But it also means that to care about and tend to our dissolute knowledge systems can be to care for and tend to our own understandings—not just to paternalistically seek to march other people forward like pawns toward attitude formation and political activation in ways we think are good. It is to de-instrumentalize our understandings of one another... See more

There is a lot—like a lot a lot—of research suggesting that using social media to keep up with news does not actually inform us but does makes us feel more informed.

Most of the explanations that I think are in my brain are actually dotted lines in the shape of real explanations, but with very little inside them. They are ghosts of knowledge. And I won’t know what I don’t know until I fuck around and find out.

Even those of us who think we know things and believe that we’re “paying attention” know far less than we think we do. We are mostly skating on a brittle scrim of knowledge over an unperceived void, blithely trusting the resources around us to fill in for our spotty brains on a just-in-time basis.