The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters

by Thomas M. Nichols

The most obvious problem is that the freedom to post anything online floods the public square with bad information and half-baked thinking. The Internet lets a billion flowers bloom, and most of them stink, including everything from the idle thoughts of random bloggers and the conspiracy theories of cranks all the way to the sophisticated campaigns of disinformation conducted by groups and governments. Some of the information on the Internet is wrong because of sloppiness, some of it is wrong because well-meaning people just don’t know any better, and some of it is wrong because it was put there out of greed or even sheer malice. The medium itself, without comment or editorial intervention, displays it all with equal speed. The Internet is a vessel, not a referee. This, of course, is no more and no less than an updated version of the basic paradox of the printing press. As the writer Nicholas Carr pointed out, the arrival of Gutenberg’s invention in the fifteenth century set off a “round of teeth gnashing” among early humanists, who worried that “printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery.”2 Those medieval naysayers weren’t entirely wrong. The printing press was used to mass-produce Bibles, to teach people to read, and eventually to empower the literacy that drives so much of human freedom. Of course, it also enabled the dissemination of insanity like the Protocols of the El...