The irony of Carole Cadwalladr’s career is that she writes paranoid fantasies about paranoid fantasies. Those are strong words, yes, and should not be used to describe mere disagreement, but I think that her Observer article “A new era dawns. America’s tech bros now strut their stuff in the corridors of power” more than merits them.

Cadwalladr is best known for arguing that Big Tech — Meta, X et cetera — is undermining democracy.  It would be unfair to avoid clarifying that this is not an essentially illegitimate concern. Clearly, Elon Musk, for example, purchased X — then Twitter — with political motives. It is entirely fair to ask questions about how the centibillionaire Donald Trump ally will use his power over the information we consume. 

Indeed, it would be incredibly naive not to ask questions.

The problem with Cadwalladr is not her theme but her approach to it. Her writing, like her thinking, is feverish — trading in assertion far more than evidence. In her mind, there is a stark Manichean divide between traditional media outlets and social media. Before 2016, she claims, “the world as we knew it” was “stable, fixed by facts, balustraded by evidence”. Er … Come again? 

If you read a traditional outlet like The New York Times (or, presumably, the Observer), Cadwalladr continues, you will be reading “clean, hygienic, fact-checked news”. Clean? Hygienic? What on Earth does that even mean?

For the sake of balance, I’ll avoid traditional right-wing complaints about the political correctness of the media (valid though such complaints are). Were we enjoying “clean, hygienic” news, “fixed by facts, balustraded by evidence”, when the media — including Judith Miller of The New York Times — published bogus stories about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs? This idealised vision of traditional media is absurd.

I can’t disagree with Cadwalladr that a lot of the discourse on social media is irrational or dishonest. Bogus claims spread like wildfire every day. The CEO of X is hardly innocent in this regard. For example, one of Elon Musk’s favourite accounts accused a completely random man of being the Southport killer. (Another of his favourite accounts is a random Malaysian man who posts about US politics 24/7.) Yes, “Community Notes” is a helpful feature — but the “notes” can be too late, or just go ignored.

So, yes, to some extent this is a valid concern. But Cadwalladr is not the person to write about it. First, just take a paddle in her rhetoric:

… come with me into the information sewers, where we will wade through the shit everyone else consumes. Trump is cholera. His hate, his lies – it’s an infection that’s in the drinking water now. Our information system is London’s stinking streets before the Victorian miracle of sanitation.

Does this sound like the product of a rational mind? Or — ironically, given its obvious opposition to populists like Trump — does it sound demagogic and dehumanising? (That “shit” on social media is the product of your family, friends and neighbours after all.) But let’s take a look at how she backs up all this verbiage. “We’ve spent [the last] eight years learning a new lexicon,” she gasps: 

… “misinformation”, “disinformation”, “microtargeting”.

Okay, but “misinformation” and “disinformation” are not new concepts. They are just newly fashionable descriptors for familiar concepts. Cadwalladr makes no attempt to argue that “misinformation” and “disinformation” are more influential today than they were in 2014. She just assumes that this is the case. Yet as Fred Skulthorp has argued for The Critic, drawing on published studies:

… there is really only a minority that does engage with and actively promote demonstrably false information. Unsurprisingly their reach is limited and negligible in terms of what restoring trust in established sources of information can achieve.

A problem, then, but the scale of the problem is arguable. Cadwalladr, though, is off on a rant about how the US election was won by young men who:

… were voting for protein powder and deadlifting as much as they were for a 78-year-old convicted felon. They were voting for bitcoin and weighted squats. For YouTube shorts and Twitch streams.

Me, I’m dull-minded enough to think that inflation and immigration were bigger factors than The Joe Rogan Experience. But what specifically does this have to do with Big Tech? No answers are forthcoming. Cadwalladr has moved on to insisting that the likes of Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are seeking something like “the chaos of Russia in the 90s”. “It’s not a coincidence that Musk spouts the Kremlin’s talking points and chats to Putin on the phone,” she says, triumphantly. Putin became prime minister in 1999 on the promise that he would end the “wild 90s”. Does this matter? Does anything matter?

Again, it is perfectly legitimate to question the power, influence and intentions of Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos. But how different is their power and influence to that of, say, George Soros and Rupert Murdoch? Don’t expect rational arguments from Cadwalladr. At a time where more traditional media outlets should be doing their best to rebuild trust, she offers up hysteria — building the narrative that a malign elite has corrupted an innocent world, seizing control of events and the minds of the sheeple, but in a form that Hay Festival attendees will find attractive. Truly, she is an Alex Jones for the Observer crowd.