by David Kordahl

Like most Americans, I spent the summer of 2020 indoors. I had just graduated from Arizona State and moved my wife and our two daughters to Shreveport, Louisiana, but my new job as an assistant professor would not start for a few months. We settled into an Airbnb and only left to shop for groceries or to survey the city, driving from neighborhood to neighborhood to scout for real estate. With no campus office, I worked on a scientific manuscript in the garage attached to the Airbnb under the pulse of an oscillating fan. And as I refined that manuscript—the last unpublished section of my physics dissertation—I would periodically flip over to Twitter to see the latest viral news clips, which, in the summer of 2020, amounted to the most extreme daily fallout from the death of George Floyd.

By now, it’s hard to avoid political clichés about these events. The protests, it was true, were mostly peaceful, but by mid-June dozens of cities had imposed mandatory curfews. People’s private reactions differed, but in those months I noticed my opinions drifting rightward in real time, as I heard NPR discussions of police defunding by day and watched Twitter videos of looting by night.

This column is not about those events in themselves, at least not intentionally, since my reactionary opinions aren’t all that interesting. What I think is probably more fruitful to discuss is how such pieces of evidence (or “evidence”—the scare quotes are appropriate) shape personal opinion. Such videos may act like sightings of digital cryptids, like glimpses of Bigfoot disappearing into the forest. They do not function as common evidence, but they are transformative for the witnesses who had never before believed. These sightings bypass the usual stages of dispassionate parsing and give the viewer the impression of a ground truth. Their power is that they are assimilated not as news, but as personal experience.

Admittedly, in my own case, I’m thinking of one specific video. Read more »