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support even into the near future. In the fable of the dentist, there is only one “trend” worth knowing—the dentist’s impressive 15 percent return. But a profusion of short-term data (what Taleb calls “noise”) fools him into telling himself all manner of other stories. Of course, in the era of the Internet, and the literally six-hour-long news cycle that online media (together with cable television) have engendered, too much data is the order of the day. Like the dentist, we cannot see the message for the noise. Taleb exhorts his readers to look for what he calls “Black Swans”—the sorts of singular, hard-to-predict events that (in markets, at least) tend to set off huge fundamental shifts. But in the realm of politics, one could easily argue that the opposite is true: we spend so much time looking for knockout blows, momentum swings—giant, important shifts that might just happen this instant—that we become blind to slow, unglamorous changes. It is the reason why one does not find many blogs (or cable-news segments) devoted to worsening income inequality, or the sorry state of the American schools, or the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Indeed, when we do manage to focus on some crucial, fundamental story, we are often able to apprehend it only as a series of tiny, meaningless nanostories. This has been the case with global warming, an indisputably enormous problem that succeeds at staying in the popular consciousness only by way of scores of short-lived stories or controversies: cannibal polar bears, heightened hurricanes, ice-shelf collapses, the various exploits of Al Gore, etc. Even an especially hot day can occasion some well-intentioned fearmongering on the subject. The problem with this approach is that it is so easily countered by sowers of doubt. Many of the splashiest stories about global warming tend, unsurprisingly, to be those that are the most speculative or even false in their factual basis. Even the global-warming nanostories that are true can simply be rebutted with other anecdotes. Average worldwide temperature last year was lower than the previous five years. Much of Antarctica’s sea ice is thickening. One could easily assemble a list of ten more such anecdotes to argue that global warming is a fiction, or at least not much of a problem. For a nation with no attention span, anecdotes are more than enough, as is evidenced by the fact that the percentage of Americans believing that humans are causing climate change has actually declined since 2001, from 75 percent to 71 percent. In a conversation dominated by sensational anecdotes, consensus for action is hard to arrive at. Empty controversy is far more easily had; and indeed, in a politics of nanostories, the controversy is more often than not the story. Just like Henry Cowling of the Viral Factory had put it: “When you have people talking—paydirt.”

THE WHOLE SHOW

This meme-warfare style of American politics was honed during the 2000 election—think of Al Gore, inventing the Internet. But it was further perfected in 2004, when Democrats, after selecting a candidate on precisely the grounds that his war-hero pedigree would render him impervious to character assassination, looked on helplessly as he fell prey to a series of attacks so damaging that the most prominent among them, the scurrilous accusation against John Kerry’s war record by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, gave the English language a new name for the entire genre. The “swift-boating” of Kerry did not begin or end with the Swift Boat Veterans, of course; readers will remember, to pick just one example, an ad in which Kerry windsurfs from side to side, as distorted facts about his record are intoned on the audio track. For their part, the Democrats’ inability to tar George W. Bush and his administration was not for lack of trying, as all the feverish digging into Halliburton or Bush’s own Vietnam-era service record will attest.

In their 2006 book The Way to Win, veteran Washington journalists Mark Halperin and John Harris give a colorful and evocative name to this style of politics: