Denial of Service

How Trump - and Robert Peston - broke the news, and why it's probably time to rethink your information diet.

In 1978, Anatoli Burgoski, a Russian physicist, was working on a particle accelerator when he was struck in the head by a high-energy proton beam which burned straight through his skull. He miraculously survived, but lost the hearing in one ear and was prone to seizures for the rest of his life. I don’t know what it feels like to have 76 billion electron volts of pure energy blast a hole through your face, but I imagine it’s a bit like opening Bluesky in the last few days.

News consumption before Twitter. Photo by Peter Lawrence on Unsplash

Trump and Musk¹, the Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett of American government, have an unmatched ability to saturate the public discourse with noise. Like all great acts, the audience know their role and do much of the work for them: every call is answered with a response, every action - implied or otherwise - generates a torrent of rumour and speculation about what might come next. The result is total information overload, which reminded me of something:

“A denial of service (DoS) attack is an attempt to overload a website or network, with the aim of degrading its performance or even making it completely inaccessible. Typically a successful DoS attack will result in loss of availability of part, or all, of a system, and consume time and money to analyse, defend and recover from.”

National Cyber Security Centre

Vast amounts of institutional, industrial and governmental bandwidth - money and time - are being consumed in a futile effort to process the tsunami of conflicting information, speculation, suggestion and rumour. The system is overloaded, our collective cognition degraded. It’s not at all clear that this is a conscious strategy², but as Sam Lowe argues in ‘The Uncertainty Machine’ it doesn’t really matter: “if everything Trump does and has ever done creates uncertainty, then we should all assume that creating uncertainty is indeed his ultimate objective, whether he knows it or not.”

Trump and Musk are the apotheosis of a trend that’s been a growing problem with news coverage for some time now. To illustrate what I mean, let’s return to one of the peak moments of Brexit drama. On Christmas Eve of 2020, the British government finally signed a trade deal with the EU. ITV Political Editor Robert Peston was on Twitter in the days and weeks preceding the agreement to keep us all informed about the ongoing negotiations.

In June of that year, Peston was telling us that a ‘no-deal relationship now looks highly probable’, a theme that continued through September and as late as October 19th: ‘Why I thought the prospects for an EU trade deal were close to 100%. What I got wrong.’ We pick up the roller coaster ride at the start of December:

December 1st: ‘I still think, as I’ve been saying for weeks, there will be a deal.’

December 9th: ‘No-deal is a very real risk.’

December 10th: ‘Why it’s (probably) no deal.’

December 14th: ‘These are not benign conditions for making a rational forecast of whether there’ll be deal or no deal.’

And now, as the kids say, buckle up:

December 22nd:

4.15pm: ‘UK and EU free-trade negotiating teams are aiming to reach agreement on a deal tomorrow night. No one seems terribly confident agreement will actually be reached though.’

7.44pm: ‘The prospects of a UK/EU deal tomorrow have faded, I am told.’

8.10pm: ‘And it is confirmed there is no chance of a deal before Christmas.’

11.43pm: ‘Oh God. I can’t believe I am saying this. But a UK source now says agreement on a UK/EU trade deal is again possible tomorrow.’

December 24th: ‘UK/EU trade deal is done. Official.’

‘Oh God,’ indeed. I’m picking on Peston here, but you could do the same exercise for many of his peers. What he’s posting is justifiable - his job as a lobby journalist is to convey the back-and-forth going on behind the scenes, to illuminate the workings of government, I absolutely get that. It’s just that… how useful is any of this to the average reader? If you had fallen into a coma on December 1st and woken up at Christmas, you would be no less informed. In fact for most of the month you would have been better informed, by virtue of being unconscious.

G.K. Chesterton once wrote that journalism was, “saying 'Lord Jones Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.” A hundred-and-some years later that sounds rather quaint. Today, it’s asking three different sources with a vested interest in the matter whether Lord Jones is in fact dead, and posting their contradictory answers in real-time as you receive them.

Here’s a similar timeline from Trump’s first term, courtesy of Sam Lowe again (it’s a really great post, read it here). It’s on an obscure subject few of you will have heard of: tariffs against Canada.

To give an illustrative example from Trump 1.0: Steel tariffs and Canada.

Last time round (thank you, PIIE, for the timeline), Trump started an investigation into the national security threat posed by steel and aluminium (April 2017), announced tariffs on imports of steel and aluminium from Canada and others (1 March 2018), announced a temporary reprieve for NAFTA countries (8 March 2018), extended the reprieve for Canada and some others (30 April 2018), ended the reprieve for Canada, Mexico and the EU (1 June 2018), removed the tariffs on Canada and Mexico (17 May 2019), reimposed some tariffs on Canadian aluminium (6 August 2020), and finally ended the tariffs on Canadian aluminium but demanded quotas instead (15 September 2020).

Phew.

‘Phew’ indeed, although by 2025 standards this feels adorably sedate. In just the last week or so, Trump has ordered and then cancelled tariffs against Colombia, ordered and then postponed tariffs against Mexico, and ordered tariffs against Canada which I’m hoping to see the fate of before I hit ‘publish’ and look stupid yep, just got postponed.

Following all this chaos is stressful and exhausting and feels largely pointless given that, again, if I had fallen into a blissful slumber nine days ago and been oblivious to the threats against Colombia, Mexico and Canada, I’d be no less informed and a lot less anxious. As Alan Beattie puts it in his ongoing³ thread: “Welcome to Donald Trump's trade policy. Nobody. Knows. Anything.”

A few weeks after the EU deal was signed, political journalist Rafael Behr described his heart attack in a piece for The Guardian. Life as a columnist in this period was not healthy: “We spent the day twitchily texting MPs and advisers, swapping information with colleagues and rivals, scanning MPs’ faces from the Commons press gallery, reading body language. What has anyone heard? How are the numbers looking?”

In hindsight, Behr’s account reads like a kind of mass hysteria, a black hole of reporters and tweeters feeding off each other, pulling each other deeper and deeper into an anxious abyss in which all is confusion and from which no light escapes. And yet, somehow, we have all become Rafael Behr, hunched over our smartphones, eyelid twitching⁴, reading the tea-leaves⁵, trying to make sense of the insensible.

That level of intensity might make sense if you’re, say, responsible for Mexican trade policy, or in a position to go and protest at the USAID offices. But for most of us it’s borderline masochistic and profoundly unhealthy: as Behr, (thankfully now recovered) put it, “social media was the main pipeline bringing anger and anxiety into every corner of my waking life.”

You can drive yourself mad trying to keep up with the daily noise and not be any better informed or empowered, or you can slow down and manage the flow. The best information isn’t to be found in the daily fragments of drama on social media, but in the substantial, longer-form journalism and analysis from people who know what they’re talking about.

Lawrence Freedman’s recent post over at Comment is Freed, looking at the new Trump Administration’s likely approach to the war in Ukraine, is unusual for giving a clear, calm overview of the key players and what’s actually been happening - the signal behind the noise. Ed Conway’s essay on why the U.S. is so dependent on Canadian oil despite being a net exporter is genuinely eye-opening. Pretty much the whole output of Wired in the last week has been a tour de force of rigorous investigative journalism. I won’t plug Sam Lowe again because nobody gets three links in one post, but there’s a theme here - slower, deeper, more thoughtful content from people with real expertise who can assemble all those messy fragments into something understandable.

I’m not arguing against the social media feeds - they serve an important and powerful function in a democracy, sharing information and impelling action. Nor am I suggesting that people switch off and live in complacent ignorance. But on a personal level, now seems a very good time to think about your news habits, about the value you’re getting from the people you follow. Are you in a position to do anything useful with this information? Do you need the unfiltered noise blasted into your face hour by hour? Do you feel more informed or empowered by what you’re scrolling through? Or would it be better to step back, slow down, breathe, and let the light in.

If you have some good recommendations for people to follow, do please share them in the comments. As ever, you can follow me on Bluesky.

1. It’s remarkable that Musk had to pay billions of dollars for Twitter, but lives rent-free on Bluesky.

2. That he appeared to confuse Spain with South Africa last week suggests we’re not dealing with a 4-D chess champion here.

3. Fair play for committing to a thread that’s going to take four years (at least) to complete.

4. Which is bloody annoying by the way.

5. If you have tea leaves on your phone then you should probably clean your phone.