"Higgins has recently come up with a framework to help understand our information crisis: Democracies function only when we can verify truth, deliberate over what matters, and hold power to account. All three are faltering, he argues. In this conversation, Warzel and Higgins trace the incentives that broke the feed: how algorithms reward outrage, how bespoke realities form, why counterpublics can devolve into virtual cults, and what simulated accountability looks like in practice."
"In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel sits down with Eliot Higgins, founder of the open-source investigative collective Bellingcat, to examine how our public sphere slid from healthy debate into what Higgins calls disordered discourse. Higgins is an early internet native who taught himself geolocation during the Arab Spring and later built Bellingcat's global community. He has spent the past decade exposing war crimes and online manipulation with publicly available data."
Eliot Higgins developed methods of open-source investigation, teaching himself geolocation during the Arab Spring and building Bellingcat's global community. Democracies function only when citizens can verify truth, deliberate over priorities, and hold power to account; all three capacities are deteriorating. Algorithms amplify outrage and incentivize polarizing content, enabling bespoke realities and fragmented counterpublics that can harden into virtual cults. Simulated accountability arises when performative attribution and shallow signals substitute for genuine oversight. The MAGA coalition exemplifies a patchwork of disordered counterpublics. Restoring a shared reality requires systemic changes to incentives, verification practices, and mechanisms for meaningful accountability.
Read at www.theatlantic.com
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