![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
The Modern Age
There are many names given to our modern age – the atomic age, the space age, and the information age are all popular. The first two are, at least to me, undisputed – we as a race have access to atomic power for good or ill, and we’ve sent items and people off planet and into space. The third one is more problematic.
In one of his books (I think it was Quantum Psychology, Robert Anton Wilson discussed information theory and the fast acceleration of its repetition. In this discussion he wrote about the amount of information generated from the discovery of fire to the start of the common era, and this was named for a notable figure of that time, so it was one Jesus of information. He then goes through history, describing the increase – 2 Jesi were achieved by 1400CE, more or less, four were reached by 1600, and so on (I may be misremembering these dates, it was multiple decades ago when I read it). But information theorists predicted that we would reach a point in February of 2012 where the amount of information would double in a single day, and from then on it would double in parts of a day. This is exponential growth, not linear, so it’s a crazy number of Jesi in play by now.
I wondered when I read it how that much data increase could happen. Then the World Wide Web came into existence and I realized that those estimates of data doubling might be conservative. This in one of the base reasons for the use of the term “Information Age”.
It’s said that knowledge is power. Note a word that’s missing in there – it doesn’t say that factual knowledge is power, just that knowledge is power. False knowledge, what’s properly called factoids (the term for small facts is a factlet) has as much power to drive people’s minds and actions as accurate information. Look at one example, the claims that an election was rigged, stolen, or corrupted. One faction claimed this with vehemence in 2020, and those claims persist, though it seems there’s no reason to keep beating that drum. But there is – by casting aspersions on one election it creates the potential perspective that any election is also potentially flawed. The phrase “Existence of one is proof of another” doesn’t mean it proves others do exist, as many folks in the conspiracy community like to believe, but that proof of the existence of something is proof that others may exist. So now we have allegations about how the same steal was perpetrated in 2024. The poison of doubt for elections was introduced, and now it’s going to fester and cast doubt on any moving forward.
The reality is that all conspiracy theories are false, save the one you believe in. It takes someone who’s got both a skeptical nature and a drive to question their own convictions to analyze, from a critical standpoint, what the person believes. Or as the saying goes, this one also introduced to me by RAW, convictions make convicts.
So, in light of this, I think of the time we’re living in as something other than the three names I started this entry with – I believe we live in the disinformation age. Thank you Mr. Orwell for showing us the mechanism of disinformation.
For me, this extends to an avoidance of short cycle news – the Occupy summer showed how different what news outlets generate can be from what folks on the ground experience (one of the few places where I found social media to be useful). This puts me at a bit of a disadvantage, because so much is fast cycling right now. And I’m in the crosshairs for multiple reasons.
The second war in Iraq used a tactic known as “Shock and Awe” to get the point across that the West had superior firepower to the middle east. I believe that the same thing is going on right now – so much is happening in so fast a time cycle that people are dealing with questions about which problem they spend their energy on. The ones creating this shock and awe condition are most likely hoping that some of their initiatives will become fait accompli. The reality is that those are what’s being described as “stick” measures, so people are getting hurt by this course of actions.
I have no idea where I’m going to end up with all of this. There are some potentially very bad outcomes if things go in certain ways. I’m not giving in to fear, because that’s part of their plan, make people afraid to act – they want the flight and freeze reactions, not the fight one. Also, intense emotions don’t paralyze me, they hyperactivate my mind so I think faster and look for ways to resolve the issue. I entreat everyone to do the same – asking why is always prudent for anything presented. It’s like the old method acting concept, “What’s my motivation?”, for information coming in. What motivates the person who sent it, created it, or reported it? I believe at this point that nonpartisan is close to mythical, though some holdouts exist. But the way to know what to listen to and what to discard remains the same – use of the scientific method more than the sniff test – question everything, take nothing as fact until proven to be so. That’s what I’m doing.
In one of his books (I think it was Quantum Psychology, Robert Anton Wilson discussed information theory and the fast acceleration of its repetition. In this discussion he wrote about the amount of information generated from the discovery of fire to the start of the common era, and this was named for a notable figure of that time, so it was one Jesus of information. He then goes through history, describing the increase – 2 Jesi were achieved by 1400CE, more or less, four were reached by 1600, and so on (I may be misremembering these dates, it was multiple decades ago when I read it). But information theorists predicted that we would reach a point in February of 2012 where the amount of information would double in a single day, and from then on it would double in parts of a day. This is exponential growth, not linear, so it’s a crazy number of Jesi in play by now.
I wondered when I read it how that much data increase could happen. Then the World Wide Web came into existence and I realized that those estimates of data doubling might be conservative. This in one of the base reasons for the use of the term “Information Age”.
It’s said that knowledge is power. Note a word that’s missing in there – it doesn’t say that factual knowledge is power, just that knowledge is power. False knowledge, what’s properly called factoids (the term for small facts is a factlet) has as much power to drive people’s minds and actions as accurate information. Look at one example, the claims that an election was rigged, stolen, or corrupted. One faction claimed this with vehemence in 2020, and those claims persist, though it seems there’s no reason to keep beating that drum. But there is – by casting aspersions on one election it creates the potential perspective that any election is also potentially flawed. The phrase “Existence of one is proof of another” doesn’t mean it proves others do exist, as many folks in the conspiracy community like to believe, but that proof of the existence of something is proof that others may exist. So now we have allegations about how the same steal was perpetrated in 2024. The poison of doubt for elections was introduced, and now it’s going to fester and cast doubt on any moving forward.
The reality is that all conspiracy theories are false, save the one you believe in. It takes someone who’s got both a skeptical nature and a drive to question their own convictions to analyze, from a critical standpoint, what the person believes. Or as the saying goes, this one also introduced to me by RAW, convictions make convicts.
So, in light of this, I think of the time we’re living in as something other than the three names I started this entry with – I believe we live in the disinformation age. Thank you Mr. Orwell for showing us the mechanism of disinformation.
For me, this extends to an avoidance of short cycle news – the Occupy summer showed how different what news outlets generate can be from what folks on the ground experience (one of the few places where I found social media to be useful). This puts me at a bit of a disadvantage, because so much is fast cycling right now. And I’m in the crosshairs for multiple reasons.
The second war in Iraq used a tactic known as “Shock and Awe” to get the point across that the West had superior firepower to the middle east. I believe that the same thing is going on right now – so much is happening in so fast a time cycle that people are dealing with questions about which problem they spend their energy on. The ones creating this shock and awe condition are most likely hoping that some of their initiatives will become fait accompli. The reality is that those are what’s being described as “stick” measures, so people are getting hurt by this course of actions.
I have no idea where I’m going to end up with all of this. There are some potentially very bad outcomes if things go in certain ways. I’m not giving in to fear, because that’s part of their plan, make people afraid to act – they want the flight and freeze reactions, not the fight one. Also, intense emotions don’t paralyze me, they hyperactivate my mind so I think faster and look for ways to resolve the issue. I entreat everyone to do the same – asking why is always prudent for anything presented. It’s like the old method acting concept, “What’s my motivation?”, for information coming in. What motivates the person who sent it, created it, or reported it? I believe at this point that nonpartisan is close to mythical, though some holdouts exist. But the way to know what to listen to and what to discard remains the same – use of the scientific method more than the sniff test – question everything, take nothing as fact until proven to be so. That’s what I’m doing.