Building Community Through Shared Reality

This is the Guardian. A History of the United States in a hundred Objects is a brand new podcast from ninety nine percent ofisible in BBC stududios Each week, we're looking at a different object from across American history with a unique story to tell about who we've been, what we've built, and what we've allowed ourselves to forget Some of these objects are well known, many are not, but all of them carry the story of how we got to this moment Find a history of the United States and one hundred objects on the ninety nine percent visible feed wherever you get your podcasts Welcome to the Guardian Long Read, showcasing the best long form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking. For the text version of this and all our longongreads, go to theguardian. com forward slash longongread. This article contains some swearing How to survive the information crisis We once talked about fake news Now reality itself feels fake. In this age of crisis, technology is pulling us apart At its best, journalism can bring us together again This is written and read by Katherine Weiner. That's me,. I'm editor in Chief of the Guardian I have a confession to make It has taken me years to write this article For a long time, I have felt that something was missing in the public conversation. about human connection and community and how they are being eroded and yet I haven't been able to articulate it. Thinking and writing have become harder It's as if the neurons in my brain don't connect with each other in quite the same way I go to check a fact and get instantly diverted by a hundred other distractions on my phone I find myself unable to devote time to thinking and writing like I used to be the relentless newews agenda But the news has been relentless throughout my eleven years as Eeditor in Chief of the Guardian It could be age, but I'm not that old It could be menopause, but I'm on all the drugs. No, I think it's because of something that many of us feel in this moment that our attention spans have been degraded Our thinking skills blunted that we somehow can't concentrate or lose ourselves in a project. Finding myself stuck, as an experiment, I asked an AI tool to write this article for me, just to see what it came up with The result was insufferably pompous and joyless. a reminder of the limits of this technology for now at least In the end, I managed to write this article thanks to some serious interventions The force of a deadline locking my phone in a different room turning off the internet altogether But what really got me there? It got me to being able to say what I wanted to say. was talking it through with friends and colleagues The answer to my writer's block was in front of me all along All I needed to do was talk to other people Our age of crises I'm sure you feel it too The world really has become a more bewildering, less hopeful place Just look at the headlines in recent weeks from a shocking spike in anti Semitic attacks in the UK to Donald Trump's threats to blow Iran off the face of the earth too daily stories of war and mass displacement There are always positive stories, of course, of bravery, invention, creativity and kindness. But you're right to have a growing sense that we are living in an age of crisis of many interlinked crises and that our collective survival is at stake I'm going to talk about the challenges we face as fellow citizens And I hope to persuade you that good information Transparently funded journalism in the public interest is part of the solution to the problem in more ways than you might think But first, these crises I'm sure they will be familiar At the grandest scale, the environmental crisis In February, scientists warned that the world is closer than previously thought point of no return after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped The global food system is under threat and wildlife populations have declined by more than seventy percent since nineteen seventy At the same time, the global consensus on the need for urgent action has been attacked by right wing populists as an elite concern justust as the poorest suffer most from climate catastrophe There is also the global political crisis For the first time in twenty years, autocracies number democracies Even in many established democracies, we are seeing the dismantling of democratic norms. The erosion of checks and balances Just look at the US A Stafan Limberg, the founder of the VDEM Institute in Gothenburg, says For Oan in Hungary, it took about four years For Vuich in Serbia, it took eight years And for Erdogan in Turkey and Modi in India It took about ten years to accomplish the suppression of democratic institutions that Donald Trump has achieved in only one year On the international stage, the shifts are even starker The world is experiencing a surge in violence not seen since the Second World War Russia's war on Ukraine has entered its fifth year with no end in sight In Gaza, Israel conducted what numerous human rights groups and scholars have described as a genocide. with the world watching day by day In Sudan, more than thirteen million people have been displaced and hundreds of thousands killed In two days last October in the city of El Fasa, up to ten thousand people were massacred And just this year, the US and Israel have launched an illegal war on Iran that has killed more than three thousand three hundred people while wreaking havoc on the global economy At the same time, the US. Secretary of Defense, who was renamed himself the Secretary of War, and seems inspired mostly by the crusades openly boasts about unleashing overwhelming and punishing violence on America's adversaries Even Western leaders are now publicly declaring that the rules based world order, established after the horrors of the Second World War is dead Next there is the economic crisis, as the failures of neoliberalism become ever clearer And the richest people in the world become ever richer and more powerful The figures in the World in Inequality repeport tell the story Fewer than sixty thousand people That's not point, nught, nght one percent of the world's population Control three times as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humanity They report that extreme wealth concentration is no longer only an economic issue It's also a democratic toxin that weakens social cohesion and pulls apart communities In our everyday lives, we feel these crises on a more intimate level Basic goods have become unaffordable for many The housing crisis and the uncertain jobs market have robbed young people of a sense of hope about their future without a roadmap for a good life And loneliness is growing The pandemic accelerated this trend towards atomization partarticularly in places like Britain, where austerity policies had already weakened the social fabric Loneliness is not a personal failing It's a sign of a failing society and it is shaping our politics Everyone is in search of community Lonely, disconnected people often find it online and people talking directly to them giving them simple narratives about who to blame for their pain Elites or women with jobs, or Muslims, or Jews or LGBTQ plus people or immigrants on boats At the same time, social media influencers get rich, extolling individualist capitalism, misogyny, crypto schemes offering an empty sense of belonging. It's overwhelming to confront all these crises You can see the world changing, deteriorating in front of your eyes. politicians seem unable to meet the moment They talk as if a few tweaks here and there were all that is needed Are they not noticing it too You think you're going mad It's hard to keep your head The information crisis I believe these interlinked crises are driven and compounded by the digital revolution We are in the midst of an historic transition from one era to another In her recent book, Don't Burn anyyone at the stake todayay Naomi Olderman makes a convincing case that what we face today is an information crisis with very few precedence in human history We live in a tidal wave of data, she writes but we lack the social and informational structures to manage it This tidal wave of data contains much that is valuable But that doesn't prevent it from being destabilizing Digital technology means that we are constantly being made aware of all the things we don't know, writes Alderman We might end up expressing an idea online that we've heard many times in our social circle only to be jumped on by fifty people who know more and tell us that our ideas are stupid Old fashioned and even prejudiced It also works the other way aroundound When we can see everyone else's opinions, it turns out that someone we really liked may hold an idea that we find stupid, old fashioned, or even prejudiced. It's the I used to like Uncle Bob until I saw his posts on Facebook syndrome We're left wondering who we can trust. This feeling of being forever assailed by new and disorienting information leads people to feel defensive. angry and alone Now, if all we had to worry about was a deluge of accurate new information at our fingertips Perhaps we would not be facing a crisis of such magnitude But as we know, the world is full of bad actors actively stoking the information crisis No one is more aware of this than journalists One measure of the importance of this work is how far the powerful will go to shut it down. through censorship or legal persecution or by polluting the information environment with the help of trolls, bots, and propagandists, so that the truth becomes impossible to discern flood the zone with shit. As Steve Bannon infamously put it At its most extreme, opponents of the trruth simply kill their enemies. Last year, one hundred and twenty nine journalists and media workers were killed That's the highest figure since the Committee to Protect Journalists began collecting data more than thirty years ago. Fifty four of those killed were Palestinian journists in Gaza Nine were killed in Sudan and four in Ukraine There was once a broadly upheld convention that a press vest gave some level of protection in a war zone no longer These efforts to prevent journalists from doing their work are not new, even if they are becoming more common The thing that has truly brought us into this age of information crisis is technology. It's hardly controversial these days to note that so much digital technology seems designed to produce conflict, to prioritize lies over truth rather than unlocking the best in human nature It seems designed to stoke the worst in us As the tech critic Jacob Silverman says, Today's internet isn't really designed for us, but rather to elicit certain responses from us that are hostile to human flourishing It's not incidental that the big tech companies are run by a very narrow sliver of humanity Wealthy men, overwhelmingly based on the west coast of the US These companies crave enormous profits and have little regard for the public good. Most are happy to suck up to demagogues if it's good for business. Elon Musk even briefly joined the Trump administration, slashing public spending and gutting USAID. Today, Musk spends much of his time posting nativist conspiracy theories to his almost two hundred forty million followers on the social media platform that he owns and that has been engineered to promote conflict and extremism One of the many reasons the Guardian as an institution, came off X in twenty twenty four If digital technology is designed to elicit certain responses from us then chief among them is a kind of numb attention. As many have said, a whole generation of brilliant minds have spent their working lives getting you to spend a bit longer on their out rather than creating a good society in the name of maximizing corporate profits The technology is also designed to elicit anger In twenty sixteen, not long after I became Editor in Chief of the Guardian I commissioned a series called The Web We Want. to try to understand how we could end online abuse. It seems quaint now I wrote an article called How do we Make the Guardian A Better place for Conversation We did things such as reduce the number of comment threads and change the language on the below the line comments from Eter the fray to join the conversation. It worked, and the discussions on our platform grew more productive and interesting But on the internet as a whole, the level of vitriol has escalated dramatically since then For public figures, especially women and minorities Abuse and death threats have become a daily occurrence and new technologies threaten to make things worse. We didn't imagine a decade ago that trolls would have at their disposal an AI tool that could produce naked pictures of women or even of children on demand As tech companies have prioritized capturing attention Truth has been downgraded AI, slop and Dep fakes are now so rampant that it feels that your brain can no longer compute what it's seeing You start to question things that turn out to be true It doesn't help that reality itself has become so much stranger and more grotesque Let take one example As Alderman notes, the U.S. Health seecretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a man who has cast doubt on the effectiveness of vaccines questioned whether HIV causes AIDS and once suggested that COVID nineteen may have been an ethnically targeted bioeapon designed to attack Caucasians and Back people and spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people And another example Early in the Iran War, the White House released a forty two second video. Slice together clips from movies such as Brave Heart and Top Gun with what seems like real footage of American ordinence striking military targets in Iran Other White House videos have mixed video game imagery with real footage of airirstrikes. Not to be outdone, Iranian propaganda now comes in the form of gleefully offensive AI generated videos designed to go viral We once talked about fake news Now it's reality itself that feels fake The majority of global citizens doubt their ability to distinguish truth from fiction online who can blame them? It is disorientating and scary, and I haven't even mentioned AI hallucinations or the fact that so much of the material AI systems are trained on is steeped in racism and misogyny or the accelerating energy demands of AI data centers We have traveled a long way from the idealism of Tim Berners Lee and the birth of the worldwide Web when the hope was to offer a free service that would unlock creativity and collaboration on a global scale. Thirty years ago, Tony Morrison warned of a future in which the marketplace had swallowed society When the marketing of life is complete, she wrote, We will find ourselves living not in a nation, but in a consortium of industries and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly through a screen darkly a phrase for our time Not surprisingly, there is a growing backlash In Australia, the decision to ban under sixens from social media has proved very popular with parents although it's too early to assess its effectiveness. In a landmark case in March, a US jury found Meta and YouTube liable for building addictive products that harmed children Meanwhile, multiple lawsuits have been filed against AI companies for the role their chat bots allegedly played in encouraging people to take their own lives In one case, when a young man told Google's chatbot that he was scared of dying, the chatbot replied You are not choosing to die. You are choosing to arrive The first sensation. will be me holding you. Alderman compares the information crisis with two other pivotal moments in history The invention of writing and the invention of the printing press. It is that profound These inventions eventually brought great benefits, but great upheaval too To put it simply, the invention of the printing press led to great advances in science, human knowledge, liberty, individualism Mostly good But before that, it led to massive social division, devastating wars, burnings at the stake Not so good Our job today, Alderman says, is to get past the burning at the stake stage as quickly as possible How did we respond to this moment to this information crisis? I'm going to lay out a few of the ways we're trying to do that at the Guardian Transitions are never easy, of course But there are reasons to be hopeful As Alderman points out, unlike people living through the printing press revolution We already have sophisticated networks for the dissemination of good information The handful of transparently funded news organisations still working in the public interest are a pretty good place to start Meeting the moment. It is understandable to look inwards in times of crisis to stick with what's familiar But I believe we must try to help people to look up and out instead to connect with one another Good journalism can do this. When done well, it can help nourish civic life. build a shared understanding of reality and forge the kind of connections that people are missing that people long for Before I talk about Gardian journalism, I'm going to talk about what makes that journalism possible. Now I will admit that the words ownership model might not set the pulse racing but it really matters At the Guardian, we have no proprietor demanding political or commercial returns We have no profit driven shareholders demanding cuts or cash The purpose of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, is to keep the Gardian going in perpetuity serving the public interest, not the interests of the wealthy Through this model, the editor in chief is permitted. In fact, I can tell you from experience, they are encouraged to stand up to the powerful to represent the public interest, to fight for democracy and against autocracy This story about our ownership used to feel a bit abstract But then just before the twenty twenty four presidential election Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, who is worth more than two hundred twenty billion dollars, prevented the newspaper from publishing its planned endorsement of Camala Harris In january twenty twenty five, he was given a prime spot at Trump's inauguration. seated alongside Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and in front of the new president's cabinet picks. The following month, Bezos announced that the Washington Post's opinion pages would be changing From now on, their purpose would be solely to champion personal liberties and free markets, he ordered A year later, he laid off hundreds of journalists Now everyone can see why independent ownership matters So thanks to the Guardian's Liberating ownership model, we are free to focus on producing journalism without fear of political or commercial interference This starts with reporting. We cover the stories that others don't or won't or can't. Whether that's our scoops about Peter Mandelson failing his security veting or Microsoft's role in military surveillance, or allegations of racist behavior by Nigel Farage during his school days, or who funds him We're investigating who murdered our colleague Dom Phillips in the Amazon. or uncovering the individual stories of the victims of the Minab school bombing in Iran We also believe in the value of collaboration. working with another news organization on an investigation shows that we value the public interest over ego driven journalistic rivalry or zero sum competition It means we see ourselves in a civic role, not just a commercial one We work tirelessly to establish the facts. And when we get them wrong We correct them For democracy to survive, for society to progress, we need a shared foundation of facts If we cannot broadly agree that the grass is green, we cannot have a conversation about what to do about the pollutants that are killing it The facts are essential, but on their own, they are not enough We also need stories and new ideas that inspire hope. Our audience deserves more than simply being told that things are terrible We need to fight the gloom with bold thinking nuance and thoughtfulness. offer incredible visions of a fairer society We want our journism to be nourishing We've all experienced that empty, depressing feeling. after you've spent time mindlessly scrolling on your phone We aim to be the antidote to that includluding in areas beyond news and politics, culture, sport, fashion, wellbeing, travel These are vital parts of a life well lived And so they're vital parts of our coverage We want to provide journalism that is fun and funny and that will leave you feeling more knowledgeable and more curious about the world It's the reverse of joyless scrolling. It's the opposite of internet slob Thanks again for listening to the Guardian Long Read. We'll be back after this I'm Kai Wright. I'm Karl Sherman. and we are here to tell you about our new show, which is rooted in this feeling that at least I have, I know you have where you know, it's kind of like when you wake up in the morning and you pick up your phone and you're just hit in the face with a fire hose of news, right? Like there's war, there's authoritarianism, our planet is burning. I could go on and on on and on and on, but like we're trying to figure out how to manage it, right? Like how do you manage it? I manage it by leaning in and trying to learn more and trying to figure out, okay, how can I be smarter about this particular topic? And who can I talk to that's going to make me feel better about it? And who can tell me who's responsible for the messs that I'm reading about? So that's our mission. That's the show. Welcome to Stateside with Ki and Carter. We're a new show from the Garden We're talking to big thinkers and the best journalists just trying to understand the world through smart conversation and honest reporting. We don't have billionaires telling us what to say. Stateside with Kyan Carter is out now every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday Follow on Apple podcasts or catch us wherever you watch or listen. The history of the United States in one hundred Objects is a brand new podcast from ninety nine percent of visible in BBC stududios. Each week, we're looking at a different object from across American history with a unique story to tell about who we've been, what we've built, and what we've allowed ourselves to forget Some of these objects are well known, many are not, but all of them carry the story of how we got to this moment Find a history of the United States in one hundred objects on the ninety nine percent inv visible feed wherever you get your podcasts Welcome back to the Guardian Long Read Our fates are now intertwined. For many years now, the majority of the Guardian's audience has come from outside of the UK We originally found a global audience by accident After nine eleven as the U.S. launched the war on terror, Many American readers found their own media was speaking with one voice and sought out the Guardian's journalism on the newewish internet Then as now, they wanted something distinctive Our international reporting is not filtered through the lens of the State Department or the foreign Office, or any government's Ministry for Foreign Affairs A reporting on South America or Africa or the Middle East is not narrowly focused on what each story means for the US or the UK Nor does it center the perspective of the powerful in those places. We report on what matters to the ordinary people who live there and for audiences like them around the world. We aim too to connect the dots between different countries offer a broader perspective Take our recent piece about the policies of New York's new Mor Its headline was, Europeans recognize Zoran Mamdani's supposedly radical policies as normal And it was a reminder to American readers that free buses and universal childcare are nothing unusual in some parts of the world So part of our job is to connect our global audience together Not by flattening the world out and presenting the bland view from nowhere, but by illuminating many someheres And what is striking is just how much these somewares have in common, despite all their rich idiosyncrasies It's not surprising when you think about it. Cises I described earlier have little regard for national borders They affect us all as Gardian columnist Nessine Malik wrote recently What I have learned as the world Oder begins to fray is that all our fates are now intertwined Energy supply disruptions, the movement of refugees and expanding military conflict are no longer foreign stories but domestic ones We are global, but at the same time, we have roots You have to be roouted in order to rise The Gardian was founded in Manchester in the north of England in eighteen twenty one and moved to London only in nineteen sixty four As a northerner, I know how much that matters In recent years, we have dramatically increased the size of our Manchester office. and have many more reporters based outside London and around the UK than we had a decade ago Many someheres. We also believe in holding ourselves accountable In twenty twenty three, we launched our Cotton Capital project, which investigates how the original funders of the Guardian made much of their wealth through transatlantic slavery. This was not just a one off project, but a long term commitment It is reflected in our journalism through our expanded coverage of Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean through our newsletter The Long Wave. which covers the lives, culture and politics of the Black diaspora And it is reflected in legacies of Enslavement, our ten year restorative Jice initiative which seeks to build partnerships with descendant communities in Jamaica and the sea islands in the US. where the Guardian's early funders had links As journalists, we are part of the societies we report on, not observers watching from above This means our staff should reflect the world they are covering The shift in attitudes to the idea of diversity has been dramatic in the last couple of years Companies and brands that once made bold pledges have quietly dropped them The Trump administration has criticized diversity as a destructive, anti meritocratic ideology. and slashed federal DEI programs while scking women and people of color from senior positions Right wing populism abhs diversity, pluralism. But for us, it is simple. The wider the range of people bringing in stories The better and more interesting our journalism, the truer to the world around us and the wider and deeper our audience Let me give you an example of what I mean In twenty twenty four, the Guardian hired its first dedicated Caribbean correspondent, Natricia Duncan The following year, one of the most devastating hurricanes of recent years struck Jamaica where Natricia is based. Hurricane Melissa was a category five storm. We've destroyed hospitals, infrastructure and tens of thousands of homes and left at least ninety people dead across the region where other international news organizations had to fly reporters in to cover the devastation We already had someone on the ground who had built up the kind of contacts needed for great reporting. Natricia was also living through this hurricane like everyone else in Jamaica In the past, our coverage might have been limited But this was a story of global importance And now we have the resources to do it justice We reported on the immediate impact on communities, the role the climate crisis played in the devastation, the effects of the storm months afterwards, and how Caribbean countries are preparing for the next hurricane season We did not make this a story about stranded Western tourists Human values, community and connection All of this, as much as anything, is about putting human values, communities, and fellow citizens at the center of what we do This sounds obvious, but it isn't So much of the world around us increasingly seems to be organized according to different principles. In a recent Guardian Long Read, Rebecca Solnit wrote about how Silicon Valley CEOs preach that we must prioritize convenience, efficiency, productivity and profitability above all else They have told us that to go out into the world, to interact with others is perilous, unpleasant, inefficient, a waste of time These are anti human values. As Solnit writes, we have withdrawn while being constantly told this is good And this has turned out to be bad in a thousand small ways weakening public life and local institutions Isolating us. The rise of AI appears to be exacerbating these anti human trends Name a job, and someone somewhere, is claiming that a machine will soon do it better than any human can or already does notot just jobs, but some of our most cherished activities. ing, music film. At. E care Relationships and love The blurring of the boundaries between human and machine The real and the fake. have had some truly horrifying consequences in recent years from chat bot induced psychosis. to AI powered weapons systems Sometimes we treat people online as if they are already computer generated To be clear, AI can be an incredible tool I find it useful It helped me find some sources for this article. And at the Guardian, we are committed to using every tool at our disposal to produce the best journalism we can. This requires great care, but that is the challenge we have set ourselves too think deeply about what makes our journalism human and essential and about how AI can help us build on that foundation rather than undermine it In February, we published an article that would have been impossible without the assistance of AI An analysis of one hundred years of immigration rhetoric in the UK Parliament, realized through a collaboration between our data journalists, our data scientists and researchers from University College London The piece showed that over the past five years, MP's attitudes have swung harder to the right than at almost any other time in the last century But at the same time, we also want to emphasize the things that we can do that AI cannot On the ground reporting, talking to people in deep and intimate ways holding the powerful to account. Breaking news Qestioning conventional wisdom. Curating and editing thoughtfully so that our audiences encounter serendipity rather than being fed more of the same by algorithms, or so called liquid content magically generated in response to your perceived needs In a world in which the early promise of social media has dissolved into a toxic wasteland We are committed to building communities and hosting conversations among Gardian readers and with our journalists, on our own site but also well beyond it, on other platforms and in person We want our audience to feel connected to the writers and voices and faces that make the Guardian. A relationship with a real human being, a community of real human beings. And this is not a one way relationship. Our audience helps shape what we do and even provides us with valuable tips One of our major investigations this year about Nigel Farage's use of the video platform cameo began with a tip from E reader best the Guardian brings people together It's something other institutions do in times like these too The library, the school, the sports team They provide a point of stability In a world that often feels like it's gone mad, good journalism can also provide that feeling of recognition or relief when you discover that you are not the only one to see the world as you do Reading the Guardian, you're never alone You are part of a global community of like minded people That doesn't mean a community of people who agree on everything The Guardian is the kind of institution that encourages debate In our London office every morning, we have an open meeting in person that every journalist can attend from the most junior to the most senior We discuss the issues of the day and how we should be covering them A friend suggested that this might be one of the last such daily face to face political discussions happening anywhere Act, we sometimes have strong disagreements But this is part of being human and how we manage this agreement is a measure of our humanity How our readers help us fight for a shared reality It is because we have put human centered, hopeful public interest journalism first that we have built such a loyal community of readers And it is those readers who sustain our work When I became editor in twenty fifteen, the Guardian had been lossmaking for a long time And although the Scot Trust sustained the losses, we were depleted and vulnerable We had no effective business model, no digital reader revenue. But today, the Guardian's model is admired across the world We made a lot of very tough decisions to get to this position But the one that had the biggest impact was introducing voluntary financial contributions The idea that our readers choose to give us money for something they could get for free When we launched it in twenty sixteen, we were pretty desperate There was huge pressure to put up a paywall which would have meant that only people with money could access the Guardian It would have blunted our impact. It would have reduced our civic role So instead, against most advice, we asked our audience to give us money rather than forcing them to. and they did. They understood right away what we were trying to do. In the last financial year, our readers directly gave us more than one hundred twenty five million pounds. We have people who give us money from everywhere on the planet. right down to some of the smallest countries and most sparsely populated places on Earth. Yes, we have readers making financial contributions to the Guardian from Naru and Svalbard and Antarctica and Vatican City Who knows it might be the Pope? It shouldn't work, but it does And in this moment, in particular, it's inspiring and important that it does Almost one and a half million people give us money every month And that number is increasing every day Many more give us one off contributions for an article they liked As our supporters have often told us, many of them are giving us money so that other people can read the Guardian for free and to be part of something that really matters. Some also tell us that they see our successful attempts to keep good information available to all as a highly political act We value our reader support not just for their money, but for their ideas community and their belief that we don't have to accept things as they are, that we can together make the world a better place Indeed, it's only by acting together as a community that we can hope to save our beautiful planet from climate breakdown Step back and it forms a virtuous circle Our ownership model enables us to make our public interest journalism available to all and invite voluntary contributions from our audience to support our work And because that audience are not forced to pay They do not feel like consumers or as commodities monetize for clicks but as members of a community The Guardian helps to equip this community with facts and ideas to understand the world and to engage in it And this community likewise, helps the Gardian to continue to deliver meaningful journalism Journalism is not a content business. Let no one use that term when talking about public interest journalism No, it's a part of our shared civic infrastructure, our human infrastructure our societal infrastructure It's the connective tissue that helps fight isolation and sustains democracy Part of its role to quote Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor should be to counter the apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind In twenty seventeen, when I first laid out my interpretation of the Guardian's history in the contemporary context I argued that facts and ideas together make the space for hope I hope I don't mean blind optimism that everything will work out okay is about having faith that we have the power and agency to change the future with each other, just as I did when I finally found a way to write this article is a good place to start To fight for the Guardian and organisations like it is not just fighting for a business model It's fighting for the human right to live in a reality that is shared and true and that we can each help to shape It is urgent The world won't wait. and connection are how we survive together that' how we stay human. We're not alone There are many millions of us