Messages in a Bottle

The news: Two articles from this issue were first published on our website in response to unfolding events: “The Deeper Question Raised by the NIH Grant Overhaul” (February 10) and “If the Reagan Airport Crash Was ‘Waiting to Happen,’ Why Didn’t Anyone Stop It?” (February 11).

A Future for the Family… : “A Future for the Family: A New Technology Agenda for the Right,” a statement of principles, was published at First Things on January 29. Its signatories include several of our editors and authors. “Stop Hacking Humans,” in this issue, elaborates on its themes.

… and for Dynamism too: On February 24, we co-hosted “Dignity and Dynamism: The Future of Conservative Technology Policy,” a one-day conference at the American Enterprise Institute that explored the themes of the essays “A Future for the Family” and “Stop Hacking Humans.” In addition to two panels that featured several of our authors, editor Ari Schulman conducted a one-on-one conversation with keynote speaker Katherine Boyle, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, after her address.

Why the fight against misinformation failed: On December 5, editor Ari Schulman spoke on a panel at the American Enterprise Institute’s “What Comes Next in the Information Wars?” conference. An excerpt of his remarks:

The basic premise of the misinformation paradigm is that we’re confronting a supply problem. And that if you can, through various elaborate means, tamp down on the supply, then you will reduce the problem.

But what is the nature of the demand for misinformation? It is that the people who control the main supply of information — trust is lost in them. Well, the reason that trust is lost is that people believe that the authorities are trying to control what information they hear and how it’s interpreted. Then they find out that actually, as a positive program, people in charge are trying to control what information they hear and how it’s interpreted. That’s exactly what they’re suspicious of. Their demand and their desire for alternative sources of information, including bad information and lies, is going to go up. I think that’s the basic feedback loop that this paradigm has been caught in for the last 10 or 15 years.

Squibs: On the day of its online publication, Alexander Raikin’s “A Pattern of Noncompliance” is featured in testimony to Scottish Parliament ~ Nicholas Carr’s “The Tyranny of Now” is selected as an Article of Note at Arts & Letters Daily ~ Matthew C. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, the bestselling book based on an article in our Summer 2006 issue, is included in the University of Austin’s freshman reading list ~ the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist’s memos to the incoming president endorse the idea of a president’s council on AI from our Winter 2024 issue ~ Robert Zubrin is interviewed on NPR about “What it would take to send people to Mars” ~ the introduction to “How the System Works” is reprinted at The Free Press ~ the debut installments of “How the System Works” receive millions of impressions on social media.

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