Knarc
Knarc, n.: 1) A person who would be easily seen to be a crank, but for the fact of practicing their cranky behavior through the protection of an institution which gives their crankiness legitimacy.
2) Crank spelled backwards.
- Eric Weinstein on Twitter
There is no concept in English, of which I am aware, for a group of experts promoting a prima facie insane perspective from the highest positions of trust, expertise and leadership. Stephen Wolfram, in my opinion, is far less nutty than the arrival of new high energy physics preprints that are posted daily on the so-called Arxiv server used by all leading theorists. A quick review on any given day, chosen at random, reveals that these papers are generally not in any way tied to particles, forces, dimensions, or symmetries that have ever been seen in any experiment. They are not actually high energy physics theories at all, because they are not tied to any energy scale, they aren't attempting to understand the physical world, and they aren't even theories, so far as I can tell. As far as high energy physical theory, that would be zero for three and beyond pathetic. What they really represent are the mathematical explorations of fragments of long ago exhausted dreams for unification, now 20 to 50 years past their due date. This is why we need a new concept, which I have called the Knarc. Aside from being Swedish slang for hard recreational drugs, it is also the word crank spelled backwards. You can think of the two meanings as being related, by virtue of the fact that our central institutions are almost all growth-dependent structures, now increasingly dominated in our low-growth world by leaders addicted to desperate measures to cover for their lack of competence, progress and honesty.
Quite simply, the mainstream may still be tautologically at the center, but it is often no less wacky than the fringe that it denigrates. Think about it. President Donald Trump is a good example of a Knarc freestyling about getting disinfectant inside the body to kill Covid from the presidential lectern, and then lying about it, claiming it was sarcasm when he was caught.
The Surgeon General, the CDC, and the WHO are all knarc organizations for giving deadly, faulty, and transparently self-inconsistent recommendations on the use of face masks, to say nothing of our friends in the People's Republic of China who are blatantly lying about all aspects of the Covid epidemic, so far as I can tell. Joe Biden, Trump's likely opponent for perhaps the world's most demanding job, is a knarc for running when he should be retiring, given embarrassing signs of mental decline and his constant inability to remember what he is talking about from moment to moment with alarming frequency for a mere septuagenarian.
Once you have a concept of a dependably crazy bipartisan center ignoring reality to quickly extract as much as possible from the accumulated wealth and credit of civil society before the bills all come due and are sent to the next generation for payment, you realize that if there are any reliable experts left, you would expect them to be straddling the worlds between the central knarcs and the cranks of the fringe. And this gets to the difficult problem we now face, but which we cannot face up to: the coming total collapse of authoritative sources. You will notice that Wikipedia's history of surprisingly high quality comes from an insistence on using reliable, published sources of information as primary material. But don't take it from me. In Wikipedia's own words: “If no reliable sources can be found on the topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it.” In short, when reliable sources cannot be found, communal sense making breaks down and comes to an end. In my lifetime, I have seen the universities, the scientific journals, the papers of record all succumb to the political economy of perverse incentives in a low growth world. Said differently, we now run the risk that if previously reliable published sources, which prided themselves on a goal of objectivity, become captured by political incentives, secondary structures like Wikipedia will begin to degrade and unravel as a result. Thus, we can formally at least understand the logic of the CEO of YouTube when she tells us that she must remove videos that contradict authoritative sources to protect the public health during a pandemic. But when she tells us that the World Health Organization is such an unquestionable source, we must, by the same logic of public health, actually consider whether YouTube should be nationalized, given that the W.H.O. appears to be in thrall to mainland China and unable to acknowledge the existence of Taiwan's efforts to control the virus, while they continue to spout nonsense about the transmission of the virus and PPE.
A free and advanced society, must question the now unreliable W.H.O. and do so vigorously and ferociously whether or not YouTube and its parent company have continuing business interests involving East Asia. Of course, the idea of nationalizing YouTube because its CEO is chilling a conversation that needs to take place in the middle of a geopolitical health crisis is a confusing issue. Yet who can deny that she is blatantly exercising the privileges of a publisher while retaining the legal protections of a platform? One senses immediately that it is a conversation that cannot take place within a framework of thoroughly nutty, yet central institutions that share a common interest in being spared difficult questions, particularly as regards Communist China.
On the other hand, figuring out how to make it impossible for Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and other publishers to exercise editorial control while posing as platforms is an essential conversation that must not be handed off to cranks, trolls and crackpots. The lacuna that is opened up between the cranks of 4Chan and the comparably nutty Knarcs of the great boardrooms, lying and colluding to protect their empires from oversight, clawbacks and regulation, is therefore of utmost importance.
- Eric Weinstein on The Portal Ep. 32, April 29, 2020
On X