Meeting the Terror and Urgency of Our Moment With a Relentless Challenge

History is repeating. In the US, Donald Trump was re-elected to the presidency, previously eradicated diseases have returned in earnest, centuries-old laws have been used to roll back rights and deport hundreds, and imperialistic plans to occupy sovereign lands (like Greenland and Canada) have been taken seriously. Countries in Europe, South America, and across the globe are seeing a rise in similarly fascistic political agendas. 

The theme of this year’s Milton Wolf Seminar, “ouroboros,” meaning, “infinite loop,” was particularly well-suited to address the déjà vu of the present political environment, taking stock of how media, governance structures, and technology mutually constitute and reinforce our political realities. Ouroboros, a term that represents an ancient symbol of a serpent eating its own tail before being reborn to new life, also suggests hope, possibility, and unforeseen developments. While history is repeating in this moment, new (and often confounding) orders and alliances are also being forged that require us to think in more expansive ways. 

The conversations at this year’s Milton Wolf seminar addressed the ouroboros of our present moment by returning to basics across three categories: 1.) diagnostics, i.e. in a world that feels like it’s simultaneously moving backwards and jumping ahead to hasty solutions, what are the problems we are trying to solve? 2.) definitions, i.e. what do we mean by previously taken for granted terms like media, democracy, and diplomacy? How do the meanings of these terms shift across constituencies? And 3.) interventions, i.e. what do meaningful solutions look like? What kinds of assumptions would require undoing for solutions to be successful? What kinds of new partnerships and collaborations could help us implement them? 

Meaningfully addressing these questions requires parsing previously held assumptions and conceptual ambiguities. The cross-section of expertise, from diplomacy to journalism and beyond, at this year’s seminar represented an important starting point for coming to consensus on key concepts that will guide policymaking in the years to come. Below, I discuss several of the main ways that this year’s Milton Wolf seminar addressed ambiguities and assumptions about the problems we face and how to solve them, highlighting the kind of big picture back to basics thinking required to address the complexities of our present moment. 

More information and more participation are always better – or are they? 

Professionals in the academic and journalistic spheres have come to think of information (dis)order as a primary problematic of our time, with state-sponsored and platform-amplified propaganda influencing voting decisions, conspiracy thinking, and hate-fueled politics. This year’s Milton Wolf seminar highlighted several approaches to addressing mis-and-disinformation across global contexts, including Taiwan and Sweden. While Scandinavian countries have taken an approach that centers media literacy and “psychological defense,” building a citizenry that is resilient to and hyper-aware of misinformation, others, like Taiwan, have taken a more reactive approach, identifying, debunking, and removing disinformation from online spaces when it’s spotted. 

In addition to discussing ways to address demonstrably false and harmful information online, the seminar also grappled with what mis-and-disinformation reflects about culture more deeply, taking an epistemological perspective on information (dis)orders. Others troubled the idea that before the Internet there was “epistemological homogeneity,” or mass agreement on truth and fact. Speaking from the US perspective, one panelist argued that we need not look very far back into history to see that mainstream traditional media channels have long been responsible for the spreading of mis-and-disinformation. She cited the example of US newspapers in the pre-Civil War through Jim Crow eras acting as mouthpieces for white supremacist policies and ideologies; and it’s not hard to identify others, like the misleading reporting around Iraq’s possession of nuclear weapons and the early years of the so-called “War on Terror” or the moral panic the press has participated in around the existence and rights of LGBTQ+ populations.

Overall, conversations around information (dis)orders troubled the notion that false and harmful information is always best fought with more and supposedly “better” information, for example via fact-checking. Participants asked what an approach to information that sees truth as culturally specific and knowledge as contextual might look like. Rather than fight information with more information, perhaps rethinking our ideals of civic engagement might be a more productive place to start. Is more engagement, more participation, and more discourse always better? Of course, demonstrably false information is a problem; however, prioritizing community needs and common ground over disciplining the content itself might be most effective. 

The nation-state is the core site of social change – or is it?  

Against forces like monopolistic technology companies, their global platforms, and widespread corporate greed, national policies and alliances are no doubt an important backstop. This year’s Milton Wolf seminar highlighted the importance of a flexible and resilient diplomatic practice that refuses to take for granted world orders and relationships. As the US increasingly aligns itself with Russia, for example, the European Union is more focused and collaborative than it has been in decades, united in its resolute support for Ukraine. As wars rage in Ukraine and Russia, Israel and Gaza, a new regime gets its footing in Syria, and historic levels of hunger and displacement plague Sudan and Congo, diplomacy is more important now than ever before. 

However, the present moment is also seeing a weaponization of diplomatic vocabularies. The Trump administration has couched many of its most egregious abuses of power in foreign policy language, with the help of countries looking to curry favor with him. The administration is using wartime laws to justify its mass deportation plans, with El Salvador becoming a co-conspirator in the Trump administration’s xenophobia. Additionally, the US State Department is openly targeting international students for actions as innocuous as penning an op-ed or attending a protest. And though the US has halted most of its international aid, refugee and asylum programs, it also welcomed the first ever group of white South African refugees who claim racial discrimination in a country where wealth is still concentrated almost entirely in the hands of its minority white population. 

And finally, we are increasingly seeing state “capture” by corporate and technological infrastructures. States are looking to tech companies to implement public services, complicating their efforts at tech regulation. And artificial intelligence has emerged as a new site of inter-state competition, prompting ever closer relationships between state governments and tech companies – what one panelist termed the “tenant state.” 

These developments prompted attendees to think critically about the role of the nation-state as the organizing entity of our world. If the state is increasingly tied more to corporations and less to citizens, how should diplomatic efforts respond? What is the role of diplomacy in oligarchy? If we cannot rely on states to prioritize citizens’ needs, what other kinds of social structures might we prioritize instead?  At a moment when institutions, including the state, are crumbling, can we envision new ones? If efforts at “global governance” like the United Nations and other intergovernmental organizations have largely failed, what would prioritizing governance at the local level look like? These questions are just as vexing as the problems that prompted them; however, decentering the nation-state as the primary site of social change prompts new pathways for envisioning the future. 

We all want democracy - don’t we? 

In thinking about what a brighter future looks like, Milton Wolf participants often invoked democracy as a central aim. However, our conversations made clear that even among journalists, academics, and diplomats, our notions of democracy are far from unified. This prompted a productive tension that allowed us to tease out what we mean by democracy, where we see it failing and thriving, and what it would look like to push democracy forward. 

For example, while some associate democracy with liberal notions of individual rights and freedoms, others see policies rooted in the collective as democracy’s truest form. These varied notions of democracy come from different positionalities; those who lived through Soviet-era communist rule, for example, might be quicker to identify democracy with the celebration of the individual, while others, who saw democracy implemented selectively based on race, class, gender and sexuality in places like the US might see the individual as democracy’s downfall.

In terms of media, democracy is also hard to pin down. While some see media’s reliance on advertising for revenue as “independent,” allowing it to maintain separation from the state, others see the commercialization of media as a sign of corporate capture. Does democratic media exist? Where in the world is there a truly “free” press? Is media independence achievable, even under democratic rule? Independence from what, exactly?

One attendee addressed these questions with a notion of “relational” journalism, which prioritizes ethics, integrity and relationships with communities over an ill-defined and impossible to achieve objectivity or non-bias. We extrapolated this notion of media independence to democracy, grappling with whether democracy is still the most useful way to think about what it is we want and need as a society, or if a notion of “the commons” might be more productive. 

Exacerbating the tensions between a liberal democracy, where the private sector enabled by the “free” market fills the state’s gaps and individual rights may come at the expense of the common good, versus the pitfalls of a society where the collective eclipses individual expression, difference, and choice, the present moment asks us to think differently – toward new, hybrid, and human-centered conceptions of democracy. 

Conclusion

The complexities of this moment will no doubt require complex solutions. However, the feedback loop that marks the topsy turvy and haywire nature of our present moment also demands that we challenge basic assumptions about what we value and how we bring those values to life. “Ouroboros” prompts questions about our relationship to idea(l)s like information, the nation-state, and democracy, urging us to unsettle the definitions and assumptions that got us here. This kind of resetting reflects what one speaker identified as a “slow politics,” where taking a step back from the urgency and chaos of the problems that plague this moment allows for an expansion and deepening of the “terrain of struggle” we might mobilize to solve them. We should be alarmed that history is repeating, but we should also use this as an opportunity to revise our playbook to build something new.