Reports that populist Calin Georgescu, who came from nowhere in Romania to win the first round of last year's presidential election, is a Russian agent put the reader in a quandary. “The original presidential vote was cancelled before the second round last December, after the then president, Klaus Iohannis declassified intelligence documents that suggested that hundreds of TikTok accounts had been activated backing Georgescu," reported the BBC. "Romanian foreign intelligence said Russia had been behind the move, as well as thousands of cyber-attacks and other sabotage.”
Georgescu might or might not be what he is accused of being. The trouble is the establishment has cried wolf so often, they are no longer automatically credible. The media provided enough resolution to identify friend/foe in high contrast situations like world wars. It could lie and propagandize about the virtue of the allies without changing the essential calculus rejecting the evil of Hitler and later of Stalin. But in today's more complex world, we need information in 8-bit grayscale, so that we might judge along a continuum instead of just between 1 or 0. We are only likely to get such granular information by constructing discriminators and indexes of our own. It is unlikely that a completely trustworthy source of official truth will emerge to replace the old voices of authority. The crowds must judge for themselves. As Lincoln put it, “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
Everyone is aware that the old media trust model is broken. The mainstream media want to win back their authority. MSNBC's purge of talk show hosts and Jeff Bezos' editorial reforms at the Washington Post — if you want to call them that — probably reflect the "after action" lessons these media outlets absorbed after the election of Donald Trump in 2024. Sometimes you learn more from defeat than victory. They are going to broaden their offerings probably to at most 16 shades of gray. The winning side, perhaps because they won, has been slower to change. With a lot of the populist media still relying on the gotcha mode it developed during the campaign, DataRepublican represents the most promising innovation in political information so far. It is the most dangerous development since the blogs arrived.
DataRepublican was an anonymous individual, later identified as a data analyst who has gained prominence on social media, particularly on X, for work in analyzing and exposing patterns in government spending. What DataRepublican does is construct indices using custom AI tools which link related information to any given subject in a manner analogous to next word prediction in large language models, I would guess. Thus, from a given starting point one could find all the connections or related records in the "Book," a reference to the mass of impenetrable data in the public scope.
Suddenly, we could see. Think of a data-naut sending intelligent AI probes into a seething sea of amorphous data, impenetrable to unaided human minds, and coming up with a map. That's why DataRepublican was so dangerous. The arrival of information science and AI to politics means that not only are Democrat subterfuges vulnerable to the new technology, but also Trump's and all future administrations. Sonar has been invented, and submarines everywhere must beware. New tools like social media, data analysis, and open source generate inputs from outside traditional institutions — think politicians, media, or corporate gatekeepers — and have the effect of creating surprise outputs. They provide what is effectively a parallel mode of sentience. It was once widely believed that information technology would provide a method of one-way control in a manner analogous to strings that puppeteers use to control the marionettes. Few realized that if one could follow the strings, one would invariably find the puppeteer.
Related: Belmont Club: Stealing You
Now you have to work at getting truth if you want to be confident. Authority isn't enough. So is Calin Georgescu a Russian agent? What do you think – and why?