The Wobble

Notes from the seam between new technology and the old structures of knowing.

You’ve probably noticed that nobody agrees on what counts as knowing anymore.

Not just politically, though that’s the loudest version of the problem. The deeper issue is that the systems we rely on to stabilize knowledge — expertise, institutions, evidence, peer review, shared standards of proof — are all wobbling at once. AI is accelerating this, but it didn’t start it. The ground was already shifting.

Most responses fall into one of two camps: panic about the collapse of truth or cheerful advice about thinking more rationally. Neither helps much. The first mistakes instability for catastrophe. The second assumes the problem is in your head, when it's mostly in the infrastructure.

The Wobble is my attempt to do something else. I draw on the history and philosophy of science — especially the pragmatist tradition — to make sense of what's happening to knowledge right now. The machinery of knowing has always been stranger, more provisional, and more interesting than the standard stories suggest. That's not a reason for despair. It's a reason to pay closer attention.

I'm not trying to predict where any of this lands. I'm trying to notice what's happening while it's still legible.

Who writes this

I'm Jonathan Morgan. I have a PhD in psychology and philosophy and work as a senior researcher at Just Horizons Alliance designing computational tools to help communities make better decisions. This means I spend a lot of time at the seam between academic research and new tech.

The thread running through everything I do is meaning-making — how we do it, what supports it, and what happens when those supports start to change. You can find more at jonathanrossmorgan.com.