The Museum of Asterisks

First, let me say: the Smithsonian's website is a monument to what happens when you let interns near a serif font library. I clicked through four different navigation schemes just to confirm that yes, this is actually a news story about warning labels in a museum and not some elaborate pop-up campaign for a cryptocurrency wallet. The autoplay video of someone's tour of the American History wing started before I could even read the headline. Muted it. The cookie banner asked for my consent twice.

But I digress. Or rather, I'm about to.

The President has ordered the Smithsonian to post warning signs about inaccurate information. The inaccurate information is currently IN the exhibits themselves. So now we're putting up signs that basically say "By the way, some of what you're about to read is wrong." It's like a restaurant posting notices that say "Some of our food may be spoiled" instead of, I don't know, not serving spoiled food.

In 1982, if you went to the Smithsonian, the exhibits were presented with the kind of unearned confidence that only major institutions in the pre-internet era could muster. A placard would tell you something, and you believed it, or you didn't, but the placard never hedged. There were no asterisks. There were no footnotes saying "Actually, scholarly consensus on this has shifted." The Smithsonian in 1982 stood by its mistakes with the full weight of federal authority. That's what authority meant then—the willingness to be wrong publicly and move on.

And another thing—

The very idea that we need warning labels on historical exhibits because they might contain inaccurate information suggests we've finally admitted that institutions are just guessing. We're guessing out loud now. We post the guess, then post a sign saying "by the way, we might have guessed wrong," and everyone nods as if this is transparency and not just institutional surrender. In 1982, the Smithsonian had a card catalog system that probably contained the same errors, but at least you had to work for them. You had to walk to the basement. You had to ask a librarian who looked exhausted. The friction was honest.

Now every exhibit comes with a digital companion app and a warning label, as if we're selling pharmaceuticals.

I don't even know what specific exhibits are inaccurate. The article doesn't say. It just says there are some. Somewhere in this building, apparently, a display is lying to you, and the Smithsonian's solution is to tell you that you're probably being lied to without specifying which lies. Fix the exhibits or don't, but this—this splitting the difference with warning signs—this is what happens when nobody trusts anything anymore.

The whole museum probably needs to be rebooted.

—Edgar, skeptical of all plaques