The Uncanny Valley: Medicines, Censorship & The Problem of Truth

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2021-07-05 14:00:06

This is Rebel Wisdom’s Third Newsletter, largely written by Ed Prideaux. We release one every two weeks — to get it sent directly to you, click on our website and add your email address: www.rebelwisdom.co.uk

In the age of COVID-19, the question of how to find truth can be a case of life and death. As we try to make sense of the different narratives at play, we inevitably encounter deep rooted problems within our information landscape.

Right now, the focus is on big tech censorship, and especially around the efficacy (or not) of the drug Ivermectin, as well as various concerns about the vaccines. Armed with warnings, strikes and demonetisations, YouTube and the tech firms — on the authority of the WHO and the CDC — have staged suppression and censorship on a number of alternative, Ivermectin-sympathetic channels, including the Dark Horse channel run by the evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein. The conversation has fallen into an age-old binary: free speech versus censorship, with most uniting against the heavy hand of the tech monopolies.

In the third edition of the Rebel Wisdom newsletter, we’re going to complicate the picture (hopefully in a useful way). We believe that at a subtler level, what we’re seeing is the media’s version of the Uncanny Valley: the strange, fast-expanding space between the mainstream and the alternative. This Uncanny Valley is the reason why it is so hard to find and evaluate truth right now, and crossing it is of existential importance if we’re going to fix our sensemaking.