This is The Guardian.

The Guardian Archive Long Read.

Hello, my name is William Davis, and I'm the author of Why Can't We Agree on What's True Anymore, which was published as a Guardian long read in September 2019.

I was first drawn to this topic because by the time it was published in 2019, there'd been a good three years or so of discussion of what

was often called post-truth, which was an anxiety that developed, particularly in the wake of

the Brexit referendum and Trump electoral victory of 2016, that the facts regarding what was going

on in politics, the economy, international relations,

and so on, had lost influence over the way in which democratic debate was conducted.

But one of the things I was interested in was that a particular mentality was widespread

across the public of, first of all, distrusting mainstream media.

Meanwhile, there was much greater allegiance to a vision of truth in which it's possible to get

directly to the data itself, that, well, I need to be able to see the video evidence.

I need to be able to see the actual data leak or the actual CCTV footage.

And one of the things I was interested in this piece is that now that we live in this age,

where we kind of take for granted, really, that all human behavior is probably being captured much of the time by something,

whether it be a camera or a screen

or the geotracking of a particular phone or whatever it might be. And of course, the ultimate

example of this right now would be something like the Epstein scandal, where there's political

crisis that just rolls on and on and on regarding what actually is going to get shown to the

public so that we can

actually find out a truth. But one of the things that I argue in the piece is that even when that

happens, that tends not to resolve the kinds of disagreement, which are often much more kind of

...