The “information system” should provide understanding, which is needed for the practice of good citizenship. But it is not working well. This started with the rise of advertising in the late 19th century, when industrial output rose so dramatically that consumers had to be persuaded – on the basis of impulses and sentiments – to buy what they wanted rather than what they needed. When this sort of talk became obviously effective, public relations emerged to make businessmen, like Rockefeller, look good, and then, during World War I, propaganda was used to make the government look less warlike than the nasty “Huns.” Thus a powerful language of selling was introduced into American life, preferring efficacy rather than Enlightenment standards of truth, veracity, and reason. Scholarly explanations for how this all worked started with Marshall McCluhan who said that each “medium” – such as books or the telegraph – controls what kind of messages we can transmit. Then Neil Postman pointed out that the medium of commercial television will “amuse us to death” by ignoring our real needs in favor of peddling profitable wants. Thus Postman alerted us to how, since he wrote, getting our attention via slippery language has become the dominant business model for corporations today and has corrupted the marketplace for ideas.

The information system, now dominated by giant corporate platforms like Meta and Google, fractures our thinking by offering up, without qualitative distinction, every sort of fact and fantasy. The purveyors of such “sludge” offer a “confirmation” excuse by saying that they are merely confirming our preferences, some more reasonable than others. Actually, they have corrupted the marketplace of ideas promoted by thinkers such as John Stuart Mill who envisioned a post-Enlightenment forum that would moderately and respectfully assess propositions in order to try out “tentative truths,” thus seeking “knowledge” rather than “opinion.” But the current “marketplace for ideas,” conducted via “information system” instruments such as televisions and smart phones, is overloaded with so much information and disinformation that the shared understandings known to history as “common sense” cannot emerge from there, and citizenship is thus deprived of its major potential source of “wherewithal.” In such a time, community-wide “narratives” could take up the slack and point citizens in desirable directions. But such “Stories,” according to Neil Postman and Yuval Harari, do not emerge, because they are destroyed by relentless competition or undermined by academic debunking of historical Stories incorrectly framed before the rise of Science and Reason.