

Diane Keaton and Robert Redford seemed like people we could know, given the chance. If circumstances ever caused our paths to cross, we felt we could have a real conversation with them. We could talk about meaningful things and perhaps connect on a personal level. There was depth below the celebrity and the heart of a real person beating there. We may have just known them through a screen – but they used those platforms to build a connection that felt real and human.

I wondered what it was about these two – in particular – that made the connection real. It was something that went beyond their talent, although their talent was undeniable. One only has to watch an example of Keaton’s master acting with Al Pacino in The Godfather: Part Two. After a visit with her estranged children, she is being pushed out the door before ex-husband Michael Corleone comes home, but he walks in while she’s still standing in the doorway. No words are said between the two for almost a minute. Everything is conveyed just by their expressions. It’s a scene that still rips my heart out.

It was also not about celebrity. In fact, Redford and Keaton both eschewed the life of a celebrity. Robert Redford found his life away from Hollywood in the ranch lands of Montana and Diane Keaton – well – in typical Keaton fashion, she just kind of ignored being a celebrity. In an interview with Vanity Fair in 1985, she said, ““I think I like to deny it (being famous). It suits me to deny it. It’s more comfortable for me to deny it, but I suppose that’s another one of my problems. Look, I don’t think it’s such a big deal. I don’t think I’m that big a thing.”

So, if it wasn’t their talent or their celebrity status, what was it about Keaton and Redford that forged such a strong bond with many of us? I think it may have been three things.

First, it was about consistency. They were judicious about what they shared with us but what they did choose to share was rock solid and reliable. Whatever was at the core of who they were – it shone through their performances. There was a foundation to each Redford and Keaton performance that was both essential and relatable. You couldn’t imagine anyone else playing these roles. 

The authenticity of their humanness was another factor. Robert Redford’s acting style was restrained and typically underplayed, but his charismatic good looks sometimes got in the way of the depth and vulnerability he tried to bring to his performances. He famously tried out for the title role in 1967’s The Graduate (which went to Dustin Hoffman) but was turned down by director Mike Nichols because he couldn’t see Redford as a believable “loser.” “Let’s put it this way,” Nichols reportedly said, “Have you ever struck out with a girl?” “What do you mean?” Redford replied.

Keaton was a little different. She embodied vulnerability in every role she played. She wasn’t perfect, and that was the point. We loved her imperfections. The characters Diane Keaton played were neither aspirational nor cautionary, they were revelatory. We connected with them, because we could see ourselves in them.

Finally, we knew there was depth to both Diane Keaton and Robert Redford. They believed passionately in things and weren’t afraid to speak out on behalf of those beliefs. I would have loved to have a conversation with either of them about serious things, because I feel I would have walked away with a perspective worth discovering.

It’s sadly ironic that for two icons who shared so much screen time with us, they never shared it with each other. They were tentatively scheduled to appear in a 2012 Holiday comedy but it never made it to the screen.

I will miss having both Robert Redford and Diane Keaton in my world. They made it better.