Pro Commerce

Information Explosion

I’m seeing a division in our society that has many consequences.

With the arrival of a global functioning Internet I am seeing several unusual phenomena. 

One is the social monopoly attribute of a few big sites, like Facebook, Google and Instagram. The main reason is that the first one with a large global following sets user patterns that cross geographic boundaries and make communication possible.  Once this happens it is hard for a new entrant to the domain to offer this multi-national quality rapidly.

The active censorship of American leaders by the social monopoly will lead many nations to create their own platforms.

A new entrant must have a strong appeal to angry, dissatisfied or dissident users of the old platform.  I expect to see user platforms used by different factions with linked global factional patterns.

The second and more important element is the division of society into multiple new knowledge factions.   

I have a large shelf- sized encyclopedia that I used before the Internet on occasion.  Now people use their search engine multiple times a day.  

When I first saw the Dynabook at Xerox Parc in 1971, a model of a future laptop, we all thought that it would be revolutionary to have an encyclopedia in our hand.  Little did we know how vast the Dynabook book of knowledge would become. 

Little did we know the consequences for humans.

I’m old and my lifelong friends are mostly gone. So it is hard for me to see how the Portable Infinite Encyclopedia influences people over long periods.  What little I see suggests a few divergents from an earlier period.

First, I see an increase in the number and quality of public intellectuals.  Both have increased.   Here is my list from the end of the 20th Century. 

Many are still with us.  There are many more today. 

In mid-century public intellectuals worked for newspapers, magazines and academia where they had access to archives, excellent libraries and research assistants  By the mid-1970’s newspapers and magazines were not important but research institutions had become more common and home to many public intellectuals.  

Today, the Internet is available to all and individuals can do their own research rapidly and thoroughly. 

In this way the Portable Infinite Encyclopedia is producing more and higher quality public intellectuals.

A second way is the creation of new and larger tribes of public intellectual followers.  Formerly books provided a stable network of supporters.  Now the Internet skirts the choke point of publishers and provides direct access to supporters and followers of the new public intellectuals.

The third way is the creation of non-traditional late teenage education.  Scholarships such as the Thiel Fellowship, the first; support study, research and work outside of academia. Similarly, global discussion group education, is creating vast new study mechanisms such as the Minerva University, again the first of its kind.  Both of these and their progeny circumvent the zombie traditional ‘woke’ academia.

Interestingly, the Thiel group has set an upper limit of age 23 for recipients.  This is the age I have publicly picked for the end of homo sapiens’ significant ability to learn. Adulthood seems to start at 23 and this age seems to end original learning for most hominids. 

Still another effect is the vast distrust of all institutions that provide information. This has two visible effects.  (a) All knowledge and information is immediately questionable.  Sources that are reliable have to be ascertained for all information.  This is work, hard work.  It makes all information and consequently all ‘knowledge’ more ‘contingent’ than it has ever been before.

(b) There is often so much information that reliable information is harder to find. For example: when good historians looked at the origins of sanitation systems before the Internet, the first sewers and fresh water in the ‘Anglo-European World’ were in a small town near Boston in 1837.  Now Googling and Wikipedianing have so many entries that every sewer system claims origins that are earlier than the first real one in the ‘Anglo-European World.’.  Of course the Romans had great sewers and fresh water as did most of Africa, Japan and many other non-European societies.

Putting it all together, we now get more top flight public intellectuals, much more contingent information, more relativistic perceptions of the world and far more unreliable, conditional knowledge than before the Internet.

Margo

Margo St. James died a few days ago.  Margo was a very good friend.  

I had tried to reach her for the past eight years, with no luck.  I even sent my daughter to look for her.  Many people have asked me how to reach her, several to do interviews and make a film, no luck. It looks like she had been moved to a care home a while back.

I was personally instrumental in Margo starting COYOTE.  When she came to me with her idea, before it had a name, I gave her stationary, gave her my office on Pier 40, where she often lived, and which she used for many years. I gave her several grants from Point Foundation. She often gave me credit for starting her on her career as an organizer.

She came to see me often, sometimes at my office, frequently to my North Beach coffee gathering.  I always helped her and she always followed my advice. She was a wonderful friend and kept me involved in her life.  Even her love life.

Margo was a brave woman, warm, caring and deeply honest.

I learned a great deal from Margo, including the real story behind the Dan White murders at City Hall.  

I learned from the creation of COYOTE that it created strong opposition. San Francisco uniquely reacted by creating a vice squad to target ‘Johns’. A friend of mine got a severe penalty for soliciting a fake hooker.

Here is a reference to her life, that she wrote over 30 years ago.