No Media Consensus on Pelosi’s Taiwan Trip?

The sudden lack of clear battle lines is glaring.

Photo by Aidan Feddersen on Unsplash.

It’s the year 2022, in the Age of Information, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s official diplomatic visit to Taiwan has set off a cavalcade of hot-takes, op-eds and sternly-worded tweets.

That’s no surprise; almost everything any public personae does these days sets off a similar uproar from supporters, naysayers, critics and cheerleaders. The battle lines, once often drawn along political lines, are almost exclusively so in 2022; especially in the media.

2022 is what we idly call this year, but it might not always be so. Someday, far in the future, our current calendar may be reset by newly powerful authorities and experts, as it has been many times before. We might have to date the start of this current epoch back to 1983, when the internet first came into being, in which case this is year 39 A.N. (Anno Notitia).

Or it might make more sense to date the beginning of the Information Age back to the invention of the pentium processor in 1993, in which case this is year 29 A.N.

One of the oddest things about the age in which we are currently living- and we are living through an extraordinarily odd age- is the monumental contrast between how much information we have at our fingertips and how little real consensus all that…