Tate vs Thunberg is evidence of our deepening Epistemic Crisis

Along with the rest of the world, I watched in fascination a few weeks back as Andrew Tate and Greta Thunberg went to war. For me, it was like a real life science fiction film; inhabitants of totally different planets encountering each other in explosive fashion.

My casting of Tate and Thunberg as different alien species was heavily influenced by the ideas in an interactive collage project I’ve been working on recently. You can find it here. In one page of the collage, I explore the near impossibility of communicating across different cultural divides these days (or any days!?). I use an image from the film ‘Arrival’ (about learning alien languages, and through them different ways of thinking and living) to suggest the huge gulfs that seem to exist between how we communicate and how we think.

My project, as a whole, is about epistemic fracturing - the splintering, down cultural and political lines, of not just what we know but of what we think knowledge is and/or should be.

Thunberg and Tate are obviously on very different offshoots of these splinters. There’s an obvious difference in what they know: Thunberg knows a lot about climate change, its impacts, and movement building, while Tate knows a lot about how to get disenfranchised right-wing men to follow you on social media, how to be verbosely bigoted at every opportunity and how to accumulate vast amounts of wealth without contributing anything to society.

There’s also a difference in what they think knowledge is, apparent in how they validate their knowledge claims. Thunberg appeals to scientific knowledge as sanctioned by major research institutions, while Tate appeals to emotions, gaining traction for his views by embedding them in feelings of anger, superiority and hope amongst his followers.

In the aftermath of their head-to-head, some commentators have tried to paint Tate and Thunberg as equivalent by reading the encounter through the later value system, appealing to feelings. In an article for the Spectator Brendan O’Neil claimed that the two are united by being equally ‘annoying’ and having ‘cult’ followings. This argument is fully within Tate’s epistemological framework - it appeals to our emotions to validate its claims rather than to any substantive evidence. Don’t you find them both annoying? Isn’t it irritating that people idealise them both based on their media personas?

This way of framing the comparison misses the point, that one is a self-declared misogynist boasting about his personal contribution to climate catastrophe and the other has dedicated most of her life so far to trying to discourage humanity from destroying itself. Of course, if you point this out, somebody like O’Neil will accuse you of being a follower of Thunberg’s ‘cult against modernity’ in an attempt to neutralise the point. (The word cult suggesting an unfounded worship of a value system rather than logically grounded agreement with it). This is a key way in which communication across different perspectives becomes impossible, through insisting that any appeal to evidence is just another form of emotional reaction and thereby reducing disputes over literally world changing courses of action to who feels what.

This mechanism is, of course, only one way in which ignorance is deliberately cultivated, a process that historian Robert N Proctor termed ‘agnotology.’ There are many forms of agnotology, from the production of ‘deep fakes’ that show politicians supposedly saying things they never said, to the casual spread of misinformation on social media, as people retweet and repost claims without any sense of their veracity. Fake news is also deliberately generated online by people with political and cultural agendas. Apparently, what normally happens is that such people generate a body of misleading online content tied to a currently unknown term that doesn’t generate many other search results. They then ensure that the term is used in a high profile media appearance. On hearing the term used, people search for it, trying to find out what it means, and find the body of misleading content. In the absence of other search results, they take the deliberately planted material to be the conclusive information.

These various forms of agnotology are leading to issues of ‘epistemic security.’ It’s become so easy for all kinds of actors to effectively spread misinformation that it’s very difficult to produce consensus around what’s true and, therefore, to mobilise action around important causes like climate change (the subject of the Thunberg - Tate war).

But it’s also very complicated to work out what should count as acceptable knowledge. It’s easy to frame the problem as sanctioned experts VS media mis/disinformation. Yet what counts as sanctioned expertise is decided by gatekeepers in academia, government and government adjacent institutions that are themselves embedded in a history of colonial, sexist, racist, heteronormative, transphobic and ableist oppression. Within these trusted institutions there are long histories of deliberate exclusion of minoritized voices. In short, they enact their own versions of misinformation by deliberately prioritising the agendas of a small, privileged group.

This issue is compounded by the dominance of colonial languages on the internet, with huge inequalities existing online regarding which languages information is written and available in.

So where do we go from here? How can we have meaningful conversations to generate consensual, progressive changes within this chaos of epistemic fragmentation?

My interactive collage experiment engages with this question.