Lots of talk about the rise of conspiratorialism has focused on ideas like ‘epistemic bubbles’ — basically, the PhD version of filter bubbles. In that account, consensus and public trust become impossible because different groups live in different worlds with different facts etc. Sure, fine, of course, whatever. But Incidents like this shooting point at a different problem; if I wrote a pop doorstop book of social theory about it, I might call it the Anxiety of Uncertainty, knowing full well that the first response would be ‘duh’ — but it’s the lingering doubt that matters. Judge Salas worked on cases involving Deutsche Bank, Epstein, and serious gangs — the kind of work that could make many and varied enemies. So, when a fake Fedex guy rolls up and opens fire on her family and the police start looking for motives, the result is a now all-too-familiar moment of doubt. Was it basically street-dealer-level? A shadowy pedo cabal? Some cockeyed two-bit plot? Plain-vanilla racists? Some mutant hybrid of a few of those options? Who the hell knows… On one level it doesn’t even matter because, before — and after — the cops turn up serious leads, conspiratorialists will poison the well. tl;dr: Bubbles are a crap metaphor because they imply some kind of interiority, when the problem is the opposite — that there are no such boundaries. Like many of the problems we face, a lot of analysis fails because it focuses on negation — in epistemic / bubble theory, the failure of consensus. But that uncertainty isn’t just the failure of a nostalgic model, it’s the creation of a new epistemology of uncertainty.Updated Jul 20, 2020 1:41:30 pmJul 20, 2020 1:41:30 pm