Now Things Get Real

Keep calm and panic responsibly

I wasn’t on the East Coast yet when 9/11 happened. I was a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I walked out of my room to my roommate, telling me a plane had hit one of the towers. I came out of the shower a little while later to them falling.

Initially, I was in a daze. I started walking to class but couldn’t go. I walked to the Badger Herald - the student newspaper I worked at - and it was buzzing with people covering the story. I felt so guilty - here, I was supposed to be a journalist (I was a journalism and political science major), and my first instinct wasn’t to cover the story. 

That event changed me like it did so many. How is another story for another time, but I can’t let this day pass without acknowledging it. If you haven’t read Garrett Graff’s book, “Only Plane in the Sky,” I highly recommend it.

Sometimes, I think about what the 2004 election would have been like if 9/11 hadn’t happened, especially now. It followed a highly contentious 2000 election that went to the Supreme Court. I think sometimes people forget how tense things were then. It’s different today but similar.

Last night, we might have seen the only debate between the two presidential candidates. (Though I threw some hot takes on Threads before I went to bed that I think Trump will be asking for a second debate by Thursday. By the time I woke up Punchbowl was reporting that the Harris campaign was already asking for one so we shall see.) Kamala won, but not as much as people think she did. She had sky-high expectations. His were in the basement. She did fantastic in her made-for-the-internet facial expressions. She also did a tremendous job needling Trump throughout, but I don’t think it’s enough to move the numbers of who people will vote for. We have a long way to go, and we are solidly in the next phase of this campaign. To emphasize the transition, Taylor Swift has weighed in.

Now, things get real.

So many people have been planning for these next five months - I say five because I’m stretching this all out until Inauguration Day - and a little beyond. But there is a difference between being prepared and being ready for what you’ll live through.

Things never unfold just like you thought they would. There are twists and turns you weren’t expecting. You won’t know all of the facts. We’ll need to be patient. We’ll need to be discerning. We’ll need to trust but verify. In other words …

We need to panic responsibly.

This can be easy to forget when the moment's emotions envelope you. The Democrats are coming off the high of Biden dropping out, Harris becoming the nominee and doing well in the debate. The Republicans are coming off the whiplash of their candidate being shot, a mostly successful convention, and then a candidate and party knocked off their game by what happened on the Democratic side … and a bad debate.

But the polls are still tied. This is anyone’s election. I do not think this is over because Taylor Swift endorsed Harris, and Harris did well in the debate. That would be a very, very wrong conclusion to make.

As an Axios headline recently blared, “America braces for a perfect storm of election chaos.” They outline five conditions for chaos:

1. A desperate Donald Trump

2. A nail-biter like no other

3. A battleground legal brawl

4. The specter of violence

5. A cesspool of disinformation 

These are correct, but they miss some things.

1. We must also be worried about voters' reaction if Trump beats Harris. Emotions are high everywhere, and while both candidates will likely not use the same tactics should they lose, voters will likely be angry and may take to the streets. We just need to be prepared for it.
   

2. There are processes for working through this, but they take time. Patience isn’t necessarily a virtue in today's society, but we’ll likely need it as votes are counted, legal challenges are made, and election officials do their jobs. Yes, we’re on some new territory, but I also take comfort in having a system to work through them.
   

3. Foreign adversaries’ tactics aren’t as new as we think, and we are more prepared than ever to detect and stop them. When the Justice Department announced sanctions on Russia Today for working with American influencers to push out content last week, I was surprised by various headlines discussing how these were new tactics. I asked my former Facebook colleague Olga Belogolova, who has spent years studying Russian disinformation if this was true. She wrote up a great post on Threads outlining that the tactics aren’t that new but that the transparency from the U.S. government is notable (and good). She also points out the challenges tech companies face in handling Tenet Media (the company who managed the influencers) and that these operations don’t seem to be making much impact.
   
   Talking about Russian, Iranian, Chinese, or any foreign interference is sexy. We should cover it. But let us be careful not to assign it more influence or importance than we should. Let’s also recognize the years-long efforts by the government, tech, civil society, and others to make these operations harder.
   

4. Some of tech is prepared, some of them are not, and no one is ready. Let me explain. Being prepared means you have trained, you’ve gone through scenarios, you’ve set up processes. Being ready means you are mentally ready to handle what you will go through. Think about the difference between athletes who all prepare for the Olympics but those who have competed before know better how to handle being in the games than those who are doing so for the first time. As I said above, you can do all the scenario planning you want, but there are still known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Things will happen that make a decision more complicated. A post’s content will go right up to the edge of being violating or not. People will disagree about what the platforms should do. They’ll make decisions with imperfect information, little sleep, and under a microscope.
   
   They will also make decisions haunted by hindsight, as Charlie Warzel described Mark Zuckerberg a few weeks ago. I love that phrase. It explains not just Meta but all the tech companies who have been through a few elections and have the scars to show. They’ll make decisions trying to think five steps ahead of the consequences of those decisions. Take the handling of hacked and leaked materials. In 201, platforms were criticized for doing too little. After 2020, they got hit doing too much on the Hunter Biden story. One hopes in 2024, they’ll get it just right, but in all likelihood, what seems like the right decision at the moment will look different later.
   
   Because of all these uncertainties, I don’t think they are ready for what we all are going to live through. I don’t think any of us are, despite the fact that we might have done everything we needed to be prepared.
   
   This means it’s ok to be anxious about what might unfold but I feel better that there are people who have gone through this before to make it a little easier. 

5. The AI pendulum will continue to swing. First, it was AI would destroy democracy, and this is the last human election. Then it became maybe it is not as bad as we thought. On Thursday Oprah is releasing a special I already know is going to drive me bonkers based on the guests she has lined up. My guess is she’s going to swing it back towards panic again. I hope I’m wrong. Many will be looking for any indication that fears around the new big, bad technology are coming true. We’ll have examples for sure, and some could be huge, but let’s just be sure to separate the signal from the noise.

The good news about all of this is that we have agency. Too often, it’s easy to feel like this is happening to us and we have no control. That’s true for many things, but we do have control over how we react and the information we consume. Be intentional about how you approach this time. Do an audit to make sure your information habits fit those intentions. Recognize the things that trigger you. They may seem small, but added up, they can go a long way in ensuring we get through this as unscathed as possible.

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