Convention of cranks: Why the nineteenth century’s golden age of pseudoscience may be a precursor of our own, by Rob MacDougall

Pravda, Russian for “truth”, was the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party from the start of the Bolshevik Revolution to the final days of the Soviet Union. After the collapse of Soviet communism, Pravda fell on predictably hard times. The newspaper was sold to foreign owners, who reinvented it in the 1990s as a rather shameless supermarket tabloid. The pages that once delivered the ponderous dictates of the Kremlin were given over to breathless reports on extra-terrestrial invaders, ghostly apparitions, and the curative properties of goat testicles. This may be a fitting fate for a newspaper whose truth was never much more than titular. But Pravda’s transformation (liberation? decline?) strikes me as a kind of metaphor for our whole information environment, as we pass from the top-down mass media of the twentieth century to the interactive digital media of the twenty-first.

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