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Now you look 10, 15 years later, and the content moderation debates aren’t about should you have nipples or not in videos and nudity or things like that — it’s about truthiness. It’s about what happens when everybody is allowed to upload content that essentially shows their version of reality versus a consensus version of reality.

Online platforms aren’t transparent about their decisions—which leaves them open to claims of censorship and masks the true costs of misinformation.

I think we can date the fall of the tower to the years between 2011 (Gurri’s focal year of “nihilistic” protests) and 2015, a year marked by the “great awokening  on the left and the ascendancy of Donald Trump on the right. Trump did not destroy the tower; he merely exploited its fall. He was the first politician to master the new dynamics of ... See more

The many analysts, including me, who had argued that Trump could not win the general election were relying on pre-Babel intuitions, which said that scandals such as the Access Hollywood tape (in which Trump boasted about committing sexual assault) are fatal to a presidential campaign. But after Babel, nothing really means anything anymore––at least... See more