Trump Hides the Truth

 

An Architecture of Ignorance

Gas prices were hovering just below $3 a gallon in late February before Donald Trump decided to attack Iran. Due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the national average peaked in early May near $4.50, a 50 percent increase. When Trump capitulated in June and paused bombing, the average price dropped to just above $4. With expectations of protracted conflict ahead, it’s now around $4.40. We know all of this because gas prices are public and easy to monitor, and because the AAA motor club keeps a well-respected calculator. We also know that fear of measurables—the price of gas, the cost of food, the stock market—is the primary, perhaps the only, discipline on Trump’s anti-democratic instincts. Numbers gave citizens ammunition to apply political pressure. That is what numbers are for. They show us where the problem is, and whether anything we did about it worked. But the numbers that matter most to a democracy are not as easy to track. Unemployment, educational attainment, what pollutes the air outside a chemical plant; this data needs to be primarily collected and distributed by the federal government. And over the course of his second term, Trump has systematically dismantled this capacity. He is building what we call an “architecture of ignorance,” and its cost is the slow disabling of democratic accountability itself. One of us is a historian, the other an engineer who spends his days inside the small discipline of observability, the science of inferring a system’s internal state from its outputs. The distinction that discipline draws is between monitoring and seeing. Monitoring tells you the server is powered on. Observability tells you whether it is doing its work as intended. A system that loses observability has not necessarily failed; rather, it has become unknowable. It may be running correctly, or it may have begun to fail an hour ago. From the outside, there is no way to tell. In airplane terms, an altimeter goes dark, and whether the aircraft is at 30,000 feet or 600 is a question that admits no answer until impact. That is how the systems analyst sees Trump 2.0. Monitors all over the place are going dark. The historian’s eye runs the other way, toward precedent. Societies that lose the ability to measure themselves rarely register the loss as it happens. They register it afterward, in the accumulated weight of consequences that only become legible once it is too late to do anything about them. Between the two of us, we are terrified by what we are watching. One of us can see the mechanism failing in real time; the other knows how this kind of story tends to end.