It recently dawned on me that we are in an age of information imperialism. Small communities of people used to have their own private stores of knowledge that were distinct to their local communities. That local knowledge defined and bonded them.
The internet broadly has opened all of those local pockets and connected everyone and their knowledge to a powerful global infrastructure, not unlike how the railroad and steamships of the 19th century connected the globe. And, in so doing, it has destroyed a lot of these local communities.
With the election of Trump and a wave of anti-globalization, we now have to have a serious conversation in practical terms about the ills that come with a world of open and free communication.
Destruction of Local Knowledge
I was thinking about these issues the other day while biking through San Francisco and up around Marin. If you unwound the clock even 20 years, and took away Google Maps, it would be difficult for me—as a casual biker—to figure my way out around some of the winding best bike routes in the region. Only people in the biking community in the area would know their way around. Now, with technology, it is easy—and that means the best bike routes are far more popular and crowded.
Broader access to knowledge of a place, person, thing or topic changes the thing itself. Just like in quantum physics, our new tools that allow us to observe the information, in many instances destroys it—or at least its value.
What is destroyed when a local community’s special information is shared?
First, without knowledge as a barrier to access, what is generally left is just money, and that creates social stress.
The events business is an interesting example here. It used to be that even if you wanted to buy courtside seats to a great game, being deep enough in the community to know how to buy those tickets was hard. You couldn’t just buy your way into whatever you wanted—you also needed knowledge and information about the community of the team. Now, of course, access to the best tickets at any sporting event or concert is just a matter of money in a liquid market. In some ways, erasing information as a barrier is a very good thing for the world. There is an argument that it is more fair and open that way, but there is something lost from the community when the only currency is money. And, I would argue, it also creates more anxiety about money itself.
Second, information imperialism—defined as the opening up of the world’s knowledge—is a knowledge-diversity disaster. If all ideas compete for attention and engagement in an open marketplace, the most seductive ideas are more powerful. That means it is less possible for niche ideas to stand their ground with locally relevant audiences. This suggests that as the internet opens up all knowledge and speech, we actually end up with less diversity of ideas and opinions. We bias more toward monocultures versus polycultures, and toward a more fragile information ecology.
Suggesting that the internet squashes rather than promotes diversity is heresy among the technorati. The narrative is supposed to be that the internet gives everyone a voice, and lets each voice find its audience. Do we see that happening? What I see is that certain voices, a Trump or a Kanye West or a Kim Kardashian, get far, far more attention than they did in the past, crowding out other views and speech.
Sure, there are more TV shows and more selfies of different people. But from a macro sense, are we seeing growth in diversity of ideas or consolidation? It might be that our ability to more seamlessly spread ideas and memes is actually collapsing our global diversity of ideas, not expanding it.
Third, our global network opens up, for the first time in human history, the real possibility that freedom of knowledge and speech will be removed. Historically, while different societies have had different opinions around the protection of freedom of speech, there was a practical limit on enforcement. A government or organization might prevent the mass distribution of an idea, but it was functionally impossible to regulate the actual local speech and knowledge of a community. You simply couldn’t monitor speech at the local level. It was impossible.
Our global network has changed this. I am not an alarmist: I trust our government and the organizations that oversee the internet. However, it is now possible for the government, or another organization, to regulate what we can and can’t say. This is why the suggestion of things like Facebook “editorializing” News Feed, hiring human journalists and behaving like a media organization is so fundamentally flawed and scary. Those asking for it, mostly very shortsighted “liberals,” are heading toward a slippery slope that leads to the demise of possibly our most important freedom.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Globalization in the 19th century was both terribly destructive and very good. For all the pain, suffering and destruction it caused, no one in their right mind would want to unwind the clock for humanity overall.
The same I believe is true for the globalization of information, and our current period of information imperialism. It has terrible effects, but it is also a net good. We can’t turn back time, but even if we could, we absolutely shouldn’t want to.
That said, I think it is very much worth understanding and acknowledging what we are doing, and that the internet is not all good. It comes with costs. Only when you confront the ways in which it has distorted local communities, destroyed diversity and posed new risks to free speech can we move forward with our eyes wide open into the future.
The internet is good, but it isn’t all good.