This newsletter is my part of an ongoing conversation among colleagues who’ve had a rough week. I share two or three pieces of the puzzle that feel are most important, hazard a guess about what to expect next, and offer at least one useful thing to do.
Hi friends,
This felt like a big week. I hate discussing them in the same sentence, but between starting the week with the State of the Union address and ending it with the Stand Up For Science rallies, I spent a lot of time thinking about the importance of spectacle - of photos, posters, and slogans - in shaping our understanding of historical moments.
The vast majority of people experience the vast majority of events second- and third-hand, at best, through hot takes and headlines, photos and video clips. We piece together our gist of what’s happened through a few fragments of content, in a process heavily shaped by our networks. Being a citizen in a digital era requires us to build new habits and skills to cope with exactly this sensemaking challenge, something I’ll come back to at the end of tonight’s debrief. But for me, at least, the overarching question of the week is what are the principled and proportionate responses to what we are seeing unfold? How do we tell the story of what’s happening to ourselves?
I’ll say this plainly - even the calmest, most straightforward recitation of the facts as we know them makes a person sound like a raving conspiracist. Constraining my list of “what’s happening” to just a few bullet points is getting harder each week. Mapping out the likely chains of consequence is even more daunting, and is something I tend to do only within my innermost circles of trust.
But I believe we must have these conversations, and prepare to frankly discuss moves and counter-moves. To do so, we have to stay focused and not flooded. But we can do it one step at a time.
This was week 7. Let’s get into it.
Budget negotiations. The deadline is midnight on March 14. This was set when Congress failed to allocate funding to the federal agencies before the new fiscal year began on October 1st. This is important and more complicated than usual because our constitutional checks and balances hinge on Congressional authority over spending. If I understand the situation properly, we are looking at either an entirely partisan budget or another government shut down. For a full rundown on what that would mean, I think this Reuters reporting is solid.
For one specific and useful action: check out this Community Air Sensor workshop on March 18 & 19. Despite the cancellation of the original EPA event, the organizers are committed to making sure people have accurate, accessible air quality data. I think it’s a brilliant example of what science for the common good can look like. Register yourself, forward it to folks who should attend, or use it as inspiration for what we can do together.
Finally, I want to go back to the ideas that I started tonight’s debrief with - understanding how we shape the narratives of our moment. Tonight I want to talk about the input side of that equation.
Back in January, I attended a National Press Club event about digital protections for journalists, who are currently facing record levels of violence and harassment. María Salazar Ferro, who is the Director of Newsroom Safety and Resilience at The New York Times, laid out a helpful distinction between physical, digital, and psychological safety and argued that online threats rarely translate into physical violence. The goal is to get inside your head. It’s an insidious tactic to intimidate and distract.
It strikes me that we are facing the same corrosive dynamics right now. I’ts just that the gleeful sadism is being delivered at scale and in places I never expected to see it, like press releases from the EPA. So I just wanted to wrap up by talking about how to think about protecting yourself and your networks from this specific kind of threat. For me, it helps to pause and say to myself, “This is propaganda and I’m the target.”
That focuses me on what I might actually need to do with a piece. Maybe I need to keep an eye on a specific actor, maybe I need to metabolize it to extract a new frame or watchword, or maybe I just need to avoid it entirely. Maybe you need to do that too. But what NONE of us should be doing is poisoning our information networks with this garbage.
I recognize that our morale and our attention is precious. As I plow through all the things I need to read to write this weekly debrief, the idea of “critical ignoring” helps get me through. I hope it helps you too.
Liz