Armchair pundits

The Age of Information?

I imagine a time before modern technology, when news took days to reach our communities, letters through the post brought important updates from weeks earlier, and our ability to understand events far away was slow and limited.

Technology, which is neither inherently good nor bad, has shrunk the world in a million ways, connecting us to locations near and far, delivering news and information (whether reliable or not) instantly, and allowing us to respond, interact, and influence others outside of our bubbles. We may read about the results of Taiwan's election before we hear about the fatal car accident two blocks from our home in Texas, a phenomenon that profoundly changes our perspectives and priorities.

There are many positives to our age of connectivity: transparency; the democratization of information; human connection and community; support and resources for those on the margins; shared knowledge in furtherance of science, health, diplomacy, commerce, human rights; and so on. 

There are many negatives, too: heaps of false or misleading information, often impossible to distinguish from truth; the illusion of proximity or understanding; virtual connection replacing real life connection; the belief in technology itself as a means to an end -- and the answer to all of our problems -- rather than understanding it as an imperfect tool; idleness and adverse health effects; and so on.

In 2025, the reality is that social media (with its influencers, trolls, news delivered through headlines and memes, propaganda and misinformation, opinion conflated with reporting) is replacing traditional, objective journalism and fact-based expertise as the primary source of knowledge for so many people, especially among younger generations. 

This is a big problem.

Humans are not wired to resist such a compelling and ubiquitous drug as social media. With ongoing consumption, our critical faculties decrease and, with them, our ability to discern fact from fiction. We conflate online community for real world community. We make assumptions that go unchallenged. We confirm our biases and worldviews again and again, aided by algorithms that feed us what we are looking for in order to grow their audiences and sell ads.

In this siloed and broken system, each person may not recognize the extent of their bubble and may feel that they are objectively informed about any given issue. As such, they feel less need for traditional experts who used to inform us about complicated topics (journalists, scientists, academics, legislators, writers, etc) and, gradually, experts become superfluous or worse. Without any rigor in establishing authenticity, building knowledge, or sourcing information, facts become subjective and change depending on your bias. 

Enter the armchair pundit

Armed with strong opinions and powerful emotions fueled by social media, the armchair pundit is an expert on every issue and not afraid to share their findings. They may even feel it's their duty to weigh in on random topics -- to virtue signal -- and that their audience is awaiting their opinion on the latest news. 

In this broken system, the armchair pundit readily conflates engagement with expertise -- the illusion of knowledge. These are regular people, activists, influencers, politicos, and anyone else who is a creature of the internet. They are now leading the culture wars (on both the right and left) and reshaping our societies. Make no mistake: there are difficult challenges in our society that need to be addressed: poverty, racism, sexism, greed, homophobia, and so on. But the current armchair activism is unproductive and tone deaf and, instead of yielding progress, is simply driving each side farther apart, into greater extremes, and empowering dumb, extremist ideologies -- like MAGA, corporate impunity, climate denialism, censorship and policing of language, anti-Israel hysteria, and performative DEI. Among the many flavors of armchair activism today, I am most familiar with the progressive version of this phenomenon -- the social justice warrior -- so I will break down the most common types that I have observed.

Five common types of social justice warrior

Rutterless whites: Many white people (and others as well) feel unsettled and guilty about their privilege, and many are not connected to their ethnic, spiritual, or cultural roots. They often feel confused or unsatisfied by their sense of identity in our society and, as a result, seek out authenticity, meaning, connection, and approval from those seen as the standard bearers of authenticity, justice, cool, wisdom, etc. (it start innocently for many in school, as they copy the speech and cool of Black kids and align themselves with their worldviews). Over time, these rutterless (mostly) white folks create a new identity to align themselves with their values. This identity can become exaggerated and brittle and, over time, transforms into an ideology -- a belief system -- that paves over their past identity or roots. These are white saviors, allies, and activists compensating for their lack of bona fides. 

Intersectionalists: In efforts to understand and address real injustice against marginalized groups, many activists have turned to pseudo-scientific theories of race, power, and oppression, with no small debt to Marxist critical theory. Especially in the US, this movement, growing since the 1960s but gaining prominence in the last 10 years, asserts that all people fall into the spectrum of victim or perpetrator, with each group's place depending on its degree of marginalization or privilege. In this absolutist and binary construct, all whites are privileged and guilty and all people of color and LGBT folks are victims. World events, near and far, are interpreted through this lens, often resulting in a profound distortion of context and reality.

Pathological empaths: Other people of any ethnicity or background find their way to activism after personally experiencing trauma, anger, sadness, or other forms of loss and redirecting those struggles toward social justice. The intense energy that comes from trauma is then channeled through the lens of activism. It becomes calcified and unyielding, and seeks outlets everywhere. They look for -- and find -- outrage, which confirms their positions again and again. In such a worldview, facts and identities are binary -- good and bad, black and white, perpetrators and victims -- and it is up to these warriors to fight for what is right. Their need to fight become tangled up with real feelings of compassion toward those marginalized, producing a sort of pathological empathy that trumps critical analysis or situational awareness. 

Veteran activists: There are others, generally older, who came of age during the civil rights movement, anti-war movement, or during the era of beatniks and hippies -- all meaningful protests and reactions to problematic systems around them. These veteran activists developed a mindset that was necessarily anti-establishment and populist. But, as situations changed over the decades and politics became far more complex, many of these activists failed to update their playbook, and developed a simplistic, knee-jerk response to all perceived power dynamics and injustices.

The Che crowd: Others are influenced by socialism, liberation theory, or revolutionary movements where the need to right an actual wrong (i.e., Cuban robber barons, the Russian czar, the Contras in Nicaragua) led to wholesale coups or revolutions that eventually created new systems of repression to replace the previous ones. These people inherited the zeal and desire for change born of these movements without updating their manuals to account for the profound flaws inherent to most revolutions.

And any combination of the above is possible. I do believe that much of this simplistic, binary thinking stems from a very old, Western, Christian mythology pitting reformers against traditionalists, crusaders against infidels, Protestants against Catholics, revolutionaries against monarchs, and so on. We are reproducing the self-righteous passion and anger from these struggles in each subsequent struggle, without considering whether there are other paradigms.

The danger is that these are all extreme or radical approaches that -- coupled with their counterparts on the right -- are driving our country further into intractable divides and culture wars.