Consensus Intermediaries

Hi there,

Hope you’re keeping cool as summer heat waves roil much of the states (and world) once again. In the final (I think) stint of my global travels, I just spent a lovely 5+ days in Mexico City, where, surprisingly, it was delightfully mild heat-wise and the vibes were immaculate.

Today’s piece combines threads that have been on my mind for some time, as well as on the minds of many other sharp media and general zeitgeist observers. It won’t all be about “climate,” but we’ll get there for sure. Enjoy.

♡ If u find this work valuable, please support it here. U can do so for $1. I put a lot of thought, time, and heart into these, either way. ♡

OPINION

Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, wrote at length about how, with respect to mythology and the archetypes that spring from it, it’s ultimately unimportant whether any of the events of a given story actually transpired historically. Especially unimportant is the historical verisimilitude of myths, stories, what have you, when cast in relief against how enduring and influential many myths and archetypes remain.

Said differently, certain stories carry a lot of weight, regardless of whether they’re “true.” I’m thinking, for instance, of Jesus Christ. Very likely a “real” carpenter, born in Nazareth, who later conducted most of his ministry in Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee (Northern Israel, in the modern day). Although his miracle-working, resurrection from the dead, and predicted return to judge the living and the dead likely strain credulity for many, the resonance of his story still inspires and matters to 2 billion+ practicing Christians today.

But I’m not here to proselytize or wade into religious debate. I’m here to talk about what I call consensus intermediaries and the unfolding consensus intermediary cataclysm.

Consensus intermediaries 

Jesus Christ as a symbol and myth (again, set aside any questions about verisimilitude; belief is what matters most) is a consensus intermediary, i.e., a person or party whose “Word,” to continue the Christian analogy for a moment, is “gospel” for its adherents. A consensus intermediary is someone who, upon making a statement or proclamation, gets people to fall in line and say: “This is True.” The Word of God, as it were.

I’m not here to convert anyone, though. Society is filled with consensus intermediaries whose primary, if not principal, value proposition is to inform the rest of us on what is “true,” as well as on what to do and how to act based on that information. Such as:

• With respect to the news, what’s going on around the world, and what’s come before, there are journalists, media organizations, historians, famous books, etc…

• In science, much of which is above many of our heads, there are countless people and organizations that do research, publish reports, attempt to replicate each other’s research, form larger bodies to synthesize understanding, etc…

• In governance, we have vast systems of lawyers, bureaucrats, politicians, representatives, lobbyists (perhaps far too many), and many other functionaries that set the rules of the road, as it were, from everything ranging from what constitutes a crime to what products are safe for consumption and sale, etc…

You get the idea.

What I’m here to discuss is how the rate at and extent to which people listen to and more importantly trust certain consensus intermediaries has changed in recent years and continues to change rapidly. Historically, many of the larger institutional intermediaries were not nearly as challenged as they are today. My Dad, for instance, sees the New York Times, as an institution, as trustworthy. As a consensus intermediary worth listening to. So much so that it informs a lot of what he believes to be true about what’s going on in the world.

I’m not here to say whether that’s right or wrong or to lambast the Times. I read plenty of what’s published in those pages and find it moderately trustworthy, certainly informative. But I can’t think of many, if any, friends or colleagues in my generation (millennials, cuspy Gen Zers) who read the New York Times cover to cover, or who view it as a trustworthy consensus intermediary through and through. My cohort, as it were, certainly listens to and trusts individuals who write or record podcasts or produce other media for the NYT. But the ‘vibe’ is definitively individuals > institutions.

Further, there are entire cohorts of people who think the NYT is a rag of propaganda, for whom anything published in those pages isn’t just suspect, but more likely verification of the opposite. Read any of the comments on a post from the NYT about the Epstein list or some other potentially negative story about President Trump, and you’ll find a swathe of comments that read more or less as “Hah! Well, if it’s coming from the NYT, it’s obviously not true.”

Many of the most polarizing issues of our day produce similar reactions. There’s zero middle ground between, say, ardent supporters of Israel’s military operations in Gaza and people who believe Israel is committing one of the worst modern-day genocides. There doesn’t seem to be any consensus intermediary at this point, whether media company, global legal body, or humanitarian organization, capable of bridging that gap.

Not only is consensus missing on this and many other issues, often not just with respect to what should be done but literally with respect to what’s happening on the ground. Consensus doesn’t even seem achievable in many cases. Said simply, the consensus intermediaries of yore are no more. Or at least not what they once were. Because, well? They can’t actually establish consensus anymore.

It’s not that consensus intermediaries no longer exist, or that it’s all their fault that consensus is now often wholly unachievable. There’s also an increasingly wide gulf between people’s belief systems and what shapes them, such as the alternative consensus intermediaries to whom they listen. None of this is news. The Flat Earthers, who grew in number a decade ago, were a pretty solid tell. Consensus intermediation began to emerge from elsewhere, with no loss in potency. Remember from our Jungian intro, the verisimilitude of myth or message isn’t what matters most. Often, it matters little at all. The messianic power of the consensus intermediary matters far more.

Algorithmic social feeds are certainly a driving factor of change, although I won’t delve too deeply into analyzing all the proximate causes. They are not consensus intermediaries in themselves, but they can amplify any consensus intermediary with a powerful message — and the wits to game the algorithm or other system — to no end. Whatever your existing worldview, or whoever your consensus intermediaries are, black-box social algorithms, optimized to juice time spent on any given app or site, invariably push users deeper into polarized orbits rather than, say, serving up content that might buck the trend. Why direct a user to another consensus intermediary that they might not be interested in? That’s anathema to say, YouTube, if its holy grail metric is solely any given user’s time spent watching videos.

I won’t even get to deep into the extent to which AI will and already is turbocharging these dynamics. But I will note that more information consumption “guided” by algorithms and AI further depriviliges institutions in favor of individuals. Or bypasses individuals altogether, offering a computer-generated summary that becomes the intermediary itself:

I wouldn’t go so far as to say we’ve lost something permanently. Perhaps we have. Consensus intermediaries definitely aren’t going away. But we live in a world with very splintered consensus intermediation. Which is both the cause and the product of polarization. Once splintered, then juiced by algorithmic sycophany, the gap grows.

Here’s how Kyla Scanlon summarized this trend and transitions us into implications, excerpted from her recent blog titled “The Four Phases of Institutional Collapse in the Age of AI:”

Why this is especially challenging for climate-y stuff 

A hint for the answer to the question posed in the heading above lives in the quote from Kyla Scanlon we just read. Climate change is an inordinately complex systems problem. Absent institutions and significant collaboration, understanding it, let alone confronting it, is an infinitely more dubious endeavor. Hence, the splintering of consensus intermediation, or its co-option by machine, is especially challenging for efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Climate change is inherently a global challenge; efforts to even grapple with it require global coordination.

There have been valiant efforts to establish and build trust in consensus intermediaries to facilitate global coordination on climate change research, mitigation, and adaptation. Think COP conferences, think the IPCC, think the Paris Agreement. The problem? As echoed throughout this piece so far, these aren’t sufficiently functioning consensus intermediaries. At least not in terms of their ability to marshal the requisite, er, consensus. I’m not here to say these bodies haven’t done tremendously important work. But they don’t have everyone’s ear, let alone buy-in.

There was a time when events like IPCC releases or COP conferences held sway. They did galvanize global action, to an extent. But now, as the world gears up for COP 30? I hate to say it, but even from my vantage point, it’s a bit of a “meh.” It’s hard not to feel like these consensus intermediaries have lost some, if not most, of the proverbial locker room.

To diagnose some cause, some of the sentiment shift from favored to feckless for the largest climate consensus intermediaries is a product of confusion. Here, I’ll invoke Ezra Klein, who is by no means not concerned about climate change and who happens to be a liberal-leaning consensus intermediary to whom many people actually listen right now. Here’s a short excerpt from a recent article of his in, to bring it full circle, the New York Times:

This hints at something I’ve written about plenty, namely that past climate comms failings were boy who cried wolf problems. Frankly, some consensus intermediaries were far too dramatic in ringing alarm bells around speculative near-term climate predictions. Here’s a video of John Kerry in Congress in 2009 suggesting the world might be five years away from an ice-free Arctic in the summer. Arctic sea ice losses are definitely a major concern. But there’s still ice there as I write this on the last day of July, 2025, more than a decade past the date Kerry envisioned nothing but water.

Unfortunately, those maximally alarmist claims, of which there are countless other examples, did a lot more harm than good, undermining the hopes of having any “big tent” consensus intermediaries for global climate change conversations in the process. Now, there’s a “missing middle,” a “great ravine” between people who think the world will be uninhabitable in a few generations and people who don’t think climate change is a particularly urgent issue at all. That’s not to say there aren’t people, like myself, in between. But forget about invoking the word “consensus” with respect to anything “climate” related these days. And I imagine (I should probably say fear) that will be true for some time.

Bridging the gap

Shoring up the “missing middle” is often invoked in climate capital conversations. On the capital side, earlier-stage companies working on mitigating or adapting to climate change need more support, whether via debt, equity, or project finance, to move from early proof points of viability to larger commercial scale. For climate tech companies, this is often hard to come by. See below from a recent CTVC survey of climate investors:

But, as we now see, there’s also a missing middle in terms of consensus formation, whether with respect to climate change and sustainability issues, politics (perhaps most of all), or any other topic, concept, or idea imaginable. Which may be an even bigger problem. Because consensus underpins capital allocation. They’re one and the same.

Some of the capital allocation gap can be bridged (pun intended) by the necessity of building new and updating foundering infrastructure. Few would argue that the world doesn’t benefit from more energy generation, storage, and transmission capacity, or that updating infrastructure isn’t essential to prevent blackouts and wildfires.

These are examples of gaps in consensus that may be bridged best by taking “climate” out of the conversation altogether, as Ezra Klein, whom we invoked earlier, did at least with respect to the headline messaging in his book Abundance, which has been making the rounds. Great start, in my opinion.

But we can’t strip the “climate” communication out of everything, even if ample reframes abound. For example, outside the power sector and transportation, it isn’t always as easy to make economic cases without alluding to unpriced negative externalities. I can easily make a purely economic case for why biodiversity loss is a massive problem (and I have). But if I go down the lists of what causes and is caused by climate change, my creative powers — and the case for shorter-term profit potential — will stop somewhere.

Obviously, I don’t have all the answers on how to shore up “healthy” consensus intermediation, or on how to deputize people and organizations to take that challenge on. These are among the more disorienting challenges of modern society.

One hypothesis? Having absurdly focused and compelling individuals (remember, individuals > institutions in today’s media environment) who focus on single issues. I’ve seen this work, the same way single-issue voters (think the NRA in the U.S.) hold a lot of sway. Take Isabelle Boemeke, who has done a great deal to change minds on the societal benefits of nuclear energy. Five years ago, she literally camped out and protested in front of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California, which was slated for retirement. Fast-forward to today → it’s no longer slated for retirement. On the back of that and significant influencing work since, she’s now an effective (and fortunately conscientious) consensus intermediary with the requisite social media fluency to boot.

Amidst the accelerating disintegration of the old vanguard of consensus intermediaries, ensuring more of these conscientious, sustainably motivated, and ultimately successful climate and sustainability champions fill the void is a great start. That said, it doesn’t solve for how to shore up the consensus-building power of institutions, which, as noted earlier, is very necessary for successful global climate work, considering the complexity of all the nested challenges that catch-all category subsumes.

On that front, unfortunately, I definitely don’t have sage ideas right now. Except for that the consensus intermediating institutions of the future will likely need to be cool, new-age media fluent, and that they probably won’t get far with doom and gloom. Of course, if you have more ideas and practical action items beyond that, please let us all know!

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Adios,

— Nick