Conversations with Masha Gessen

There is something about the pandemic that pushes everyone into confrontation with inequalities: social inequalities, civil and political inequalities and, in the end, inequalities of knowledge. The polarised politics of the spring of 2020 become what Shoshana Zuboff has called not only an issue of who has and who has not, who can and who cannot, but also who knows, and who knows who knows; an inequality in epistemology. When your government is telling you that you are safe from COVID-19 while your doctor cancels your test because your government lacks the supplies to perform it, the difference between the people who know only what they see on state-allied television and those who know that the government is lying is now a matter of life and death.

In Melbourne, I listen to the BBC World Service amplifying the voices of protesters in Belarus, in Poland, in Kyrgyzstan—and, yes, in America—I find myself searching for stories with historical truth and with moral purpose. As protests against corruption, against racism and for freedom erupt all over the world, I think of Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Capital Surveillance. Thinking of the peoples of dictatorships who don’t have a commitment to the facts, a free press or the outcome of an election as the will of the people, I ask myself constantly: Who knows? Who decides? And who decides who decides?