2026-02-25
35 分钟This is The Guardian.
Hello, my name is William Davis and I'm the author of Why Can't We Agree on What's True Anymore?
which was published as a Guardian Long Read in September 2019.
I was first drawn to this topic
because by the time it was published in 2019 there'd been a good three years or so of discussion of what was often called post-truth which was an anxiety that developed particularly in the wake of the Brexit referendum and Trump electoral victory of 2016 that the facts regarding what was going on in politics,
the economy, international relations, and so on,
had lost influence over the way in which democratic debate was conducted.
But one of the things I was interested in was that a particular mentality was widespread across the public of,
first of all, distrusting mainstream media.
Meanwhile,
there was much greater allegiance to a vision of truth in which it's possible to get directly to the data itself that well I need to be able to see the video evidence I need to be able to see the actual data leak or the actual the cctv footage and one of the things I was interested in this piece is that now that we live in this age where we kind of take
for granted,
really, that all human behavior is probably being captured much of the time by something,
whether it be a camera or a screen or the geo-tracking of a particular phone or whatever it might be.
And of course,
the ultimate example of this right now would be something like the Epstein scandal where there's political crisis that just rolls on and on and on regarding what actually is going to get shown to the public so that we can actually find out a truth.
But one of the things that I argue in the piece is that even when that happens that tends not to resolve the kinds of disagreement which are often much more kind of political and ideological in nature and that it's a myth that kind of raw data can ever really resolve some of those sorts of polarised disagreements.
I think in the years
since I wrote the piece in 2019 many of the trends that I discuss in it have really I suppose persisted and deepened and one of the examples of that we have moved more and more into a kind of videographic public sphere by which I mean that the sorts of information that are perceived to carry authenticity are often those which are captured as video on smartphones and that this is what you can trust and believe in,
and the more that diverges from the narratives that are being provided to you by journalists,