While deception has been with us since the Garden of Eden, it took the advance of information technology to fully weaponize it.
Throughout human history, particularly following the Age of Enlightenment, ignorance and untruth have done battle with empiricism, rational inquiry, and the scientific method, and cultures having these tools available - and prepared to use them - have dispelled what might today be called "Disinformation", and contributed mightily to human progress.
Today, the use of "Content moderation" on platforms like Twitter squelches free inquiry, which underpins any healthy society's defenses against ignorance and disinformation.
Why is ignorance so readily celebrated? Are those eager to proliferate or at least tolerate disinformation so bereft of critical thinking skills after the cashiering of the Western canon they know not what they do, or do they cynically compartmentalize what they permit to appear on social and traditional media from what they truly believe, akin to permitting dysfunction to prevail in the D.C. public schools and denying school choice to poor parents while sending one's own children to Sidwell Friends?
Long before the information revolution, during the age of the ARPANET, bumper stickers were an easy way to virtue signal in a low-information world - today, they might read "I'm With Her", "Bernie 2020", or, if you prefer, "Make America Great Again".
In the pre-internet era, no one looked to bumper stickers for information or wisdom; the messages so conveyed were understood to be of limited value and only tribal significance.
In the information age, tech-enabled ignorance can advance narratives even more effectively than can veracity.
Monday, May 16, 2022
From Amplification to Celebration: A Brief History of Tech-Enabled Ignorance
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