The Structure of Data: A Protection of Fact

Arming Individuals to defend the reality from in the present day’s warfare on information

Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the floor, these current additions to our every day vocabulary seem to have little in widespread. However collectively, they’re driving an epistemic disaster: a multi-front problem to America’s means to tell apart truth from fiction and elevate reality above falsehood.

In 2016 Russian trolls and bots practically drowned the reality in a flood of faux information and conspiracy theories, and Donald Trump and his troll armies continued to do the identical. Social media firms struggled to maintain up with a flood of falsehoods, and too usually didn’t even appear to attempt. Specialists and a few public officers started questioning if society was shedding its grip on reality itself. In the meantime, one other new phenomenon appeared: “cancel tradition.” On the push of a button, these armed with a cellphone might gang up by the hundreds on anybody who ran afoul of their sanctimony.

On this pathbreaking e book, Jonathan Rauch reaches again to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to elucidate what he calls the “Structure of Data”—our social system for turning disagreement into reality.

By explicating the Structure of Data and probing the warfare on actuality, Rauch arms defenders of reality with a clearer understanding of what they have to shield, why they have to do—and the way they will do it. His e book is a sweeping and readable description of how each American will help defend goal reality and free inquiry from threats as far-off as Russia and as shut because the cellphone.