We now live in the era of “do your own research,” where that adage which used to motivate a dweebish cottage industry of Kennedy assassination buffs has now become the m.o. of the information economy. Institutional trust is out, and Substack sleuths are in. Today, anyone with an iPhone and a gift for provocation can become the go-to influencer or podcaster for millions of fervent followers.
Individuals can no longer assume that a handful of familiar institutions will do the civic weeding and marginalize the nuts. This poses an urgent challenge to educators. One constructive response is the kind of “digital literacy” work that’s being tackled by Sam Wineburg and his Digital Inquiry Group. That’s a useful start.
The larger point, though, is that the costs of ignorance have gone up—not down—in this modern era. Knowing what is true, what is dubious, and how to know the difference becomes indispensable as adults increasingly rely on bespoke sources or AI as an all-purpose answerbot.
When news was more homogenized, the extremes less extreme, and the reach of provocateurs much shorter, the personal (and societal) stakes of an individual’s ability to spot propaganda and spurn the appeals of kooks and crooks were smaller. Ignorance was a limited liability thanks to informational guardrails and a cultural safety net. No longer.
Just the other week, we had the spectacle of Hasan Piker, a hotshot left-wing provocateur, going viral for a New York Times podcast in which he endorsed looting and was fairly equivocal on murder. The ensuing furor neatly overlapped with the Washington Post’s profile of right-wing Nazi wannabe Nick Fuentes, which detailed how he’s pocketed roughly a million dollars since 2025 from diehard superfans.
Piker and Fuentes aren’t honey-tongued masters of persuasion. These are guys who say things like “The U.S. deserved” 9/11, “Women should be treated like children,” and Hitler was “really f*cking cool.” For people who know anything about the world, possess any sense of history, or have a functioning moral compass, such assertions are credibility deal-breakers. For the fan of Piker and Fuentes, of course, these are not. They’re just asking “thought-provoking” questions.
Keep in mind, the provocateurs don’t need big audiences to wield an outsized influence. In late April, Echelon Insights reported that 79 percent of Americans surveyed had either never heard of Piker or hadn’t heard enough to form an opinion; just 7 percent of respondents had heard of him and liked what he had to say. But that’s enough for him to earn millions, receive adulatory press, and be held out as the left’s answer to Joe Rogan.
The likes of Piker and Fuentes are hardly new archetypes, of course. A half-century ago, Tom Wolfe was eviscerating “radical chic.” But, back then, these characters would have been sad-sack figures speaking in half-empty community center basements and mimeographing newsletters alongside the Weather Underground or the Symbionese Liberation Army. Today, they’re big-dollar, professional provocateurs.
This brings us back to education. It may seem like a stretch to ask what these very online, very entrepreneurial influencers can tell us about the animating vision of “next-gen” high schools. But, if the aim is to prepare students to innovate, collaborate, communicate, use tech to tackle socially relevant projects, and navigate the new attention economy (to the tune of millions of followers and dollars), Piker and Fuentes sure seem like raging success stories, no?
It’s a reminder that a good education is never just about acquiring a vaporous set of skills. It always comes back to informing judgment and cultivating discernment. It just happens that the costs of failing to do this are exponentially higher in a no-guardrails world. This means that students need to have workable responses to questions like: What is the tension between majority rule and minority rights? How does the machinery of representation work in American government? Why should judges accept or reject textualism? How should we assess the costs and benefits of government regulation? How do we understand the nature of evil?
These are fundamental questions that students should encounter in those hoary old books and old-school subjects, the kind that can help cultivate autonomous adults and citizens. The ability to answer them isn’t as appealing to a college admissions office as organizing an anti-gun protest, and it lacks the transactional allure of a vibe-coding project. But it can help ensure that graduates don’t sound as dangerously incoherent as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei did when he was asked to contemplate the ethics of his enterprise’s world-changing technology. Indeed, it just may prove the key to civilizational survival.
After all, Amodei’s venture is part of a thriving new world in which Piker, Fuentes, Candace Owens, Andrew Tate, and the like are producing a flood of content that’s always one swipe away. What prepares students for such a world? I fear that building robots and pursuing passion projects aren’t going to suffice.
In the “age of AI,” the importance of “mere knowledge” has taken on new gravity (as have its close cousins, discernment and judgment). This is doubly true in those schools seeking to prepare their charges to operate in a tech and media landscape where 20- and 30-somes frequently play an outsized role.
Those crafting “next-gen” high schools would do well to wrestle with that, not dismiss it.
