academics studying the field and the people directly affected? Probably not, but it’s still important to know about.
Critics on the left frequently argue that the nation’s top media underreport the war. But for many of us, myself included, reading about Afghanistan is a chore. The story is convoluted, confusing, complex, and depressing.
In the editorial judgment of the
Clay Shirky points out that newspaper readers always mostly skipped over the political stuff. But to do so, they had to at least glance at the front page—and so, if there was a huge political scandal, enough people would know about it to make an impact at the polls. “The question,” Shirky says, “is how can the average citizen ignore news of the day to the ninety-ninth percentile and periodically be alarmed when there is a crisis? How do you threaten business and civic leaders with the possibility that if things get too corrupt, the alarm can be sounded?” The front page played that role—but now it’s possible to skip it entirely.
Which brings us back to John Dewey. In Dewey’s vision, it is these issues—“indirect, extensive, enduring and serious consequences of conjoint and interacting behavior”—that call the public into existence. The important matters that indirectly touch all of our lives but exist out of the sphere of our immediate self-interest are the bedrock and the raison d’etre of democracy.
There’s no going back, of course. Nor should there be: the Internet still has the potential to be a better medium for democracy than broadcast, with its one-direction-only information flows, ever could be. As journalist A. J. Liebling pointed out, freedom of the press was for those who owned one. Now we all do.
But at the moment, we’re trading a system with a defined and well-debated sense of its civic responsibilities and roles for one with no sense of ethics. The Big Board is tearing down the wall between editorial decision-making and the business side of the operation. While Google and others are beginning to grapple with the consequences, most personalized filters have no way of prioritizing what really matters but gets fewer clicks. And in the end, “Give the people what they want” is a brittle and shallow civic philosophy.
But the rise of the filter bubble doesn’t just affect how we process news. It can also affect how we think.
3
The Adderall Society
It is hardly possible to overrate the value… of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar…. Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.
The manner in which some of the most important individual discoveries were arrived at reminds one more of a sleepwalker’s performance than an electronic brain’s.
In the spring of 1963, Geneva was swarming with diplomats. Delegations from eighteen countries had arrived for negotiations on the Nuclear Test Ban treaty, and meetings were under way in scores of locations throughout the Swiss capital. After one afternoon of discussions between the American and Russian delegations, a young KGB officer approached a forty-year-old American diplomat named David Mark. “I’m new on the Soviet delegation, and I’d like to talk to you,” he whispered to Mark in Russian, “but I don’t want to talk here. I want to have lunch with you.” After reporting the contact to colleagues at the CIA, Mark agreed, and the two men planned a meeting at a local restaurant the following day.
At the restaurant, the officer, whose name was Yuri Nosenko, explained that he’d gotten into a bit of a scrape. On his first night in Geneva, Nosenko had drunk too much and brought a prostitute back to his hotel room. When he awoke, to his horror, he found that his emergency stash of $900 in Swiss francs was missing—no small sum in 1963. “I’ve got to make it up,” Nosenko told him. “I can give you some information that will be very interesting to the CIA, and all I want is my money.” They set up a second meeting, to which Nosenko arrived in an obviously inebriated state. “I was snookered,” Nosenko admitted later—“very drunk.”
In exchange for the money, Nosenko promised to spy for the CIA in Moscow, and in January 1964 he met directly with CIA handlers to discuss his findings. This time, Nosenko had big news: He claimed to have handled the KGB file of Lee Harvey Oswald and said it contained nothing suggesting the Soviet Union had foreknowledge of Kennedy’s assassination, potentially ruling out Soviet involvement in the event. He was willing to share more of the file’s details with the CIA if he would be allowed to defect and resettle in the United States.
Nosenko’s offer was quickly transmitted to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It seemed like a potentially enormous break: Only months after Kennedy had been shot, determining who was behind his assassination was one of the agency’s top priorities. But how could they know if Nosenko was telling the truth? James Jesus Angleton, one of the lead agents on Nosenko’s case, was skeptical. Nosenko could be a trap—even part of a “master plot” to draw the CIA off the trail. After much discussion, the agents agreed to let Nosenko defect: If he was lying, it would indicate that the Soviet Union
As it turned out, they were wrong about both. Nosenko traveled to the United States in 1964, and the CIA collected a massive, detailed dossier on their latest catch. But almost as soon as he started the debriefing process, inconsistencies began to emerge. Nosenko claimed he’d graduated from his officer training program in 1949, but the CIA’s documents indicated otherwise. He claimed to have no access to documents that KGB officers of his station ought to have had. And why was this man with a wife and child at home in Russia defecting without them?
Angleton became more and more suspicious, especially after his drinking buddy Kim Philby was revealed to be a Soviet spy. Clearly, Nosenko was a decoy sent to dispute and undermine the intelligence the agency was getting from another Soviet defector. The debriefings became more intense. In 1964, Nosenko was thrown into solitary confinement, where he was subjected for several years to harsh interrogation intended to break him and force him to confess. In one week, he was subjected to polygraph tests for twenty-eight and a half hours. Still, no break was forthcoming.
Not everyone at the CIA thought Nosenko was a plant. And as more details from his biography became clear, it came to seem more and more likely that the man they had imprisoned was no spymaster. Nosenko’s father was the minister of shipbuilding and a member of the Communist Party Central Committee who had buildings named after him. When young Yuri had been caught stealing at the Naval Preparatory School and was beaten up by his classmates, his mother had complained directly to Stalin; some of his classmates were sent to the Russian front as punishment. It was looking more and more as though Yuri was just “the spoiled-brat son of a top leader” and a bit of a mess. The reason for the discrepancy in graduation dates became clear: Nosenko had been held back a year in school for flunking his exam in Marxism-Leninism, and he was ashamed of it.
By 1968, the balance of senior CIA agents came to believe that the agency was torturing an innocent man. They gave him $80,000, and set him up in a new identity somewhere in the American South. But the emotional
