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Simple Sabotage Field Manual - Cecily

2025-12-02T20:00:17.000Z

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How To Paint With Sound - Cecily

2025-12-02T20:00:17.000Z

Craig Ogden | Aeon | 28th November 2025 | U

The guitarist’s palette

In the hands of a great musician, the gloriously simple guitar can create the most complex works of art. Here’s how

by Craig Ogden

In the hands of a great performer, the classical guitar can mesmerise audiences with its beauty, emotional power and subtlety. The 20th century was dominated by the Spanish guitar legend Andrés Segovia, who took the instrument from the salon to the large concert halls of the world, aided in part by developments in guitar-making that produced louder instruments. A later generation included superb players such as John Williams and Julian Bream (sometimes described as the Apollo and Dionysus of interpretation). Other notable virtuosi, including Ida Presti, David Russell, Pepe Romero, Manuel Barrueco, Roland Dyens, Kazuhito Yamashita, and the brothers Sérgio and Odair Assad, have enchanted listeners around the world with their musicianship. In the 21st century, younger players such as Xuefei Yang, Ana Vidović and Gabriel Bianco are reaching new audiences via YouTube and social media.

What’s distinctive about the classical guitar is its simplicity. Ultimately, it’s basically a wooden box with strings attached and a fretted neck, a bridge, a saddle, and tuning pegs. Classical guitar has no inbuilt amplification, and the sounds are produced very directly. While many other instruments are based on that fundamental design, the guitar is simple in that you’re just plucking the strings, as opposed to the relative complexity of bowing a violin, viola or a cello with horsehair that’s been rubbed down with rosin. With the classical guitar, you don’t even use a pick. The sound is created by carefully shaped and maintained fingernails on the plucking hand of the performer, which is overwhelmingly the right hand (many left-handed people play the guitar right-handed).

So there is a glorious simplicity to the guitar, yet that belies a complexity: what’s particularly distinctive about it is that numerous frequently used notes can be played in multiple places on the fretboard.

The top string of the guitar, the one that carries the melody most of the time, is tuned to an E above middle C, and that exact same note exists not just as the open first string, but also on the fifth fret of the second string, the ninth fret of the third string, and the 14th fret of the fourth string – four playable places in all (in principle, there is also a fifth place, as the note can be played on the 19th fret of the fifth string too, but that’s unlikely to be used). It’s the same pitch, the same note and the same note name, but the tonal quality, texture, flavour or quality of the sound differs on each string that is sounded. Middle C on the piano is a single key on the keyboard, while middle C on the guitar exists in three comfortably usable places. It’s found on the first fret of the second string, the fifth fret of the third string, and the 10th fret on the fourth string, and again they have contrasting tonal qualities or richness.

The author Craig Ogden plays E at the same pitch in four different places on the classical guitar

On the guitar, all those notes that can be played in different places have different timbres and they combine differently with other notes that are also replicated in multiple places, to create distinctively different tonal qualities. That’s our palette – it’s what we use to paint music in particular ways on our instrument. Guitarists talk a lot about creating tonal variety, about finding ways of changing the sonic character of the same pitch. Choosing where on the fretboard to play notes and chords has a huge impact on the mood and character of the music being interpreted.

Each positional choice you make produces sounds with a different character

With standard tuning, the bottom five notes on the guitar – E, F, F sharp, G, G sharp – can be played only on the open and first four frets of the sixth string. But once you go above the A at the fifth fret on the sixth string (which is the same pitch as the fifth string played open), we have entered into the world of identical pitches playable in more than one location on the fretboard. The most places you would find any single pitch practically usable on the guitar is in four different positions. For many notes, there are three comfortably possible locations. But when you build chords around those, that means that chords can be voiced or played in multiple different positions as well. Open strings have a different timbre from strings that are stopped, so that’s a factor too.

If you’re sight-reading on the piano, the notes you’re reading can be sounded only by playing one specific key on the keyboard. But the guitar is very different. Each positional choice you make produces sounds with a different character. It’s not infinitely complex, but complex enough. With that comes a fascinating and wide range of expressive possibilities.

So, the guitarist faced with, for instance, a crotchet or a quaver, sees a note at a certain pitch, but that on its own doesn’t determine where to play it. Reading, for example, an E that corresponds to the top E string of the guitar (the top space of the treble clef musical stave), the logical assumption might be that you play this as an open first string. But if, as is commonly the case, you have to play other notes that can be played only on that string at the same time, or overlapping with it, it becomes entertainingly complicated. A whole series of decisions both technical and interpretative come into play. There is a great deal of creative puzzle-solving that goes on when learning a new score.

The guitarist also has to decide how long each note will last. If left to itself, the note will die away, but sometimes performers will stop a note from resonating at a certain point, or may let it sound on for longer than the official duration that’s written into the score. Guitar notation is notoriously vague when it comes to specifying how long certain notes should, or shouldn’t, be sustained. How the notes fade away can be part of the beauty of a performance, as can silences within a piece, or at the very end, after the final note or chord has died away – those few magic seconds before the guitarist looks up to take applause.

The guitar can produce sounds that are bright, tinny, thin, rich, sonorous, percussive, soupy, plummy, sweet, seductive, harsh, and so on – classical guitarists speaking to one another can sound like wine experts who know what they mean by ‘chalky’, ‘fruity’ and ‘cheeky’. These qualities are not just the result of the string and fret choice. The way the guitarist plucks the string matters too, the angle of attack of the fingernail and the strength of the finger movements. There are also two very distinct ways of striking the string, known as rest stroke and free stroke, sometimes referred to using the Spanish terms apoyando and tirando.

The apoyando is richer in tone, and used for emphasis. The tirando is typically lighter and can be nimbler

With a free stroke (tirando), you pass your carefully crafted fingernail across the string, following through above the remaining strings towards the palm of your hand, whereas with a rest stroke (apoyando) you push down into the guitar with the fingertip coming to rest on the adjacent string, so that the string vibrates in a different direction – more up and down rather than straight across the body of the instrument. This typically produces a rounder, richer and usually slightly louder sound that is audibly different from tirando. This is especially noticeable in recordings that, in effect, courtesy of close microphone placements, put the ear of the listener closer to the guitar than would normally be the case in a concert hall. The apoyando or rest stroke is usually richer in tone, and is used for emphasis or accent, often to bring out a line of melody. The tirando or free stroke is typically lighter and can be nimbler. If you listen to a scale played free stroke, and then the same scale played rest stroke, there is an obvious difference: there is a slightly more percussive, less smooth or legato effect to playing scales with repeated rest strokes, an effect often exploited in flamenco and flamenco-influenced music.

A simple scale played tirando (free stroke) and then apoyando (rest stroke)

When it comes to playing chords, these can be plucked together simultaneously, or arpeggiated (when the notes of a chord are sounded individually, in a rising or descending order); they can be strummed with a thumb or finger, or sounded in more complex rasgueado rhythmic, multi-finger strumming patterns that can also involve slapping the strings with the open hand. Some guitar composers also use pizzicato. For bowed string instruments, pizzicato indicates that the strings are to be plucked rather than bowed – in that sense, the guitar is played pizzicato most of the time. Hence, on the guitar, pizzicato refers to a muffled shortening of notes produced by resting the fleshy side of the palm of the right hand on the strings just inside the bridge to create a staccato note that has a warm popping sound and is used to beautiful contrast in many pieces, such as in the opening passage of the guitar transcription of ‘La Maja de Goya’ (1911) by the Spanish composer Enrique Granados. Some composers also borrow the golpe from flamenco, a technique that requires the performer to strike the top of the guitar with the hand, thumb or fingers, using it like a drum.

The author demonstrates pizzicato in the opening passage of ‘La Maja de Goya’ (1911) by Enrique Granados

Harmonics are another possibility. These are of two kinds. Natural harmonics are produced by the guitarist placing a finger lightly on a string at a node point, eg, at the 12th fret, which sets the string resonating in two halves producing a very beautiful, quiet, distinctive, pure, bell-like note. Natural harmonics can be produced for all strings at the 12th, seventhand fifth frets relatively easily, but they can also work on other frets in the hands of a skilled performer. Then there are artificial harmonics in which the guitarist uses the tip of the first finger on the plucking hand to touch the node while simultaneously plucking the string with the second or third finger or thumb of the same hand. The hand on the fretboard then holds down different notes while the right hand moves to the corresponding nodal point on the string. The combination of natural and artificial harmonics allows guitarists to play melodies entirely in harmonics, often accompanied by gently played bass notes that are not harmonics.

A beautiful passage from ‘El Testament d’Amèlia’ (1900) by Miguel Llobet played using artificial harmonics

The Romantic French composer Hector Berlioz, who also played the guitar, is supposed to have said: ‘The guitar is a small orchestra,’ a quotation that has also been attributed to the earlier German composer Ludwig van Beethoven. In part, this saying alludes to the guitar’s possibility of playing polyphonic music with several distinct lines, but particularly to the variety of tone colour that the guitarist’s palette offers. And so, when considering timbre and tonal variety on the guitar and where you might choose to play certain phrases, this sense that you have an orchestral range of colours at your disposal courtesy of those six strings of different thicknesses and tensions is important. You can imagine colour bursting out of the instrument with each string having its own shades of a particular hue. And then those colours change as the guitarist’s hand moves around the fretboard.

Melody is that portion of music that people tend to connect with most directly. Very few audience members will go away singing bass lines or accompaniments. Our ears naturally focus, in an orchestral context, on what the first violins often play – lovely soaring melodies, as do some of the wind instruments, but obviously these aspects of instrumentation are fascinatingly variable. On the guitar, our top E string is the equivalent of the first violins in the orchestra: it very often carries the melody. If we think of a popular and well-known tune, such as Stanley Myers’s ‘Cavatina’ (1970) – the theme from the movie The Deer Hunter (1978) – that melody is predominantly on the top string throughout. The melody sings above the accompanying arpeggio with the bass line below.

The author plays the opening of ‘Cavatina’ (1970) by Stanley Myers

With a simple piece that consists of melody, accompaniment and bass line, the upper strings and the lower strings tend to perform distinct functions. Melody is usually on the top strings, bass on the bottom, and in the middle you might have some arpeggios or rhythmic figures that provide harmonic context and maintain rhythmic flow and which are subdued in volume compared with the melody and bass.

‘Carbon’ strings have physical qualities that result in a brighter and more projecting tone

The high E string of the guitar, the first string, tends to grab most of an audience’s attention as its key role is frequently melodic. By comparison, the sixth string, tuned to an E two octaves below it, represents the double bass of the orchestra as it carries a lot of the bass lines. In a modern classical guitar, there are also significant tonal differences between the strings, because the top three strings are made of smooth nylon or carbon composite material, while the three lower bass strings are wound with metal.

For centuries, the classical guitar’s strings were made from sheep or cow gut but, since the 1940s, the top three strings began to be made from nylon, with the bottom three strings from a multi-filament nylon core wound in silver-plated copper. For a while, string manufacturers would buy the raw material from fishing-line manufacturers, but treble strings made of fluorocarbon polymers are increasingly popular these days. Ever since 1948, when the string manufacturer Albert Augustine discovered that nylon was an effective alternative to gut, this synthetic substance has been the main material used for the top three strings, right through to the present day. In the 21st century, string-makers started to use a special polymer called polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF), also known as fluorocarbon, although string manufacturers commonly refer to them simply as ‘carbon’. What makes these ‘carbon’ strings so special is that they have physical qualities that result in a brighter and more projecting tone. Andrés Segovia played on gut strings for the early part of his career from the 1910s, and that had a distinctive sound – rounder, but also somewhat duller than the nylon strings that he was central to developing with Augustine, and that performers such as Julian Bream and John Williams used in the 1960s when the classical guitar became an extremely popular instrument.

Segovia’s influence over the development of classical guitar-playing was immense, but he used to finger his music in a distinctive way that is now, arguably, less in fashion. If he could choose between playing notes in higher positions, such as the seventh fret, or in a low position closer to the head of the guitar, he tended to play higher on the fretboard. When played on modern guitar strings, many of the pieces in Segovia’s repertoire sound more lyrical and brighter if played in lower positions and, as a consequence, performing guitarists today often use quite different fingerings from those that Segovia wrote into his printed scores.

Sometimes, the distinctive sound of the lower strings is exploited by composers who write melodies using the metal-wound fourth, fifth and sixth strings. The orchestral analogy is a good one because there are many instances in musical history where the cellos in particular (which you could say are loosely represented by the fourth and fifth strings on the guitar) are given rich and prominent melodies to play. A particularly good example of this, well known to many guitarists, would be Prelude No 1 (1940) by Heitor Villa-Lobos, which opens with an extended passage of melody that uses the fifth and fourth strings, supported by a bass note on the sixth string, with accompaniment chords played on the top three treble strings. Here, the typical structure of music with which we started is inverted. The sustained melody is now on the richly resonating bass, and the accompaniment is in the treble.

The author plays the opening of ‘Prelude No 1’ (1940) by Heitor Villa-Lobos

A virtuoso guitarist is fully aware of all these things going on simultaneously, and will adjust, as a matter of personal interpretation, the tone colour for a particular passage, perhaps by varying repeated material (‘Never play the same thing the same way twice’ is one of our popular maxims) or just by the use of tonal variety to characterise certain passages of music. It is very common to play something in a low position and then, if you have to play the same passage again in a repeat or echo, to finger it in a higher position, to produce a warmer, richer version of it.

Two phrases, each played first in a lower position and then echoed in a higher one

One other particularly potent tool available to guitarists is to play close to the bridge on the guitar, which is called sul ponticello, or away from the bridge (sul tasto), sometimes also referred to as dolce (sweet). The tonal contrasts that can be created by plucking near the bridge or away from it are greater on the classical guitar than on any other instrument. With bowed instruments, you can also play near the bridge, which is squeakier and lighter, or produce a richer, fuller timbre away from the bridge but, with the guitar, the effect is more pronounced. Bream was a great exponent of this type of tonal contrast.

The same note played on the open E string but with different timbres due to right-hand position

With some musical instruments, it is quite easy to change dynamics – how loudly or softly the performer plays. The guitar is not the easiest of instruments in this respect, and one of the most pervasive criticisms of student guitarists is a lack of dynamic variety. The received opinion about the guitar is that it has a more compact dynamic range than many of the instruments that we listen to in the classical world, which also largely explains its absence in the vast bulk of orchestral repertoire as it cannot effectively compete with the volume produced by most orchestral instruments individually, let alone when they are playing together.

The guitar that I usually play, built by the Australian guitar-maker Greg Smallman, was designed to produce more resonance and volume than guitars built earlier in the 20th century. Its design allows a wider dynamic range than many more traditional instruments, and it goes some way to negating the need for amplification, though I do sometimes use amplification, particularly when playing in ensembles with louder instruments such as the piano, saxophone, accordion, or in chamber groups with mixed instrumentation.

This simple instrument embodies almost limitless expressive possibilities – we literally sculpt with sound

The challenge on the guitar is to create the impression of a large dynamic range by sometimes playing pianissimo (very, very quietly) – in fact, the guitar can be played incredibly quietly and to great effect – and then also to exploit the full resources of the instrument to achieve the dramatic impact of playing fortissimo (very loud!) It’s just a question of what is musically appropriate, and is also partially determined by the acoustics of the venue. Performers tend to gauge this once we’re in a space, while also feeding off the audience response as we play. The wonderful thing about quieter dynamics on any instrument, but particularly on an instrument as intimate as the guitar, is that you can really draw the listeners in, make them almost literally lean forward to hear. But the guitar can be played aggressively too, creating a huge dramatic impact with the impression of substantial volume, sometimes with the aid of percussive effects (hitting or slapping the guitar) or using what’s known as Bartók pizzicato, where the string is pulled away and then released to slap aggressively against the fretboard.

The author plays a part of the ‘Usher Waltz’ (1984) by Nikita Koshkin

When an experienced performer blends these different techniques, the audience may be moved by the beauty, rightness and subtlety of the result without necessarily being aware of the choices the guitarist has made. In the hands of a great musician, this simple instrument embodies expressive possibilities that are almost limitless – we literally sculpt with sound.

I have spent many hours of my life with my guitar and don’t regret a second of that. In practice, toying with the full palette of colours the guitar has to offer brings immense pleasure and individualises interpretations of even the best-known pieces. Having the opportunity to entertain people and strive to make them feel what I feel about the music I play is a great privilege.

Policing Language In Colonial India - Cecily

2025-12-02T20:00:17.000Z

Vipin Krishna | History Workshop | 2nd December 2025 | U

In the mid-18^th century, British intellectuals began to use philology, the study of texts and languages, as a tool for understanding human societies. The rise of the East India Company, in particular, inspired new research into the origins of South Asian languages. After studying Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, and Latin, the jurist William Jones helped to popularise the idea that these languages shared a common ancestor.

Over time, however, colonial administrators increasingly turned to philology as an instrument of governance. In North India, British officials divided languages into two broad categories. Those that had written literature and material evidence of their antiquity were classified as languages proper. Anything else was classified as a dialect—from the Greek dialektos, meaning what was ‘spoken’.

Colonial administrators also created a hierarchy of standard and non-standard dialects, associating secretive and coded languages with criminality, illegibility, and deviance. This coincided with a wider initiative to categorise and classify colonial subjects. Following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, as the East India Company gave way to the direct rule of the British Crown, governors grew increasingly suspicious of nomadic groups and communities that were considered ‘hereditary criminals.’ These anxieties were eventually codified into the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871.

By the mid to late 19th century, therefore, discourses about ‘elegant speech’ coexisted with efforts to mark certain forms of communication as suspect. Philology served a carceral purpose, helping the state to map, classify, and control populations. Colonial administrators and native informants, as Christopher Bayly has shown, engaged with dialects and trade languages as part of a growing apparatus of surveillance. From secret trade cyphers to fraudulent shawl-weaving, language was treated not merely as culture, but as evidence that could be used to criminalise whole communities.

A depiction of thuggee strangling a traveller, unknown artist, 1830s. Source: British Library via Wikimedia Commons.

The most famous example of this linguistic work is William Henry Sleeman’s Ramaseeana (1836), a lexicon of ‘criminal speech’ compiled during his campaign against the so-called Thuggee. Thuggee was a colonial term for semi-organised bands of robbers accused of deception and ritual murder. They were said to communicate in a hidden language unintelligible to outsiders, and Sleeman’s text helped popularise the idea that criminal networks had their own secret modes of communication.

This work would inspire others to create systematic frameworks of ethnolinguistic governance. The Linguistic Fragments (1870, 1872, 1879) compiled by the orientalist G.W. Leitner included detailed notes on the Magadds, a group operating in northern Punjab. Leitner suspected that the Magadds had originated in Khorasan, in present-day Iran, and travelled between Persia, Afghanistan, and India to sell polished stones. This theory was ingrained in colonial policy, and Magadds were often deported to Khorasan by British officers. These ethnographic speculations, however, were only confirmed after Leitner studied their dialect and understood their internal codes.

Leitner observed that the Magadds spoke in a simple code by adding five to all their numerals:

‘I found that, although they knew both the Persian and the Urdū numerals, those in their own vernacular were formed by the addition of 5, just as the extended hand, with the thumb thrown out, forms the Latin V and its double forms the Latin X.’

This linguistic detail was not a neutral observation. Leitner’s research contributed to the emerging sciences of policing and detection – fields that, as Kapil Raj has shown of modern science more broadly, were not developed exclusively in the West.

Beyond his surveys of the dialects of the Bashegālī Kāfirs, Changars, Dards, and Magadds, Leitner also investigated secret communication systems—what he called ‘native cryptography.’ One such method was the Kam Ṣalā cypher, a coded script used by Persian scholars and elite figures. Leitner considered it impenetrable to munshīs (ordinary scribes), making it useful for covert communication.

A page from Leitner’s Fragments explaining the kam ṣalā cypher. Source: Internet Archive.

The cypher worked by letter substitution, using two lines of poetry to inform the reader which letters to swap and which to leave as they were. The gibberish words kam ṣalā instructed readers to replace m with k, and lā with a sibilant ṣ. Readers could then use the second line to understand which letters were to be used as-is. The use of these systems among scholars, criminals, and travelling communities blurred the lines between erudition and deception.

Leitner’s attention to linguistic detail extended to economic life as well. In one section of the Fragments, he describes the illicit appropriation of Kashmiri shawl patterns by Punjabi weavers. This was a time when North Indian artisans were being integrated into colonial capitalism, as Amanda Lanzillo has shown. Kashmiri weavers (shawlbafs) designed the margins of their shawls with unique patterns of colours and symbols. Specific directions for the warp and weft of the cloth ensured that each generation created an authentic Kashmiri design. Leitner’s analysis of the visual language of shawls became part of an effort to distinguish authentic Kashmiri producers from imitators, helping to police trade and protect origin.

One of Leitner’s most important collaborators was Muhammad Abdul Ghaffur. A former schoolmaster, Ghaffur would rise through the ranks to become a thanadar (low-level police official) and later a darogha (prison supervisor) in Lahore. There, he compiled a Dictionary of the Criminal Tribes of the Punjab (1879) for use by police and prison officials. The dictionary documented dialects, community histories, place-names, and the unique speech patterns of criminalised groups.

According to Ghaffur, each category of thief or confidence artist used its own secretive form of communication, or argot. Many of these dialects had never been documented in writing before. In his introduction, Ghaffur stressed the need for linguistic training among colonial officers, arguing that without such tools, criminal intelligence gathering was incomplete. His work was annotated by Leitner and ultimately incorporated into the 11th volume of George Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (1903-1928), a monumental study that codified decades of linguistic research.

Much of this survey was supported by the works of jailers, as well as prisoners themselves. One of these prisoners was Maulana Ja‘ffar Thanesari. Famous for having declared jihād against Queen Victoria, Thanesari had been jailed on the Andaman Islands for his participation in the 1864 Ambala Conspiracy Case. There, he served as an amateur anthropologist, lexicographer, and ethnographer of the local Sentinelese tribes. Thanesari compiled prison vocabularies and corresponded on linguistic matters, all while incarcerated. This work points to a larger pattern of extracting philological labour from imprisoned people.

Two pages from Leitner’s Fragments, illustrating the language in the margins of Kashmiri shawls and a table of common elements. Source: Internet Archive.

The colonial interest in ‘secret languages’ became more institutionalised through the 1870s and 1880s. R.C. Temple’s An Examination of the Trade Dialect of the Naqqash (1884), for example, focused on the secret vocabulary of papier-mâché artisans in Kashmir and Punjab. Temple argued that while some words were relics of older languages, others were intentionally inverted or layered with nonsense syllables to obscure meaning. Disguised words like gauẍkha (paper) and nath (place) exemplified how language could serve exclusionary and protective functions in artisan communities.

Temple also examined the dialect of Delhi’s dalāls (brokers), suggesting connections to earlier lexicographical works by 18^th-century Persian and Urdu scholars. His question throughout was whether these secret dialects were fossilised remnants of an older language or inventions meant to throw off outsiders. Temple’s analysis linked linguistic shifts to changes in trade, mobility, and urban anonymity.

Glossaries, dictionaries, and regional settlement reports all contributed to a colonial archive where language functioned as both classification and evidence. Carceral spaces such as jails and reformatories became unlikely laboratories for linguistic data-gathering. Philology, a discipline ostensibly devoted to the love of language and textual traditions, was deployed to manage populations, regulate trade, and suppress mobility. It moved in parallel with fingerprinting, anthropometry, and other emergent technologies of the modern colonial state.

By the late 19th century, in other words, philology had become a forensic tool. Figures like Leitner and Temple used language to detect, classify, and sometimes deport, while native collaborators like Ghaffur and Thanesari lent both access and credibility to their efforts. This history challenges any clean separation between the human sciences and the machinery of the colonial state. The study of dialects and argots was never innocent. It was shaped by the needs of governance, animated by suspicion, and grounded in institutions of incarceration. Traces of this carceral philology live on in linguistic archives, waiting to be read.

In today’s world, where accents and vocabulary still shape policing outcomes, and where algorithms scan speech for cues of deviance or threat, the colonial entanglement of language and suspicion feels eerily current. Understanding these 19^th-century archives is both a historical task and a political one.

Let’s Not Bring Back The Gatekeepers - Cecily

2025-12-02T20:00:17.000Z

Dan Williams | Conspicuous Cognition | 30th November 2025 | U

The challenge for the liberal establishment in the social media era is simple: persuade or perish. If you can’t control the public conversation, you must participate in it.

A consensus view holds that social media benefits something called “populism”, an amorphous political force involving anger towards “elites” and “the establishment” on behalf of the more virtuous masses. The evidence for this view consists mainly of the suspicious correlation between social media’s emergence and the worldwide rise of populism, and the undeniable fact that populists seem to perform uniquely well on social media platforms.

Because the establishment in modern liberal democracies is overwhelmingly small-l liberal (universalist, pluralist, procedural), such populist movements are typically illiberal, especially on the populist right (MAGA, Reform UK, Rassemblement National, Alternative für Deutschland, etc). So, social media’s support for populism goes hand in hand with its threat to a reigning liberal order in the West that many thought or at least hoped marked the end of history.

Why does social media have these consequences? And if, like me, you are a liberal who opposes populism, what can be done about it?

This essay has three parts.

Part 1 argues that the main reason social media benefits populism is that it destroys elite gatekeeping, providing a mass media platform for popular ideas historically stigmatised and marginalised by establishment elites.

Part 2 then outlines several reasons why we should nevertheless resist moves for more elite gatekeeping on social media. Not only are such efforts likely to make things worse, but the decline of elite gatekeeping has had many beneficial consequences, and the negative consequences, although real, are often overstated.

Finally, Part 3 argues that many of these negative consequences are not inevitable either. A large part of the blame for them lies in the fact that establishment institutions have failed to adapt to the new pressures and responsibilities of the social media age. Instead, they have clung to a set of habits and norms—most fundamentally, an aversion to engaging with illiberal ideas to avoid “platforming” and “normalising” them—adapted to a world that no longer exists.

Put simply: Once established institutions lost the privilege to control the public conversation, they acquired an obligation to participate within it, which, so far, they have mostly failed to do.

1. Why Social Media Benefits Populism

The most popular theory of why social media benefits populism points the finger at engagement-maximising algorithms. Because tech companies design their platforms to capture user attention, algorithms recommend content that is sensationalist, negative, and polarising—precisely the kind of content that benefits populist demagogues selling cartoonish anti-elite narratives.

There is obviously a grain of truth here, but the explanation is also unsatisfying. For one thing, appealing to engagement-maximising algorithms is not very informative without a supplementary account of why audiences find specific ideas engaging. Moreover, focusing on algorithms obscures the extent to which audiences actively seek out and amplify content that aligns with their pre-existing views. The popular image of wholly passive exposure to recommended content, or of vast numbers of users being sucked into radicalising rabbit holes, is not well supported by evidence.

A more promising theory, owing primarily to Martin Gurri in his book The Revolt of the Public, points to how the social media age has destroyed elite gatekeeping. Whereas establishment institutions once exercised an informational monopoly, managing media and mainstream discourse to protect elite interests and perspectives, social media makes such narrative control impossible. As a result, the public is now exposed to endless examples of elite failures and hypocrisy, fuelling populist anger and backlash.

Once again, this story gets at something important, but it can also be misleading. There is a lot of anti-elite sentiment on social media, but it is hardly a well-oiled machine for holding elites to account. If anything, legacy media outlets are often better at exposing establishment failures because they insist on minimal standards of truth and evidence. Moreover, reporting and commentary on such failures, whether accurate or not, is just one example of a much broader set of populist-aligned ideas and narratives that thrive on social media platforms.

A more plausible story generalises Gurri’s analysis. The erosion of elite gatekeeping ushered in by social media benefits populism, but mainly by providing a platform for the advocacy of ideas historically stigmatised by elites. This includes powerful anti-elite sentiments, but it also encompasses many other views, including fierce opposition to immigration and progressive cultural change, run-of-the-mill bigotry, medieval beliefs about everything from economics to demons, conspiracy theories about Jews and vast paedophile rings, and much more. To the extent that many such ideas are popular, it’s unsurprising that social media benefits populism. Indeed, “popular ideas historically stigmatised by elites” is a pretty good definition of populism.

By platforming such ideas, social media lets them reach a much larger audience. This can produce persuasion, but it also fuels processes of normalisation and coordination. When people learn that their stigmatised views are popular, they become emboldened, and the spiral of silence breaks. In turn, enterprising politicians and pundits discover that they can profit by affirming and rationalising such viewpoints. The Overton window expands accordingly. There is no better illustration of this dynamic than Tucker Carlson’s recent viral interview with Nick Fuentes, a conversation featuring extreme forms of anti-Semitism and misogyny that would have been unthinkable on the mainstream right even five years ago.

Admittedly, the term “elites” in this analysis can be misleading. Are Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen not elites? Is Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and owner of one of its most influential media sites, not an elite?

To make sense of this, one needs to distinguish establishment elites (what populists typically mean by “elites”), who achieve status and influence by impressing those within establishment institutions, from populist elites, who achieve status and influence by appealing directly to a mass audience.[1] By letting politicians and pundits reach vast audiences in ways that bypass traditional gatekeepers, social media benefits this latter class: people who gain power and prestige by championing viewpoints historically marginalised by establishment elites, often for good reason.

2. So, Is Elite Gatekeeping A Good Thing?

In some ways, this is a bleak and uncomfortable story. Elite gatekeeping is supposed to be a bad thing. Even many elites pretend to dislike elitism. Yet if this story is correct, it suggests that elite gatekeeping is good.

Perhaps, then, we should aim for a return of much more elite gatekeeping. Banning social media is obviously not an option. But one might still campaign for a much more regulated internet with a greater role for top-down censorship, content moderation, and de-amplification of misinformed, hateful viewpoints. One could think of this as a return to the policies that dominated social media before Musk took over Twitter and other major tech companies abandoned their most aggressive anti-misinformation measures. But one could also advocate for much more censorious regimes than that, as many do, especially in the UK and EU.

We should resist this impulse.

To be clear, private companies should be able to set whatever content-moderation policies they want in a free society, and governments should be able to enforce laws against the most clear-cut foreign disinformation campaigns.

Nevertheless, a world in which all citizens are free to compete in the marketplace of ideas, even if they hold views accurately deemed absurd and hateful by establishment elites, is better than one in which such elites control who can speak. Although it’s important not to downplay the dangers and harms associated with some of today’s most popular social media pundits—Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Tommy Robinson, Russell Brand, Nick Fuentes, and so on—we should not aim for a world in which they are prevented from advocating those views to audiences who want to hear them.

Against Elite Gatekeeping

One simple reason for this is that the horse has left the stable. The effort to avoid platforming and normalising illiberal, misinformed, or hateful ideas doesn’t make much sense in a world in which they are already popular and widely discussed.

Moreover, although it’s not true that elite gatekeeping can never “work”—before the emergence of social media, it generally did work to marginalise and stigmatise many bad viewpoints—it’s much harder to see how it can work in an era with social media.

The failures of the post-2016 anti-misinformation industry are instructive here. In the aftermath of Brexit and Trump’s first election, there was a concerted effort within establishment institutions to exert greater control over the internet under the banner of fighting “fake news”, “misinformation”, and “disinformation”. The story of how such efforts unfolded is complex, but the headline outcome isn’t: in the well-funded, top-down war against misinformation, misinformation won.

Efforts to censor and de-amplify disfavoured views bred widespread anger and resentment among those who saw unaccountable elites exerting undemocratic control over the public conversation. One cannot understand the political trajectory of figures like Joe Rogan (from Bernie Bro to MAGA Bro) or even Elon Musk without understanding this backlash.

Admittedly, most of this backlash against a perceived “censorship industrial complex” was based on lies, exaggerations, half-truths, and right-wing opportunism. But if policies against misinformation only work if people aren’t misinformed, they don’t work. And it’s difficult to see how any top-down effort to control the information environment can work without merely exacerbating the anti-elite resentment that fuels the very content such efforts aim to address.

The Benefits and Overestimated Costs of Social Media

In addition to these points about feasibility, it’s also important to acknowledge that many viewpoints marginalised by establishment elites are correct, and many more express reasonable perspectives that improve the quality and vibrancy of the overall public conversation. As I’ve written about before, the intellectual culture of establishment elites was and continues to be deeply dysfunctional in many ways, featuring harmful forms of groupthink and highbrow misinformation. Elite gatekeeping doesn’t just filter out the most egregious forms of misinformation. It also typically filters out legitimate grievances and reasonable challenges to establishment orthodoxies.

Finally, although the decline of elite gatekeeping has undoubtedly produced some negative consequences, the dominant tendency within establishment institutions is to exaggerate them—to imagine that if only the internet went away, angry populist challenges to liberal-democratic regimes would disappear along with it.

This is a self-serving fantasy. Not only are the worst forms of social media content less prevalent and impactful than many assume, but populist backlash is tied to many factors beyond the internet, including persistent establishment failures over many years, objective trends (e.g. mass immigration and top-down liberalisation of cultural values), and the accurate perception among many voters that establishment politicians don’t adequately represent them. Social media plays an important role, and often a negative one, but the liberal establishment’s frequent scapegoating of social media-based “misinformation” for all the world’s problems is no more defensible than simplistic populist narratives blaming immigrants or billionaires for them.

3. Persuade or Perish

These considerations suggest that introducing more elite gatekeeping on social media is less feasible and desirable than is often assumed. But another fact should also determine how we evaluate the decline of such gatekeeping: its consequences are not inevitable. They are mediated by how establishment institutions respond to this change. And so far, the response has been, at best, inadequate.

Over many decades, such institutions developed a set of habits and norms suited to a media environment subject to elite gatekeeping. This included a commitment to top-down modes of communication in which those designated as experts or intellectual authorities inform the public about what to think, as well as a deep aversion to engaging with ideas deemed illiberal, absurd, or hateful lest such engagement normalise them. In a world with elite gatekeeping, these behaviours make sense.

In recent years, social media has gradually dismantled such gatekeeping, along with the ability to determine which ideas are platformed and normalised in public conversation. The norms within establishment liberal culture have not adjusted, however. So, we now have the worst of both worlds: a reluctance to engage with many illiberal, populist ideas that are becoming increasingly mainstream.

The antipathy towards persuasion

The most obvious example of the liberal establishment’s aversion to persuasion is the Great Awokening that swept major Western institutions in recent years. This was characterised by an approach to politics that emphasised ideological purity, the use of shaming and reputational destruction to discourage heresy, an extreme hostility towards “platforming” ideas at odds with elite progressive orthodoxy, and an insistence that such orthodoxy be taken on trust. (“It’s not my job to educate you!”).

Nevertheless, the distinctive feature of wokeism is not really the use of such tactics against perceived heresies, but the heroic attempt to expand the category of heresy to include attitudes held by around 90% of the population, including many liberals within establishment institutions.

Given this, even as the Overton window has subsequently expanded during the predictable cultural backlash and vibe shift against wokeism, the liberal establishment’s attitude and approach towards ideas outside that window has largely remained the same.

To illustrate, I recently heard from two non-woke academics complaining that a scientist had appeared on the popular Triggernometry and Jordan Peterson podcasts, both of which reach large audiences. They weren’t complaining about anything the scientist had said on these podcasts; they were outraged merely at the fact that the scientist had been on them.

Case Studies

If this seems like an unrepresentative anecdote, recall that in what Democrats claimed was the most critical election in American history, a vote on the continued existence of its democracy, Kamala Harris didn’t go on Joe Rogan, the world’s most popular podcast, to make her case.

Similarly, after RFK Jr. appeared on Rogan’s podcast to vomit up several hours of lies and bullshit about vaccines, Rogan offered $100k to charity if Peter Hotez, a prominent scientist and science communicator, would debate RFK Jr. on his show. When Hotez refused, he received widespread support from elite legacy media outlets and the scientific establishment, where a broad consensus emerged that any such debate would legitimise RFK Jr.’s views, implying they were on an equal footing with mainstream science.

This hostility towards engagement and persuasion has also been striking in the UK. For example, when GB News was recently introduced, which aspires to be the UK’s version of Fox News, there was a widespread elite panic about it, a reluctance by many mainstream centrist and centre-left politicians and pundits to even appear on the channel, prominent calls to boycott it, and a yearning for government regulation to either ban or heavily constrain the channel’s coverage. This yearning has also been the dominant establishment response in the UK to online content deemed to be misinformed or hateful.

In many ways, things are even more extreme elsewhere in Europe. For example, at the same time as the anti-immigration AfD (a far-right party with fascist roots) is surging in popularity in many parts of Germany, mainstream parties continue to enforce a literal conspiracy of silence around discussion of any negative social consequences of immigration.

It’s also noteworthy that over the past several years, large segments of the English-speaking world’s educated liberal professionals in academia and journalism have decamped to Bluesky, a social media platform that someone would invent if they wanted to create an over-the-top caricature of the pathologies of inward-looking, puritanical liberal culture, except it’s real.

Such behaviour is all the more remarkable when you contrast it with the thirst for engagement, disagreement, and debate you typically find among the figures who most loudly criticise the liberal establishment.

On Confronting Reality

In fairness, there is a growing appreciation of just how damaging this aversion to engagement and persuasion has been. Kamala Harris now regrets not going on Rogan, and Ezra Klein’s claim that liberals should learn from Charlie Kirk’s “taste for disagreement” and “moxie and fearlessness” signalled a dawning realisation that the liberal attitude to politics has been a disaster.

More recently, Klein has elaborated on this critique, condemning the dominant liberal view

“that you don’t bridge disagreement, you sort of draw a line around it, and you say that’s not even an OK position to hold and that there can be no compromise with it. There can barely be engagement with it.”

Although Klein’s focus is on the Democrats and broader progressive culture in the US, what he describes is instantly recognisable to anyone who belongs to small “l” liberal institutions across Western countries:

“There has been more of a tendency to try to define people out of the community, out of the boundaries of acceptable or polite discourse.”

Klein notes that this dominant liberal attitude to contrary viewpoints is perversely and hypocritically illiberal, but he also observes, correctly, that as “an instrumental reality… it was a total failure.”

In most cases, it would be unfair to blame specific individuals for this failure. The problems are institutional and, more broadly, cultural. To encourage individuals to engage and persuade with populist and illiberal ideas, they must be incentivised by the norms and prestige economy within establishment culture. And at present, these incentives do not exist. They actively discourage such engagement, in fact.

There is a dominant norm that many outlets, spaces, and ideas are simply beyond the pale, even when they are increasingly popular. To the extent they are discussed at all, the discussion focuses overwhelmingly on how they might be better managed, regulated, or controlled. That is, it takes place within a fantasy in which the liberal establishment retains the ability to determine which viewpoints become the focus of public attention and conversation.

But Aren’t The Deplorables Irredeemable?

To abandon this fantasy, it’s not enough for the liberal establishment to relinquish the delusion that it can determine which ideas become discussed and debated. It must also unlearn something else: a widespread, deep-rooted pessimism that rational persuasion is even possible.

In 2016, Hilary Clinton was infamously caught on tape referring to half of Trump’s supporters as “deplorables”: “They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic - you name it.” But more tellingly, Clinton also added that some of these deplorables are “irredeemable.” In other words, not only are they terrible people with terrible views and values, but there is simply nothing that can be done to make them less terrible. Persuasion is futile.

In the aftermath of Brexit and Clinton’s subsequent election loss, one of the dominant responses from the liberal establishment across the world was to double down on this perspective. What we had apparently learned from those populist revolts was that large segments of the population are “post-truth”. They are beyond reason. Facts, evidence, rational arguments—these things are simply pointless when directed at the irredeemable deplorables. A representative article in The Guardian from 2018 reports a conventional wisdom that “30% of the electorate are resistant to rational argument.”

Strangely, this idea has been combined with the narrative that large swathes of the population are routinely brainwashed by the disinformation, misinformation, and fake news they encounter online. So, you get what might be called the liberal establishment’s theory of perverse persuasion: the idea that those who support populist or illiberal politics are persuadable—but only by bad ideas.

For some time, politicians and journalists could point to studies that seemed to support this perspective, a flurry of sexy social-psychological findings that people—well, not scientists or professional journalists or highly-educated professionals who read broadsheet newspapers and believe in truth and reason and facts and evidence, but everyone else—are irrational, emotional, and stupid, credulous towards misinformation and yet pig-headed in the face of evidence-based arguments. Scientists even seemed to find that some people are so preposterously irrational that they will “backfire”, becoming more confident in their beliefs when they encounter evidence against them.

To a first approximation, everything about this perspective is wrong.

Persuasion Works

Nobody is perfectly rational, of course, and there are robust differences in people’s level of intelligence and open-mindedness, but research from social scientists like Alexander Coppock, Ben Tappin, and others consistently shows that rational persuasion is broadly effective at changing people’s minds.

The “backfire effect” is either extremely rare or, most likely, a myth. And far from being duped by simple emotional manipulation and other non-rational techniques, people are generally sophisticated in how they evaluate messages, implicitly weighing the plausibility of claims, the validity of arguments, and the trustworthiness of sources.

To illustrate, recent research by Tom Costello and colleagues shows that engaging with a chatbot that presents tailored evidence and arguments reduced participants’ beliefs in conspiracy theories by 20% on average, with the effect persisting for at least 2 months. Follow-up research has demonstrated that the intervention works by providing factual, targeted counterarguments (when AIs are prompted to persuade without using facts, the effect disappears), and that it still works even when people believe they are speaking to a human being.

Although one can reasonably question the methodology of these studies, the findings align with a large body of high-quality research. Given this, why are so many people so pessimistic about the power of rational persuasion?

Sources of Pessimism

One source of pessimism is simply confusion about what rational persuasion involves. Often, frustration that people aren’t “persuadable” is simply exasperation that they don’t accept one’s intellectual authority. In the aftermath of the Brexit debate, for example, much of the discourse about how voters didn’t respond to “facts” was really about how many voters didn’t trust a particular class of politicians and experts making claims about what the facts are. But saying “You should trust me on this!” is not an argument.

Another source of pessimism is what psychologists call “naïve realism”: the belief that the truth is self-evident, so that anyone who disagrees with what one takes to be the truth must be crazy, stupid or lying. In reality, people often hold divergent beliefs about the truth not because they are deeply irrational or acting in bad faith but simply because they have been exposed to very different streams of information and arguments over the course of their lives, which inevitably shape how they interpret the world.

In most cases, what looks like people “refusing to see reality” or “resisting the facts” is an illusion created by a failure to empathise with another person’s worldview. When audiences don’t immediately abandon their beliefs upon confrontation with contrary evidence, it’s concluded that they are irrational, when in fact it would be highly irrational to immediately abandon a whole worldview upon encountering contrary information.

Relatedly, much of the frustration that evidence and rational arguments don’t persuade audiences stems from the fact that people aren’t actually being presented with persuasive evidence or rational arguments. They’re presented with exasperated spluttering and talking points from the speaker’s own information bubble.

If you want to evaluate whether an argument is likely to be rationally compelling to audiences with very different beliefs, you can’t simply judge whether you find it convincing. But I see this mistake all the time. “When I told these vicious racists how racist it is to complain about immigration and reminded them that diversity is our strength, they didn’t change their minds. You can’t reason with these people!”

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that much of what establishment figures know about anti-establishment information environments comes from what they’ve read in establishment media outlets, which is often highly misleading, or from short, unrepresentative clips designed to make such environments seem as insane as possible. In consequence, they underrate the extent to which evidence-based, rational persuasion actually occurs in these spaces and the extent to which popular pundits and commentators there have well-developed critiques of establishment orthodoxies.

If you turn up on, say, Joe Rogan’s podcast expecting a low-IQ, low-information meathead because that’s the impression you got from reading The New York Times or The Guardian, you’re going to be unpleasantly surprised. If you want to engage with such pundits, then you have to be prepared to address the various truths and half-truths that they will use to support their side of the argument. However, precisely because of powerful taboos surrounding discussion of certain topics in establishment spaces (e.g., immigration, race and crime, climate change, youth gender medicine, etc.), people within these spaces are often unprepared when they encounter the most basic criticisms of establishment orthodoxies.

Qualifications

None of this means that persuasion is easy. You must meet people where they are, address their questions and objections, and be willing to revise your own beliefs in the process. It’s also often uncomfortable. People don’t like to discover that they’re mistaken about something. This is why there must be significant institutional and cultural changes to incentivise people to do this hard work.

Moreover, persuasion can only achieve so much. Both communicators and audiences have many goals other than discovering what’s true, including propaganda, ingroup signalling, and demonising target groups. Nevertheless, as Hannah Arendt observed long ago, inserting factual information into the public conversation can still helpfully constrain how people pursue those goals.

It’s also important to stress that rational persuasion doesn’t mean always being boring, civil, or a pushover. Social media is a brutal attention economy. The bottleneck in persuading people is often reaching them with persuasive messages in the first place. The most successful pundits and influencers are highly entertaining, and usually more than willing to provoke fights and conflict. These things aren’t inconsistent with also presenting evidence-based, rational arguments. Polite, well-mannered discourse is desirable when possible, but it’s neither sufficient nor necessary for rational persuasion to occur.

Finally, I’m not suggesting that shaming should play no role in politics and political discourse. It should be shameful to lie, propagandise, and spread lazy, biased, hateful talking points. In a healthy democratic culture, someone who lies as frequently and egregiously as, say, Elon Musk would be shamed out of the public square.

The problem is that we don’t have a healthy democratic culture. One of the unfortunate things about politics, as with life more broadly, is that you must act within the world that actually exists. For shaming to be effective, it requires cultural power, which liberals are plainly losing, especially in the online world that looks set to become increasingly influential over the coming years and decades. If you can’t rely on such cultural power, you must demonstrate to sceptical audiences that certain speech and ideas are shameful—that they are dishonest, false, or bigoted—and that requires persuasion. So, even when shaming is the appropriate response to speech, it is not an alternative to persuasion. It depends on persuasion.

Final Thoughts

The story I’ve told is uncomfortable in many ways, at least for liberals like me. If the main reason social media benefits populism is algorithms, the problem would lend itself to familiar technocratic solutions. If the main reason is that social media has removed the liberal establishment’s ability to control the public conversation, the “blame” lies with the loss of this undemocratic privilege and the abject failure to adapt to a more competitive marketplace of ideas.

If you read the liberal intelligentsia and commentariat today, you will encounter a thriving market for articles lamenting the social media age. Social media, we’re told, is destroying society. It is destroying civilisation. It is making people dumber and angrier and more misinformed and polarised. It is a technological wrecking ball, an alien force that has smashed into liberal democracies and producing increasing destruction with every new swing.

It’s a comforting story. So is the popular belief that large segments of the public are so deplorable and irredeemable that they’re unreachable by rational persuasion.

In these accounts, the problem is not that liberalism has become so pathetically fragile that it can’t survive contact with Joe Rogan. The problem is with algorithms that drive his popularity, and with audiences too irrational to judge what constitutes a good argument on his show.

The problem is not that establishment figures became so accustomed to deference and control that they’re unprepared when people disagree with them. The problem is a digital post-truth era in which algorithms and disinformation campaigns brainwash the public.

Maybe. Perhaps liberal democracy ultimately requires a more illiberal, undemocratic media environment than the one created by the social media age, a world in which people’s exposure to ideas is regulated by establishment elites, not by recommender algorithms. But before we accept such a lesson, we should first test what happens when the liberal establishment is required to argue under the same rules as everyone else.

Our Picture Of Evolution - Cecily

2025-12-02T20:00:17.000Z

Prosanta Chakrabarty | MIT Press Reader | 1st December 2025 | U

We may have ditched the monkey-to-man meme, but the myth of humans as nature’s “pinnacle of evolution” persists in subtler ways.

By: Prosanta Chakrabarty

This year is the 100^th anniversary of the Scopes “Monkey Trial” — the first trial to challenge the teaching of evolution in the United States. At the time of the trial in 1925, opponents of evolution based their case on the Butler Act, which prohibited teaching that humans descended from “lower orders of animals” in public school classrooms.

Key to the case for both sides was the state-sanctioned 1914 textbook titled “Hunter’s Civic Biology,” which was published about 30 years after Charles Darwin’s death and 30 years before Darwin’s theory of natural selection was synthesized with then-emergent ideas of genetics (in what is called “the modern synthesis”). Hunter’s textbook depicted mammals as occupying a higher position in an evolutionary hierarchy than other groups (an erroneous progressive notion of evolution) and contains texts about human races that state the “highest type” is “the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America” (Fig. 1).

These images and statements (which were, again, in a state biology textbook) are antithetical to modern views of evolution and race/ethnicity. And yet we still find today that many evolutionary diagrams depict our species, Homo sapiens, in ways that promote misleading views of humans, particularly with regard to sex, gender, and ethnicity.

Figure 1: The left image from “Hunter’s Civic Biology Textbook” shows an “evolutionary tree” in the “The Doctrine of Evolution” section. It depicts a “simple” to “complex” progressive view of evolution from bottom to top. This notion is emphasized in the right image, a text from the book’s “Races of Man” section that explains a hierarchical view of human races.

Consider, for instance, Rudolph Franz Zallinger’s 1965 mural “March of Progress.” This mural — which illustrates a linear progression of humankind from monkey to ape to man (redrawn in part in Fig. 2a) — is one of the most commonly used in popular culture today. But it’s incorrect. As Stephen Jay Gould explains in his 1996 book “Full House,” evolution doesn’t lead to humans as shown. Rather, we share common ancestry with other great apes, such as our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees; we did not evolve directly from them.

Figure 2A: The most ubiquitous and useless image used to explain evolution. It gives the impression to many that we transformed from a monkey, then a chimp, and a “caveman” in a direct series leading to “modern man.” In reality, we share a common ancestry with these other forms, and we did not progress from them but rather with them from those shared ancestors. This image has done far more harm than good to those trying to explain evolution. These depictions are based on the original “March of Progress/Road to Homo sapiens” by muralist Rudolph Franz Zallinger.

Figure 2B: A more accurate way of depicting evolution is with a phylogenetic tree. The branches bifurcate (split in two), and pairs that share a “node” (the point where the split connects) are more closely related to each other. Here, the tailed monkey is the closest relative to the five other primates, not the “ancestor.” The ancestors are represented in the nodes. Node “1” is the common ancestor of the six primates (including humans) depicted above. Node “2” is the common ancestor of chimps, modern humans, and extinct human species.

In other words, evolution doesn’t have an end goal. It’s not about one species turning into another until you end up with humans. It’s about adaptive and non-adaptive heritable changes in populations responding to ever-changing environments, more like blind trial-and-error than progress in one direction.

In more modern depictions, humans are frequently represented in phylogenetic trees — evolutionary diagrams showing the relationships among organisms. These depictions are more accurate; however, the human is often represented by a stereotypical nondescript “white man” — and rarely as a woman, child, person of color, or any other figure representative of the diversity of humanity. This problem has persisted since the time of Scopes (and likely before).

Furthermore, humans are often depicted at the far right side, or top, of phylogenetic trees, which can give the erroneous impression that we are the “most advanced” organism (as might be interpreted by the layperson seeing “progress” from left to right or bottom to top — see the figures from Hunter’s textbook again). Yet because phylogenetic trees illustrate “sister-group relationships” (i.e., closest relatives that descended from a common ancestral node), each node can be rotated and the two descendant “sister groups” can be switched in place relative to the ancestral node and still show the same relationships (Fig. 2B). Therefore, humans can easily be depicted in other parts of the phylogeny (versus on one extreme end) without changing the relationships. Depicting humans closer to the center of a phylogeny allows the viewer to reflect more deeply on the meaning of their place within the Tree of Life (i.e., the phylogenetic depiction of life on Earth). We are just another branch in the Tree with no more special a designation than a flea or a cow.

To further examine how the representation of human beings in evolutionary diagrams has changed since the time of Scopes, I recruited an excellent Louisiana State University undergraduate student, Margaret (Maggie) Bagot, to search for images depicting humans in biology textbooks. Maggie went through every biology book in the LSU undergraduate library’s stacks (GN281- GN449.8, and QH301-QH430) and examined all the images she could find of humans shown in an evolutionary context.

In my search with Maggie, we found that most evolutionary diagrams represented all of humanity with a white male when identifiable: 36 male figures were found out of 48 total representations of humans (Fig. 3A). However, there has also been a progressive increase in diversity added to the representation of humans in these diagrams over time (Fig. 3B). Additionally, when humans were depicted in phylogenetic trees or other similar representations of evolution, humans were normally in the top or far right side of the image (ex. left side images of Fig. 3b).

Figure 3: Image A, top, shows a phylogenetic tree with a woman representing humans on the far right. Women are rarely used to represent humans in relation to men, as shown in the bar graph on the right. Image B, bottom left, is an example of how humans are typically depicted at one end of the spectrum on a phylogeny (top or far right) and often as a white male. Note that the representation of other ethnicities has increased in recent years. Images on the left are redrawn from Braasch et al (2016).

We recognize that this is a very cursory investigation of how humans are depicted in evolutionary diagrams. But we challenge scientists and educators to think about the representation of human diversity and of how a phylogenetic tree may be read or misinterpreted (as progressive) in the ways we generally illustrate them.

In the time of Scopes — when genetics and the mechanisms of inheritance were still only partially understood — racism, sexism, and eugenics dominated the scientific literature, as it does in Hunter’s textbook. One hundred years after the Scopes trial, the field of evolutionary biology has made significant progress. But many people still misunderstand evolution as progressive or goal-oriented, with humans as the ultimate objective. The way we depict humans and other organisms on the Tree of Life impacts how the public understands evolution. Some simple changes in how we illustrate the process, like swiveling a node or two on the Tree of Life, might go a long way toward improving that understanding.

Prosanta Chakrabarty is the Hunter Chair & Professor for Communication in Science Research. He is also Director and Curator of Fishes at the Museum of Natural Science at Louisiana State University. He is the author of the book “Explaining Life Through Evolution.”

Post on Longreads - Longreads

2025-12-02T16:24:01.000Z

"It was fine for me to lie by omission in order to report a story. But this was something different: I was no longer going to pretend to be a believer. I was going to pretend to believe." —Chandler Fritz for County Highway https://www.countyhighway.com/archive/volume-3/issue-3/jesus-christ-is-born-in-texas-fritz?src=longreads #dispatch #christmas #journalism #holidays #longreads

Post on Longreads - Longreads

2025-12-02T16:04:47.000Z

"For the time being, one desire felt like it would make me more of who I already was, and the other would unmake me entirely." For Longreads, Diana Saverin confronts the costs of motherhood.

https://longreads.com/2025/12/02/extreme-outdoor-adventure-motherhood/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

#Motherhood #ExtremeAdventure #Alaska

The Register: Stealthy browser extensions waited years before infecting 4.3M Chrome, Edge users with backdoors and spyware - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-12-02T15:20:59.000Z

The Register: Stealthy browser extensions waited years before infecting 4.3M Chrome, Edge users with backdoors and spyware. “A seven-year malicious browser extension campaign infected 4.3 million Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge users with malware, including backdoors and spyware sending people’s data to servers in China. And, according to Koi researchers, five of the extensions with more than 4 million installs are still live in the Edge marketplace.”

The post The Register: Stealthy browser extensions waited years before infecting 4.3M Chrome, Edge users with backdoors and spyware first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

Engadget: India will require a state-owned cybersecurity app to be installed on all smartphones - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-12-02T15:17:21.000Z

Engadget: India will require a state-owned cybersecurity app to be installed on all smartphones. “Telecom regulators in India have reportedly asked smartphone manufacturers to preload a state-owned cybersecurity app that cannot be deleted onto all new devices, and push the app to existing devices via a software update.”

The post Engadget: India will require a state-owned cybersecurity app to be installed on all smartphones first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

Search Engine Land: Google tests pushing searchers from AI Overviews with follow up questions to AI Mode - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-12-02T15:15:32.000Z

Search Engine Land: Google tests pushing searchers from AI Overviews with follow up questions to AI Mode. “This brings AI Mode more directly into Google Search and sadly, will likely result in fewer clicks to websites. Google is now officially testing pushing searchers from AI Overviews in Google Search into the AI Mode interface.” Gross. I think I am officially spending more time searching with MiniGladys (it’s Wikipedia-based) than I am with Google.

The post Search Engine Land: Google tests pushing searchers from AI Overviews with follow up questions to AI Mode first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

WSB Radio: Marietta History Center unveils online database with thousands of artifacts - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-12-02T15:08:54.000Z

WSB Radio (Georgia): Marietta History Center unveils online database with thousands of artifacts. “The Marietta History Center is launching a new online database, giving the public digital access to thousands of items documenting the city’s past. The database already features more than 10,000 artifacts, most of them photographs. Collections Manager Christa McCay says the project will continue to grow.”

The post WSB Radio: Marietta History Center unveils online database with thousands of artifacts first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

The Conversation: We built a database of 290,000 English medieval soldiers – here’s what it reveals - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-12-02T14:52:59.000Z

The Conversation: We built a database of 290,000 English medieval soldiers – here’s what it reveals. “In response to the high interest from historians and the public (the database has 75,000 visitors per month), the resource has recently been updated. It is now sustainably hosted by GeoData, a University of Southampton research institute. We have recently added new records, taking the dataset back to the late 1350s, meaning it now contains almost 290,000 entries.”

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Florida Phoenix: Florida AG will now ‘aggressively enforce’ social media ban on minors - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-12-02T14:50:02.000Z

Florida Phoenix: Florida AG will now ‘aggressively enforce’ social media ban on minors. “The preliminary injunction against the state’s social media ban on minors won’t last, an appeals court concluded this week. Two judges on a three-judge panel told the state Tuesday it may begin enforcing a 2024 law that prohibits young Floridians from using social media while litigation plays out. “

The post Florida Phoenix: Florida AG will now ‘aggressively enforce’ social media ban on minors first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

Korea Times: Democracies at risk of persistent foreign manipulation, EU official warns - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-12-02T14:46:40.000Z

Korea Times: Democracies at risk of persistent foreign manipulation, EU official warns. “The European Commission’s executive vice president for technology sovereignty, security and democracy has warned that democracies are facing ‘constant hybrid attacks’ from foreign actors and called for closer cooperation with Korea to counter cyberthreats, misinformation and online manipulation.”

The post Korea Times: Democracies at risk of persistent foreign manipulation, EU official warns first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

Give the Gift of Fix The News - Fix The News

2025-12-02T09:16:03.000Z

Give a gift subscription

“A powerful antidote to the despair that is so often presented in the 24/7 media environment” ~ Tim Kalmier

This holiday season, give someone the gift of Fix The News, a weekly dose of reliable reporting on how the world is quietly getting better. Each edition pulls together real improvements in health, education, climate, conservation, human rights and science, told with the kind of detail that makes progress feel tangible rather than abstract.

A gift subscription unlocks the full newsletter, the archive, long-form explainers and our lively community of readers who care about people and the planet. 30% of every subscription goes straight to small frontline charities, so the gift supports real work as well as better information.

For anyone who’s tired of doom and needs a steadier picture, it’s a simple way to brighten their week.

Gizmodo: Google Home Users Are Trying to Hack Their Way to a Better Voice Assistant - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-12-02T09:01:55.000Z

Gizmodo: Google Home Users Are Trying to Hack Their Way to a Better Voice Assistant. “Instead of waiting in line for their invite for Gemini for Home—a long-awaited upgrade that’s promising major upgrades to the Google Assistant experience—Google Home users are trying to hack their way (in a loose sense) into getting the supposedly upgraded voice assistant onto their Home devices.”

The post Gizmodo: Google Home Users Are Trying to Hack Their Way to a Better Voice Assistant first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

University of California San Francisco: UCSF Print News Preserved and Digitized Through California Revealed - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-12-02T08:52:19.000Z

University of California San Francisco: UCSF Print News Preserved and Digitized Through California Revealed . “Thanks to generous support from California Revealed, a state-wide initiative to digitize, preserve, and provide online access to materials documenting California’s history, art, and culture, UCSF Archives and Special Collections now offers expanded digital access to more than 4,600 pages of UCSF newspapers, newsletters, and health publications, dated 1967 to 1999.”

The post University of California San Francisco: UCSF Print News Preserved and Digitized Through California Revealed first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

LatAm: Five tools to detect, analyze and counter disinformation - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-12-02T08:44:57.000Z

LatAm Journalism Review: Five tools to detect, analyze and counter disinformation. “The following list brings together five tools that media outlets and fact-checking organizations use for tasks ranging from tracking disinformation and analyzing its dissemination patterns, to recovering deleted content and analyzing audiovisual material.”

The post LatAm: Five tools to detect, analyze and counter disinformation first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

AWS: How do you do, fellow kids? Please watch our keynotes in Fortnite (The Register) - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-12-02T08:39:10.000Z

The Register: AWS: How do you do, fellow kids? Please watch our keynotes in Fortnite. “Amazon Web Services has decided to stream all five keynotes from its re:Invent conference in the hit multiplayer game Fortnite, which is more than a little bit bonkers.”

The post AWS: How do you do, fellow kids? Please watch our keynotes in Fortnite (The Register) first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

Mezha: Kremlin to Intensify Disinformation Campaigns Targeting Ukraine-US Talks in December - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-12-02T08:35:47.000Z

Mezha: Kremlin to Intensify Disinformation Campaigns Targeting Ukraine-US Talks in December. “In early December, the Kremlin is likely to ramp up a disinformation campaign around negotiations for a diplomatic settlement of the war against Ukraine, focusing its main efforts on discrediting the negotiating process between Ukraine and the United States. Such conclusions are contained in the forecast of the Center for Countering Disinformation at the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine on information threats.”

The post Mezha: Kremlin to Intensify Disinformation Campaigns Targeting Ukraine-US Talks in December first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

Skye's Curator Corner - BlogFlock

Simple Sabotage Field Manual - Cecily

How To Paint With Sound - Cecily

The guitarist’s palette

In the hands of a great musician, the gloriously simple guitar can create the most complex works of art. Here’s how

Policing Language In Colonial India - Cecily

Let’s Not Bring Back The Gatekeepers - Cecily

The challenge for the liberal establishment in the social media era is simple: persuade or perish. If you can’t control the public conversation, you must participate in it.

1. Why Social Media Benefits Populism

2. So, Is Elite Gatekeeping A Good Thing?

Against Elite Gatekeeping

The Benefits and Overestimated Costs of Social Media

3. Persuade or Perish

The antipathy towards persuasion

Case Studies

On Confronting Reality

But Aren’t The Deplorables Irredeemable?

Persuasion Works

Sources of Pessimism

Qualifications

Final Thoughts

Further Reading:

Our Picture Of Evolution - Cecily

Post on Longreads - Longreads

Post on Longreads - Longreads

The Register: Stealthy browser extensions waited years before infecting 4.3M Chrome, Edge users with backdoors and spyware - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

Engadget: India will require a state-owned cybersecurity app to be installed on all smartphones - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

Search Engine Land: Google tests pushing searchers from AI Overviews with follow up questions to AI Mode - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

WSB Radio: Marietta History Center unveils online database with thousands of artifacts - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

The Conversation: We built a database of 290,000 English medieval soldiers – here’s what it reveals - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

Florida Phoenix: Florida AG will now ‘aggressively enforce’ social media ban on minors - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

Korea Times: Democracies at risk of persistent foreign manipulation, EU official warns - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

Give the Gift of Fix The News - Fix The News

Gizmodo: Google Home Users Are Trying to Hack Their Way to a Better Voice Assistant - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

University of California San Francisco: UCSF Print News Preserved and Digitized Through California Revealed - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

LatAm: Five tools to detect, analyze and counter disinformation - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

AWS: How do you do, fellow kids? Please watch our keynotes in Fortnite (The Register) - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

Mezha: Kremlin to Intensify Disinformation Campaigns Targeting Ukraine-US Talks in December - ResearchBuzz: Firehose