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I’ve been reading this book recently and it has a very interesting discussion about the sheer influence that Alan Greenspan had on markets at his peak and his resulting reluctance to speak in anything other than the most arcane and impenetrable ‘fed-speak’ lest the markets inadvertently seize on what he says and respond in a way that he, at least, would deem undesirable. In a way it’s symptomatic of the media age in which we live where access to information, far from liberating us, threatens to overwhelm us. Too many people seem to imagine that the Internet is inherently democratising – why else would China go to such trouble to restrict access? As a song by one of my favourite punk bands puts it:
At some turning point in history, some fuckface recognized that knowledge tends to democratize cultures and societies so the only thing to do was monopolize and confine it to priests, clerics and elites the rest resigned to serve, cuz if the rabble heard the truth they'd organize against the power, privilege and wealth hoarded by the few- for no one else. And did it occur to you that it's almost exactly the same today?
Yet the historically unprecedented proliferation of information – understanding both terms in the widest sense possible – has a weirdly ambiguous character. It undercuts established authorities, engendering plural and often cynical resistances to taken for granted truths, yet it also establishes new authorities, as busy people with finite attentional resources look to understand and negotiate a path through ever more complex and opaque systems while they drown under a media torrent that simultaneously makes some working conception of truth more desirable and necessary than ever while systematically stripping away the epistemic markers with and through which we’d reach such an outcome. Thus you have the information cascade as the endemic intellectual (and social) problem of the ‘information age’. Far from setting us free, in the internet age the truth – or at least the search for it – paralyses us.
