Public detachment from facts is misdiagnosed as misinformation rather than speculative trust.

Evidence

It is often argued that today’s publics turn their backs on facts and shun scientific consensus; that they are routinely misled, too distracted by raging misinformation to prevent their falling prey to the epoch’s conflicts of ideology and the base identification of culture wars. … Not only is this a fallacious view, it also underestimates today’s fiery speculative conflicts—its lenses are ill-fitted for the incongruous (nondeliberative) forms taken by such conflicts. Trust itself looks different when predicated on our speculating together rather than on understanding each other. Ultimately, it, too, requires a speculative imagination, in the sense of being able to imagine ourselves occupying the positions of others, but not necessarily to understand or to empathize. This is not a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, in the sense of a rational device that allows equal citizens to make fairer choices. Rather, it looks more like a trust fall game, in which participants share each other’s relinquishment of control. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 342

Categorization

• XREF: The trust-fall versus veil-of-ignorance contrast connects to the reader’s interest in how financialized uncertainty shapes epistemology and politics; links back to earlier chapters establishing speculation’s migration beyond trading floors. — connects to: Alternative facts are a rejection of factual authority, not a rival claim — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 236
• SEED: The ‘trust fall’ model of democratic trust versus Rawlsian deliberation could anchor an essay on what solidarity means when citizens can’t understand each other.
• DEEPTHINKING: The deflation of the misinformation narrative into a speculative-trust account is dense and genuinely paradigm-shifting for how to read contemporary political conflict.