Information Poisoning

There were several submissions of this piece: "Novelist Caleb Carr (probably most famous for The Alienist ) has written an article on Salon in which he talks about the dangers he believes information technology pose to society. His contention is that the unchecked spread of information technology will allow for increased corporate control over our lives. His proposed solution? Government regulation. (This is something that he has mentioned in interviews before, and it touches on ideas explored in his near-future SF novel Killing Time ). Overall a very interesting and thought-provoking read." I suggest you read the article without any preconceived ideas of whether you'll find it "good" or "bad", just read it and see what you get out of it.

Comments

Re:He's an economic ignoramus

[Mr. Slippery]

What he's missing is that in the race to earn profits, corporations have to please people. Only by pleasing people can corporations earn money.

Only in the ideal case where buyers and sellers meet in the marketplace with equal power, full knowledge, and no costs externalized.

Which is not to say that more government action is necessarily the answer to corporate misdeeds. We have to remember that corporations are creations of governments!

Rather than muzzling the monsters it creates, the state simply should stop creating monsters. Revoke corporate charters of misbehaving companies (that's not a new power for the state, it's an existing one that's never used). Require corporate shares to be owned by people, not other corporations. Stop treating corporations as natural persons (the Constitution defines U.S. citizens quite clearly, and corporations don't fit). These aren't increases in government regulation, they're actually decreases in the state power to create profit-obsessed artificial entities.

(Pardon me for the U.S. bias in the above; I believe the same ideas apply in other nations, but I'm most familiar with the laws here.)

But what this twit wants isn't to stop corporate abuses. If that were the goal, he'd want more freedom of discussion, making sure that net publishing remains available to the average American, not just to AOL/Time Warner and Microsoft. Like every other pro-censorship fuckhead, he's wants his opinions of what's good information or bad information to affect the rest of us, "for our own good".

"Information is not knowledge." Sure, Zappa told us that a long time ago. But I sure as hell don't need idiots like this "helping" me by forcibly filtering my data stream.

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

Interesting idea, but how will it work?

[Private Essayist]

Carr makes some interesting points (essentially boiled down to: either government will regulate the Net or corporations will, and at least goverment is supposed to be on the side of the people whereas corporations exist to make profits). This point could be argued back and forth, but he at least makes a good argument for his case.

It was this statement, however, that most struck me. In talking about how government, for instance, regulates the food industry so we know what ingredients we are dealing with, he says something similar is needed for the Net. He says: "There must be strenuous efforts first and foremost to guarantee that what is represented as fact is fact, and that what is not fact is clearly labeled as such."

This parallels an idea I had a couple years ago as a possible Web business -- providing a rating system to information sites as to how factual the information really is. A 'Consumer Reports', if you will, of information.

But the problem I came across, and one that I see in Carr's proposal, is this: Who decides what is factual?

Let's use an obvious example, creation versus evolution. See the problem? If a creationist were to evaluate a scientific article talking about evolution, might he or she be tempted to mark it down as 'Not factual'? Certainly a biologist would mark creationist writings as 'Not factual.'

So whoever provides the ratings as to whether or not information on the web is factual will either bring their own prejudices to the task, or will turn off a sizable segment of the population ('Oh, he marks that site as factual, but he believes in evolution so what does he know?')

I don't know the solution to this problem. How do you get a system that marks information sites as factual or not factual when the population-at-large can't even decide on what they think is factual?
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A much more insightful discussion...

[adubey]

..can be found here. The best part is, the essay is a comic strip.

I was going to submit this, along with the Salon article, pointing out how much more insightful the comic writer was (hmm... is this always the case?).

What SalonBoy misses (and ComicBoy gets) is that if you directly paid the artist, "corporate" interests are silently subverted.

And if there was a micropayment system, you would be more likely to pay the artist rather than demand free content.

The question becomes: is the lack of a micropayment system a technological problem, or a political one?