Reflecting on power and information
What’s happening in the world today, any day beyond today, and at all moments in the past, is in large part the teleological reason for the human energy spent creating mechanisms that either broaden the access to information, or withhold it.
A few generations ago in the late 1800’s, an effort to broaden access to information was put forth in the USA by people who championed a demand that access to public schools should be shared by people of all colors and backgrounds — a demand that was easy to understand, but difficult to implement well. The American law and order changed, and over a hundred years later so continues to the American way of sharing access to information and resources interracially. For this pattern of change, recognition must be paid to the people who energize the collective conscious, to brave souls who run for office to phrase and manage this change, and to the people who consistently encourage and vote for candidates they believe in.
The folks who poured sweat into the creation and commercialization of air travel throughout the 1900’s that allowed us to effortlessly move vast distances, live diverse experiences, and exchange things should also be recognized for furthering access to information. Access to travel was being enjoyed more and more and by an increasingly diverse people before travel itself helped communicate the wrong kind of information — a virus — to the entire planet.
As a final case study, those involved in the development of the internet have been a crucial piece in this intergenerational puzzle. The people within corporations, research groups, and indy projects that have extended the internet’s configuration over the past 30 years to better organize and disseminate information — and provide ways to create more of it — certainly deserve recognition for furthering this pattern of change.
Depending on how you feel about global ways of life today and your interpretation of the direction we seem to be headed in, it’s worth taking a moment to either appreciate the human lifetimes spent furthering access to information, or question them.
I feel as though information is power, but it’s important that the pursuit of the information is deliberate — if knowledge is instead stumbled upon mindlessly, the power intrinsic to this knowledge is delegated to the people and brands who feed it. It’s tricky though. The more mindless people there are, the fewer people that have power. And the fewer people that have power, the easier it is to manipulate that power to create any sort of unified change — both progressive or destructive. It’s a complicated tradeoff, and the current state of things has been unsettling. On one hand an increasing number of people have access to an increasing amount of information being created by an increasing number of influencers, and we find ourselves pledging allegiance to increasingly varied and diverse people and brands over time. On the other, a few machine learning models curated by people at tech companies are enabling an overarching lack of unity by spreading information and leadership so wide and thin, assuming power inso doing.
All I know is I just got my iPhone’s emergency alert that the “mandatory SF citywide curfew remains in effect from 8 P.M to 5 A.M. All in SF must stay home”, alongside a message from a dear friend who lives on the other side of the country sharing thoughts on a meaningful project he’s working on.
