Did the 20th Century Just End? One Historian’s Perspective

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Hello, I'm John Milewski, and this is Wilson Center NOW, a production of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. My guest today is Jason Steinhauer. Jason is a bestselling author and public historian, also a global fellow with the Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. He's a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a featured speaker on disinformation and misinformation and media literacy for the United States Department of State.

Here's his most recent book. He's working on another now. History disrupted How social Media and the World Wide Web Have changed the past. Jason, great to see you. Welcome back. Thank you, John. It's always great to be here. So, you know, one of the reasons that I invited you back as we talked about doing this again after we had a discussion about this book and we were looking for the right hook.

And then you wrote this brilliant piece post-election, trying to gather your thoughts on what just occurred, where you talk about the centuries are not tied to the dates on the calendar. They're tied to other things. Tell us about that idea. Yeah. So after the presidential election here in United States, I was getting text messages from my friends in Europe and they were saying, So what happens now?

What happens next? What do you make of all this? And so I felt like I needed a few days to kind of catch my breath and think about it, because, you know, we'd all been in the midst of this very heated campaign over the past few months. And the more I took a step back and thought about it, the more I kind of incorporated a lot of the things I was thinking and writing about with my book, as well as other engagements I've done with the State Department and institutions around the world.

The more I began to think that maybe this election wasn't just about one particular candidate or one particular state, it was about some much bigger trends and maybe some of the ideologies and institutions that had come to define the 20th century or with a like term. In this article I wrote, The long 20th century have finally given way to a new modus operandi and that we're now officially in the quote unquote, 21st century.

Now, you know, when we make these judgments about when centuries and and when they begin, there's always a lot of subjectivity and there's always a lot of debate. So this is some ways just a an exercise in sort of thinking about our current moment, where we are, where we've been and what are the sort of guiding ideologies and principles of each of those moments.

And have they shifted significantly enough that we feel like we're in something new? And after some reflection, I decided that, yes, I think we are in something new. I want to dig deeper into that on those values and other things. But first, I want to ask you a little more about this whole notion of long centuries. You've referenced the long 19th century, beginning with the French Revolution and ending with the Paris Peace Conference.

What are the things that create a beginning and end? Is it technology? Is it the way we communicate? What are the factors? Yeah, again, this is highly debatable. Sure. Different scholars make we're running, we're here. Three missions. So I would say this from my vantage point, I think we only know in retrospect. So we don't actually can't say at the time that we've something has started and nothing has ended.

But I think in retrospect, we can see that there are certain institutions that have a, an outsized impact in shaping how society is organized. There are certain technologies that have an outsize impact in shaping how we communicate, what types of information we receive. And I think the forms of those technologies also matter. So one of the things that I talked about in the piece that you're referencing is how many of the forms of media in the 20th century were linear forms of media.

And so there were certain expectations about user behavior. When you're interacting with a linear piece of media, you start at the beginning, you finish at the end. Well, now we live in a moment where we do not have linear media. We live in a constant scroll. We're always entering in the middle. Right. I wrote in the piece that I think that the Infinite scroll may be sort of the most one of the most consequential inventions.

And there's no end in human history because we always enter in the middle and we always leave in the middle. So that sort of changes the way we behave and interact with media. So media have a role and then there are obviously people and individuals who also have an outsized role in shaping what gets to be the zeitgeist of an era.

So I think there are lots of different factors. And then when you add up the institutions, the media, the media forms, the technologies, the people and the ideologies, then you start to see how it all fits together. And you could start to recognize where one century may have passed into another. And it's not just about how we communicate.

You make the point that other structures that mimic the linear framework, whether it's schools or the assembly line. Yeah. So one of my principal arguments throughout the past few years has been the more we use the technology is, the more we we become like the technologies we use. So when we use linear technologies, we start to operate in think in linear frameworks, we go from A to B to C today.

And if you think about how our educational institutions were structured, you start in a certain grade level. You then progress through those various grade levels in a linear form and eventually you wind up the other end with a certification that says you can go do X, Y or Z. It's a very linear mode of thinking. When you think about how people enter the workforce, you start at point A you go through a series of apprenticeships, you start junior level, then you go mid-level, then you go senior career level, then you exit in retirement.

Again, it's sort of a linear structure. Well, the promises of this new century that we're in, but also some of the perils are that you no longer have to follow that. So you don't have to go through this linear mode of education in order to become an expert in something, in order to get certified to do something. You don't have to follow a linear career path.

You don't have to follow a linear plan to get from point A to point B, You can hop around from place to place. And that mirrors the way we use the Internet where you don't have to go in a linear path. You can hop around from hyperlink to hyperlink. So my arguments rest upon the idea that the more we use certain technologies, the more their values become our values sort of McLuhanesque here the medium very McLuhan asked very McLuhan.

The the the implications of this are staggering, right? When you start to look at where we are, it's sort of in the infancy of this non-linear environment. And so you think about the way we organize schools, you think about the way that we organize life. Everything is based on a linear formula. The products we purchase, they have beginnings and endings, but so where are we as far as being able to identify what the the standards are?

The values are between the 20th century, which you say ended on election Day and the 21st century, which is just getting started in 2024. Well, the seeds for this have been planted, and I've talked about that. So of precursors, it's not starting from scratch. Right. Right. So we've obviously been living with the Web and social media now for 25, 30 years.

So this is not like the Web just invented yesterday. And certainly people have been operating inside of an environment where they've been looking for different avenues to break out of these sort of more linear structural forms that maybe previously existed. I mean, if you look at the way education is evolving, right, there's a lot of discourse now about how you don't have to follow this prescribed pathway that goes from elementary school to high school to college to post-graduate to then working world.

You can bypass it. You can go outside of that framework to find other avenues of education, whether it be certificates online or Coursera or Google or Microsoft. And then you can enter you don't have to enter at an entry level position. You can enter at a different level of position. You can build your own business, you can be a content creator, you can be an influencer.

There are all of these different new ways of of building a path that doesn't follow the trajectory that may have been prescribed by a previous era or by a previous set of institutions. And so I think that has been information for quite some time. But what I think what we've seen over the past year or so is how that has really now burst into the mainstream and has really in some circles, at least in some circles that I'm privy to, and I'm earshot too, has become the new standard.

Yeah. So the the, the previous way of doing things, the more linear path of going A to B to C to D that's now completely old fashioned. That's, that's not accurate current. That's not the way that you make your mark, make your living, make your fortune, make your fame. It's this new way. And I think in the election cycle, we kind of saw how President elect Trump leveraged that.

I mean, he recognized that. He understood that that's where the media landscape was going and that's where people's expectations were. And so he leaned into it smartly on his part. Yeah. While being mocked by his opponents. Right. I think about the drive thru and McDonald's, you know, some of those things that he did that the Democrats or Trump critics laughed at.

And yet he was creating memes for the Internet that were seen by millions and millions of people. He was a genius at creating constant content for the infinite scroll. And that is paramount in this media environment that we operate in today, because, again, we're not we're not coming in at the beginning and leaving at the end. So we're not hearing a told finished, polished story of any particular candidate in any particular time.

But we're just seeing our little cinematic glimpses. And the more that you leverage that and the more that you lean into that, then the more the ecosystem rewards you. I'll just tell you a really quick story which sort of encapsulated this for me. I went very close to the end of the election cycle. I went to dinner by myself at a Chinese restaurant.

My wife and my son were at home and just out of curiosity, I started talking to the staff. It was a slow night, so I was the only person there and I asked them if they had a preference in the upcoming presidential election. Now their English wasn't great, so what the waitstaff did was she pulled out her phone and she pulled out a meme of Donald Trump dancing to the YMCA song, this little famous dance that he's now made.

And she pointed to that and she said, That's what I like. And again, it was one of those moments where it's just an anecdote, doesn't tell the whole story, but in some ways it kind of crystallizes some elements of what you were thinking, right? People are now interacting with politics in a very mimetic way, in a very cinematic way, where they're seeing glimpses and symbolism on their screens at any given moment.

And that may be the principal interaction that they have with the candidate. And so to be successful in that environment, you have to know how to manipulate it and leverage it. And Trump did a masterful job at that. Well, you know, you think the classic example is the Lincoln-Douglas debates, right? And how long they were and how linear they were and how really they were based on text.

It was almost a recitation of things that either Douglas or Lincoln had written. And now you go from a text based society where there are arguments and there's a linear structure, there's a beginning, a middle and end. Now you go to them showing you somebody dancing on the screen. It's a complete change in the how we make decisions, and it's a complete change in the way that elected officials, political officials and government institutional structures need to operate.

Yeah, and I think that's one of the that's one of the. So give an example of what they need to do differently. So Joe Biden was the last president of the 20th century, according to your art. Yeah, that's one of the things I've argued. Well, let me take it in a slightly different direction, because one of the things that I've been known for over my career is is sort of preaching this idea of history, communication.

And so arguing that the way we communicate history has to continue to evolve with the media, an information ecosystem that we operate in. And, you know, there will always be some space for the 90 minute lecture hall, and that may that space may continue to exist. But the land that it's on may continue to shrink, you know, until it gets to be infinitesimal.

And so people who want to continue giving the 90 minute lecture will probably always have a space to do so. But increasingly, the way people understand and interact with historical information is through the social web. And so if we want to if institutions, you know, historical institutions, scholarly institutions want to maintain their relevancy with public audiences and even with policy making audiences, they have to adapt the way that they communicate on these platforms.

And that means bending and contorting a little bit to what these platforms prioritize, meeting people where they live. Is that what you're essentially saying? Reading people where they scroll, where they scroll? And so if you got an invitation from 60 Minutes or an invitation from Joe Rogan, your pick. Joe Rogan Well, you may not have to do either or, but I think if you are thinking about positioning yourself as being within this communication landscape, you have to understand what a privilege is, what it does not, and how people are receiving information.

And I think sometimes the institutional structures that are have been around for a long time are sort of maybe a bit sedentary in how they do things, can be a little bit reluctant to embrace those changes because they feel like they're going to have to give something up and they probably will have to give something up. But part of what I think I've been trying to do in my career is to think about ways that we can bring the values of the historical profession, rigorous research, scholarly enterprise into this new ecosystem that doesn't always still have a place.

I think they do. But this gets to the question that you asking about what elected officials and government citizens to do. They also aren't walking this fine balance, right? How do you bring the values and mores that we feel are important, which is, you know, evidence based research, science backed research expertise, and plug it into an ecosystem. And that doesn't always privilege that.

And so that's where we need to be clever in how we evolve our communications, both at the political level as well as at the academic world. The phrase that's playing in my head as I'm listening to your answer is, you know, I do my own research. I don't need Anthony Fauci or any health officials to tell me anything about the pandemic.

I do my own research that applies to all endeavors, not just addressing a pandemic. How does a historian respond to that? Why do I listen to the top down historian who's published 16 books and has been doing this for decades when I can do my own research? Well, my response personally would be, That's great. I have a lot of research you can read.

I mean, historians and scholars and academics and fellows at the Wilson Center are in the business of producing research. So if someone tells me that they want to do their own research, well, I've got a lot of research that I can give you. So that's an opportunity. I think we should see that as an opportunity. And then the question becomes, how do we leverage the technologies that we have, both social media and increasingly artificial intelligence, to get that research into people's hands so that they can use it?

And how do you build that authority and that trust so that they will give it some credence? The other factor is media literacy, something that you're involved in. You know, I'm old enough that when I was in school, we diagramed sentences. Were you old enough to remember that or is that okay? You know, we thought language was so important, we diagramed or we dissected it like a lab frog in biology class, Right?

There's no equivalent now for dissecting visual media or internet media or social media. Well, I think that there's no widespread there's a lot of good media literacy stuff, literacy stuff that's happening. And I think my one of my arguments has been that we need more of it. So if you look now, years ago there were only one or two states that included media literacy in their curriculum.

Now I think we're up to somewhere around 15 to 20 states that have something about media literacy in their curriculum. Sometimes it's actually structured media literacy framework. Other times it's a recommendation that media literacy be integrated and it's up to the individual districts to do it. So I think that there has been some progress, but we have an opportunity, I think, to to use social media and other media forms that are out there as primary sources in the classroom.

And we can do exactly what you just said. We can take tweets or Instagram posts or tik-tok posts and we can break them down the way we used to break down sentences. We can say this is this is a source, right? Analyze it as such. What is the agenda of the person creating the video? What is the video trying to achieve?

What mechanisms of the social web is it trying to leverage? These are all opportunities. We just have to build the frameworks and institute them into the pedagogy. And that takes time. There's always politics around that, but I believe that that's possible. Do you have any concern that we're just not moving anywhere close to fast enough as it comes to that?

You know, all the things that you're describing these movements for? So, you know, there's been talk of adding media literacy to classrooms for decades now, and it's glacial. Meanwhile, we're bombarded by messages daily. Yeah, I think we're we're we're lagging behind the technology and think in some ways that always happens. We have to be these technologies enter the marketplace, we embrace them, we use them.

And then along the line we figure out, maybe we need to understand more about these technologies. Maybe we need to dissect them critically, and then we try to reverse course or at least build some safeguards and speed bumps into it. We're doing a little bit better with artificial intelligence. We are building more safeguards and speed bumps into it at as we go along, although we still have a big learning curve there as well.

In some ways, I think the education will always be behind the technology, in part because they're just so much more money in the technology than there is in education, right? There's so much more money in creating the tech and getting it rolled out and into people's hands than there is and getting people to stop and think critically. And education plays catch up.

Yeah, it's always been another really fascinating point you make as far as defining the difference between the century we just left and the century we're in now is that old technology. It's created jobs. New technologies are eliminating jobs. Huge disruptor. And you see the results of that in elections around the world. Yeah. So I've been doing a lot of reading about artificial intelligence because my next book, which I'm working on, is about artificial intelligence.

I don't know when that's going to come out. I have a baby at home. Makes writing a little bit difficult, but I've been doing a lot of reading, a lot of research. So this is not my own research at the moment. It's more an amalgamation of other sources that I'm looking at. But the evidence seems to suggest that, well, the technologies of the 20th century actually helped to create jobs.

The technology of the 21st century is actually helping to eliminate jobs. It's making it so much easier to improve productivity, increase speed and remove not only white collar but also blue collar work from the equation. And an example of this, you think about customer service, a lot of customer service jobs are in the African continent, Southeast Asia, even some in Latin America.

Those jobs for years granted relatively low paying jobs, but they were able to maintain steady workforces. Now, as artificial intelligence gets used to displace customer service, you have huge employment gaps. And

And so what fills that gap and we know in this country that when jobs disappear, if there is not a plan to fill in the gaps in some way with career skills, with training, with new employment opportunities, then what you have are hollowed out factory towns that we're all familiar with in this country, where there is crime, where there is drugs, where there is corruption, and where there is a loss of hope.

And oftentimes when you get those things, then you get to ethnic nationalism, populism in some cases violence and terrorism. Right. We know that these are feeders for unhealthy behaviors. And so the risk that we pose now is that these technologies are going to so hollow out, not just manufacturing towns, United States, but communities around the world, and there'll be nothing to fill those gap.

And then what steps into its place. And that should cause us all to have some concern. And in the meantime, we're still applying the old standard 40 hour workweeks to get benefits, which people don't get as much as they used to. So where is the new thinking? You know, where are you? You're not a futurist, you're a historian.

But where do we look to to figure out what is the new mousetrap that needs to be erected? Yeah, that's a great question. It's something I've thought a lot about recently because I have my background in history, but I've always believed that a historically informed citizenry can help to shape its future. So if we understand what happened in the past with art, with honesty, with rigor and with sophistication, that that should give us, or at least be able to give us some clues, not answers, but clues.

So I think one of the things that we've seen, again, if we look at the United States, what happens when industry leaves? Well, history gives us a lot of examples right here in our own backyard about what happens when industry leaves and nothing fills its place when the jobs disappear. But the people don't. So that gives us some clue about what we need to do in the future if we're going to embrace this new air dominated world and air dominated workforce.

There needs to be a plan and it needs to be developed quickly for how we're going to upskill people, what type of jobs people are going to be able to work in in order to feed their family, have gainful employment and feel some sense of purpose in their life. And there needs to be a requisite investment to make that possible.

And again, invoking a little bit of history, some kind of New Deal level investment. Right. An entire agency that is devoted to this, perhaps. I have a friend who just wrote a book about quilting. One of the things that she told us in this book that she uncovered was that during the New Deal, the federal government actually paid people to make quilts because they recognized that the people who had that skill set, it was going to be very challenging for them to learn a new skill during the Depression and they wanted to put that skill to work in a way that would benefit the American people, like the tax code, incentivize behavior.

Right. So so right now we have an opportunity to do something similar. What type of investment can we make for people who have skills but are at this point probably not going to be able to learn how to code AI or do machine learning or algorithms, what type of educational system can we create for them so that they can still have gainful employment and feel some contribution?

What types of upskilling can we create? Or are there certain skills now that we can just make an investment now to help people stay afloat? And I have some ideas about what that are. I'm not necessarily in a position to say what they should be right now, but if I look at history and I look at the past, that's what I see and I see the need for that investment in education as much as any investment we make in technology.

As you made the point earlier, history takes time to sort out, right? You just can't write the history books today about yesterday. It takes some time. But one of the conclusions you draw in this article is that perhaps the greatest achievement of the previous century was vaccinations. Yeah, I mean, I don't have the statistics out of my head, but if you look at the success that we had in the 20th century with mass vaccination, think about polio.

Measles, Yeah, diseases that used to decimate populations, disability debilitate people for their entire lives are now you get a shot of vaccination when you're a child and you know you don't have to worry about it. That's an amazing achievement. Amazing accomplishment. And it's been incredible to watch over the past 10 to 15 years. How there's been such a concerted effort to undermine all of that progress and achievement and all that expert centric innovation.

So whatever new world we're entering now, whatever new media forms, whatever research people want to do, there are certain things from the previous era that I hope we can still carry with us. And one of them is this belief in sort of basic fundamental scientific principles. One, global warming is real and we have to deal with it. We can debate the ferocity, we can debate the policy.

But that's a science that I believe is settled at this point. And number two, that vaccination works and it helps to save people's lives, and especially people who are, you know, in poverty, who are underprivileged and everyone deserves a shot at a healthy and happy life. And vaccinations help us achieve that. So in this new paradigm that we're in, this new media environment, this new political environment, I hope that's one of the legacies of the 20th century that we can carry forward.

One of the barriers to that, speaking of the new paradigm, is it seems to favor misinformation and disinformation. More than it does expertise. Well, again, in the online world, I have a whole chapter in this book at one point about science communication, which I took out, but it was really interesting to look at the comparisons between what has happened online with science versus what's happened online with history.

And one of the things I learned in my research is that there have actually been very purposeful disinformation campaigns that have tried to undermine vaccination. In fact, the Russians have been one of the premier at this. They have actually purposely tried to muddy the waters online about the efficacy of vaccination. And it's part of their larger strategy about creating chaos and undermining, you know, the American, United States and Europe and casting doubt on things.

And there's an old there's a whole playbook that, you know, Soviet scholars and Russian scholars are familiar with. But vaccinations and vaccines have been one of their targets. And so I think it was in the 2018 period, even before the pandemic, there was a concerted effort online by Russian disinformation agents to sow doubt in the populace or to inflame passions and tensions around vaccines.

And then, you know, a year and a half later, we have a global pandemic where vaccines become one of the most important elements and we see the consequences. So these disinformation campaigns, they have effect in the moment, but then they also have lasting repercussions in casting doubt on the very institutions that we need to help us through global calamities.

So the where do we go from here? You know, what's next? Tell us about your work around the world with the State Department and what the reception is, because essentially what you're doing and talking about history has application for every discipline on the planet. Yeah. So the State Department has a expert speaker program and they send speakers around the world to do public engagements in public diplomacy.

And they have speakers on climate change, they have speakers on women empowerment and women's rights, and they have speakers on disinformation. So I've done 14 trips now with the State Department to 12 different countries to meet with stakeholders in Europe principally and talk about the effects of disinformation and social media and just trying to help audiences be a little bit more critical thinking media literate when they encounter disinformation online.

And their audiences have ranged from cadets at the Bulgarian Naval Academy to Russian speaking high school students outside of Riga, Latvia, to officials with the Estonian Ministry of Defense, to journalists in Kosovo. As you'd expect, with that wide range of knowledge and skill sets, there's a lot of different opinions and and insight into what's happening. And some people are very well versed in the online information ecosystem and others are still finding their feet.

I think the principal thing that comes out of these group, these missions and in these trips is that we have an opportunity to embody our values of what we believe to be our American values in front of our partners and allies. And for me, those values are a belief in democracy, a belief in information literacy, and a belief that honest and accurate history is critical to both.

And if we look at the world today, we see how in so many places that is under threat. There are scholars and journalists who are being targeted for doing honest and critical work. There is a lack of information literacy in many communities where there's lots of propaganda and it's very difficult to decipher what is what. And there's also democratic backsliding, which is the result of not only disinformation and aggression by foreign actors, but also corruption in a lot of different places.

So what I hope comes out of these trips is a chance to reinforce the values that we feel best uphold democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms, and to argue for those values on the global stage. What I hope that I'm doing in my own work, State Department and beyond, is again fighting for those values and whatever the future looks like, whatever our technological future looks like, whatever our political future looks like, I hope that those values are part of it.

And that's where I feel like maybe I can make some small contribution. Well, I think you're making a significant contribution and really your work is thought provoking and important. And I'm a fan and so I'm going to ask you to do some shameless plugging before we say, sure, yeah. People who are interested in learning more about the world of Jason Steinhauer, I know there's a newsletter or other things.

Where can they where can they turn? So the best destination would be the newsletter, because that's where I write about the trips that we do, the speaking engagements, the books and these longer thought pieces that you've referenced. So that's just Jason Steinhauer, dot Substack dot com. Now I will actually put a call out to the listeners. I'm actually looking for a new name for my newsletter.

The name that I have for my newsletter is actually a couple of years old. It comes from a previous iteration of programing and events that I used to do that I know no longer do. So if anyone wants to go to Jason Steinhauer dot sub subsection, read the newsletter and write me with what you think should be a new name and brand that's going to be a prize involved here.

I would be glad to give you a prize to be determined what that is. Maybe a signed copy of History disruptor or something else that you might want towards the library. Of course. There you go. Join the rebranding. But Jason Steinhauer, that Substack icon. And then I'm also on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, YouTube, all the various sites. Well, it's a pleasure, Jason.

Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me. We hope you enjoyed this edition of Wilson Center now and that you'll join us again soon. Until then, for all of us at the center, I'm Jon MALESKY. Thanks for your time and interest.