From where does the legitimacy of a nation state spring? For a long time, European nations sat comfortably alongside one another under the Divine Right of Kings, which in one form or another had been the background assumption for monarchy for more or less the entirety of civilization. In ancient China, the equivalent political philosophy was the “Mandate of Heaven”, which much as in Europe transpired to be a fairly flexible arrangement. Consider as just one example the infamous Three Kingdoms period, whereby the evident possession of military and political power was taken as proof that the favor of the heavens had shifted – hence the Han empire’s violent shattering into three rival thrones.
King James I, whose legacy today is more associated with his edition of the Bible than with the political scuffles of his reign in Scotland and England, was a vocal advocate of his own Divine Right, which put him into conflict with his parliament. In 1604, the minutes of Westminster record a spat over James’s attempts to interfere with both the law and the free speech of his subjects, whereupon Sir Thomas Ridgeway had cause to speak of the “misinformation” entailed in some of his Royal Majesty’s positions concerning his relationship with the commoners. The situation worsened under the reign of James’s son and successor, King Charles I, for whom a novel solution to the problem of recalcitrant royalty was proposed, and they cut off his head.
This memorable break with the claim of an indisputable heavenly authority provides a crucial backdrop to a certain troublesome colony making its break with the British Crown, and declaring itself a republic. In the Americans’ Declaration of Independence, however, it is still God who is asked to bear witness to the legitimacy of their new nation, even if the derivation of its power as a state is grounded upon “the consent of the governed”. Echoes of Divine Right still linger on in the poetic wording of the pledge of allegiance that my sons (as dual citizens of the British Crown and its former colony) make at school: “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
From the Divine Right of Kings we thus come to the secular rights of citizens under that oddly diverse set of legal arrangements collected under the whimsical title of “democracy”, exemplified by the United States of America. The assumption still remains that it is the consent of the governed from which the legitimacy of democratic states springs. However, this is starting to become rather problematic – especially and ironically within the USA itself.
The assumption still remains that it is the consent of the governed from which the legitimacy of democratic states spring. However, this is starting to become rather problematic – especially and ironically within the USA itself.
It is now quite common for people of one political stripe or another to declare that such-and-such a ruler is “not my president”, and thus ignore inconvenient laws or lead half-baked insurrections, at which those on the “other team” are understandably horrified. So much for the “indivisible” nation.
The question is, what steps into the breach left by Heaven and its Kings now that the consent of the governed is no longer sufficient to justify democratic legitimacy? Fortunately, the internet has an answer for everything. Accidentally harkening back to Sir Thomas’s invocation of “misinformation” to keep his King well-behaved, Google and its Silicon Valley pals have stepped up to ensure that “we the people” – indeed “we the peoples” – are equally defended from the horrors of misinformation and its freshly minted friends, disinformation and malinformation.
Not content with the tremendous power that the world’s most influential file index already possessed, in 2020 Google partnered with a group founded by the BBC to curtail what they called “election misinformation”. It was the opportunity to crackdown on “vaccine misinformation” that seems to have drawn Google to the table. As Tim Davie, the then-director general of the Beeb, stated in December 2020, when announcing the expanded alliance: “The Trusted News Initiative partners will continue to work together to ensure legitimate concerns about future vaccinations are heard whilst harmful disinformation myths are stopped in their tracks.” Those “partners” thereafter included not only the BBC and Google (who own YouTube), but also the Associated Press and Reuters, not to mention Meta (who own Facebook and Instagram), Microsoft, and pre-X Twitter.
Harkening back to Sir Thomas’s invocation of “misinformation” to keep his King well-behaved, Google and its Silicon Valley pals have stepped up to ensure that “we the people” are equally defended from the horrors of misinformation and its freshly minted friends, disinformation and malinformation
The most remarkable aspect of the Trusted News Initiative since Google and its tech buddies joined in is the singular lack of balance regarding what is or is not deemed “misinformation”. In their original context of election interference, we might recall the TNI’s crackdown on the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop under the claim that it was “Russian disinformation” (it turned out it wasn’t). Or we might ponder the remarkable lack of follow-through on that commitment to ensuring that legitimate concerns about vaccinations would be heard. Either way, the behavior of this media power bloc is far better explained by its collective political allegiances than by anything ever stated as policy.
Google and its allies are willing to take quite considerable steps to ensure that viewpoints differing from their own – including true-but-inconvenient interpretations of the evidence – do not circulate. Among these ideas that apparently cannot defend themselves, three have proved particularly controversial. That everything ever called a vaccine is unequivocally safe and effective. That the needs of women with penises outrank those of women with vaginas. That climate change is such a sufficiently grave existential threat that it necessarily eclipses all other environmental harm, including that caused by technological attempts to offset climate change. On each of these fractious political topics, Google’s media chums are willing to prevent any unauthorized views from circulating, purely out of their noble commitment to “fighting disinformation”.
Explicating these examples of Google’s metaphysical commitments is quite unnecessary: if you are aligned with their beliefs, you will not be swayed by anything I say, and if not, you will already have encountered myriad problematic aspects in all three cases. However, it’s worth contemplating the widely-circulated claim that “vaccines are safe and effective”. This could mean one of two things. It could mean that regulatory oversight is a sufficiently effective safeguard that everything we call a vaccine can be trusted both to work as claimed and to cause negligible harm. Or it could mean that the technology deployed in the creation of vaccines is so reliable there’s no need for long-term studies. Never mind euphemistic “misinformation”, this latter claim is simply false, while the former assertion flounders on the apparent collapse of pharmacovigilance after so many nations acted as if the evidently ludicrous second claim were necessarily true. If the Trusted News Initiative is serious about ensuring that “harmful disinformation myths are stopped in their tracks”, it should consider disbanding as a productive means to that end.
If I am overreaching in treating Google as the figurehead for this alliance of institutions, both corporate and governmental, I hope my shorthand for what Michael Shellenberger has dubbed “the censorship-industrial complex” still serves to underline the key point: that the political power possessed by Google and its allies is such that it has become far more than a mere kingmaker. Google has grasped the secular descendants of the Mandate of Heaven by their epistemic roots: if the legitimacy of a nation state cannot yet be entirely divorced from the consent of the governed, then genuine power rests in the capacity to influence, justify, and control the governed’s beliefs. What greater dominion over democracy could there be than deciding what voters can or cannot believe?
Google has grasped the secular descendants of the Mandate of Heaven by their epistemic roots: if the legitimacy of a nation state cannot yet be entirely divorced from the consent of the governed, then genuine power rests in the capacity to influence, justify, and control the governed’s beliefs.
This very crisis was what the Westminster parliament faced with King James when he rode roughshod over the norms of government in his time and, once again, disagreements about “misinformation” and the curtailment of free speech lie at the heart of it all. If nobody is touting the Divine Right of Tech Companies, neither is anybody in a position to propose cutting off Google’s head in order to set matters right. It is hard to avoid accepting that whatever limited power royalty might still possess today is dwarfed in both scope and scale by the informational kingdom of Google Rex. Against swearing fealty to this usurping behemoth, the only plausible rebellion is to hold fast to freedom of thought and speech and to declare, as loudly as we can: vivat disputatio, long live discourse!
