Lately much virtual space is devoted to questions about the quality of information. "Disinformation" has caused a feeding frenzy of entrepreneurs, consultants, government contractors and censors. Matt Taibbi has been reporting on this in the great tradition of Journalism.
But I can't help this feeling that we're missing something. And it came to me suddenly whilst thinking of something else: what is the context of all this noise? Lately the "Disinformation Board" got disbanded, and the person picked to lead it has filed a lawsuit for, um, its wrongful death. Like we're supposed to care.
So it does not matter if we're trying to combat it, or foment it, or ignore it; there's a lot of money to be made whichever way you slice it. This has made the whole conversation obsolete and irrelevant. But not less dangerous.
It's not dis-, mis-, mal-, or un-information that we should worry about. It's the way the whole issue is used. It gets attention, not for what it says, but because it gets attention. It's a Kardashian of public discourse.
We're not in the Information Age anymore. Information was the big commodity, but that market has tanked. It crashed around 2014, at a guess. Obama was the last presidential candidate with mastery in that realm. The next one was information-challenged, to say the least.
And was that even a speed-bump in No. 45's ballistic rise to authoritarian power? What about grabbing women's private parts? If anything that got his sagging campaign over the top. I suppose people on Fifth Avenue will have to wear flakjackets in the current campaign.
It's the Attention Age now. This is an economic matter. Info was displaced by an even more profitable, portable, cheap, infrastructure-independent commodity: the momentary, aggregated focus of millions of minds, in split-second packages of "big" data. Data humans can't even read. The "thousand datapoints" of a Cambridge Analytica, or any of its hellspawn now swarming every system. Traffic lights, doorbells, light bulbs, children's toys, oh, and all your devices, hoovering up all your susceptibilities so it can target you ever more precisely.
Memes are not about content. Content is only whatever attracts the most eyeballs. That's it. That's their only value and use. "Far right" or "liberal" or whatever is totally meaningless and irrelevant, the only thing a meme is for, is to make you look for a moment. It's even more effective if you don't notice where your attention is.
The same is true for "issues," which are just more memes. Take "disinformation" for instance. It is a bottomless question. There is no answer possible. You can hire experts, they're cheap, anybody wearing shoes is one now, and you can even hire experts who actually know how to tell truth from fiction. It won't matter. If they censor anything, game over. If they don't, oh dear, everybody is too stupid, we have to protect Nascurtie, rat out your neighbors quick!
There is no solution where you can't find the problem. Because it's a transaction. A problem on one end, and a solution on the other. There's a buyer, there's a seller. And this product can be sold over and over again for infinite reasons, and infinite rewards, based on indeterminate content. It's a casino. The house is raking in the dough.
As long as disinformation is seen as an issue, it's big, big money. It will be debated, reported, tracked, suppressed, enhanced, programmed, and legislated. "AI" is already central to every proposal to get ahead of this will-o-the-wisp.
And as long as this goes on, or the next big terror, or the one after that, we are feeding ourselves to a machine we made, to make us safe from the machine we made. That'll work. It will: it will consume us, and then the machine will stop, because nobody will be minding the power grid.
Nobody will be minding the power grid, because nobody was minding the carbon emissions, we were all trying to figure out how to get rich off them before they fry our eyeballs out of our heads.
We have to, because all the money is being drained out of one end of the system, and the people there are dying, selling their futures for the promise of a slightly better one than starving to death, struggling to escape to where all the money goes, and being thrown to the cartels at the border to pick over their bones.
The habitable areas are shrinking faster than a person can run, now.
This is how we're spending our last moments as a species.
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