I was browsing through the archive of Simon Rosenberg’s excellent substack and came across a fascinating interview he did with Nathan Heller, a staff writer at the New Yorker. Heller wrote a piece last fall titled “Republican Victory and the Ambience of Information.” I touched upon related topics in my recent post on Vibe Research, where I explored how research can often take on a very performative and surface-level nature in today’s online environments. But I’m really intrigued to consider how information itself, not just the research process, can function as a sort of window-dressing for a given scene, or a prop used to create a certain ambience, or vibe.

Heller writes that “Detail, even when it’s available, doesn’t travel widely after all. Big, sloppy notions do. Planting ideas this way isn’t argument, and it’s not emotional persuasion. It’s about seeding the ambience of information, throwing facts and fake facts alike into an environment of low attention, with the confidence that, like minnows released individually into a pond, they will eventually school and spawn. Notions must add up to a unified vision but also be able to travel on their own, because that’s how information moves in a viral age.”

Rosenberg himself goes on to argue that activists and politicians, of what he deems the pro-democracy crowd, need to work on more effective narratives “commensurate with the deeply dangerous moment we find ourselves in.”

While both Heller and Rosenberg are talking about politics, campaigning, and the political information ecosystem here, I think they raise points that can apply to our broader information environment. Where I think Heller is onto something is his idea of “seeding the ambience of information,” where people can have the impression and the experience of consuming and sharing information. The information can be true, or false, or a blend of the two. As long as the ambience of information is there it can serve its purpose and spread accordingly.

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