Al Gore

Author of The Assault on Reason, the book Kyle read as a critique of the decline of public reason in Democracy. The wiki treats Gore as a former U.S. vice president writing on how a “well-informed citizenry” and the rule of reason erode when electronic broadcasting displaces print. Kyle’s notes engage Gore adversarially: they push back on his nostalgia for a more rational pre-television public (“the pre-television public wasn’t actually that reasonable”), and on his framing of psychological manipulation as a recent, broadcast-driven phenomenon — arguing instead that it “has been part of it all along.” Gore’s account traces the Propaganda tradition of engineered “consent” forward into modern media.

Gore surfaces a second time in Double Entry, quoted in 2006 that “the old way of measuring value is becoming irrelevant” — invoked in the context of how double-entry accounting shaped (and may be outliving) our sense of what counts as value.

Context: Al Gore is a former U.S. senator and the 45th Vice President of the United States (1993–2001). After narrowly losing the 2000 presidential election, he became a prominent climate-change advocate, known for the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The Assault on Reason (2007) is his book on the deterioration of rational public discourse.

Where this appears

• The Assault on Reason — author; his thesis on the decline of public reason, read with active counter-argument
• Double Entry — quoted (2006) that “the old way of measuring value is becoming irrelevant”