George Will: How the 'velocity of stupidity' is making America worse

Now 84, conservative Washington Post columnist George Will has vivid memories of U.S. conservatism's pre-Donald Trump era as well as the media's pre-internet era. Will, an ex-Republican turned independent and very much a Never Trumper, believes that President Trump has been terrible for the conservative movement — although he is also a frequent critic of the left. And in his October 17 column, Will argues that technology plays a major role in accelerating "the velocity of stupidity" and driving America's bitter "polarization."

"A sound of morning silence is coming to Atlanta," Will explains. "The sound of newspapers landing on sidewalks in residential neighborhoods will vanish when, at year's end, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, joining a national trend, stops publishing print editions. Turning trees into paper, marking it with ink, trucking it to people who deliver it to readers — soon, this laboriousness might be as forgotten as men with tongs lugging large slabs of ice for home iceboxes. The waning of the 400-year era of newspapers is, however, about cultural changes more momentous than the efficiency and convenience of written words presented digitally."

Will emphasizes that while the digital presentation of news is quite efficient, that efficiency is coming at a major price.

"The sentences that are being read are shorter and simpler," Will observes. "The Economist says an analysis of hundreds of New York Times bestsellers 'found that sentences in popular books have contracted by almost a third since the 1930s'…. But sophistication is not in the repertoire of journalism devoted to what Andrey Mir, a Canadian, calls the retribalizing of society. In his epigrammatic 2020 book 'Postjournalism and the death of newspapers,' Mir, a self-described 'media ecologist,' says the media lost agenda-setting power when the internet enabled crowdsourced agenda-setting."

Will continues, "As advertising dollars migrated to the internet, newspapers, which hitherto were funded from above by selling readers to advertisers, became funded from below by selling themselves to readers. Newspapers encouraged readers to think of subscriptions as donations to political causes. Subscribers enjoy their 'slactivism,' outsourcing their activism through 'donscriptions' — subscriptions thought of as donations."

Media's "new business model," Will laments, "depends on polarization, amplifying readers' irritations and frustrations."

"What Mir calls the 'commodification of the Trump scare' has completed journalism's transition from 'making happy customers' for department stores and other advertisers, to 'making angry citizens,'" the conservative columnist warns. "For what Mir calls post-journalism, the next challenge is to find a successor scare…. Time flies. Until the 1840s, information could move at about 35 miles per hour…. Today, information matters less relative to opinions, and opinions are distilled to attitudes."

Will adds, "These are performative, and they compete for attention with upwardly spiraling shrillness. Hence this distinctively 21st-Century achievement: the velocity of stupidity."

George Will's full Washington Post column is available at this link (subscription required).