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We Live In A Post-Gatekeeper World Not A Post-Truth World

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Perhaps the greatest contribution of the web to society was that for a brief moment it freed us from the shackles of elite control over the flow of information. Governments, business leaders and the wealthy no longer had exclusive domain over the information we could consume: suddenly anyone, anywhere could publish anything at any time. Elite gatekeepers enforcing societal norms were replaced by value-free algorithms maximizing attention. In effect, the autocratic world of information access was replaced by absolute anarchy, with all of the attendant ills when a carefully governed space descends into ungoverned chaos. In turn, as the web centralizes into dictatorial social media platforms, we are restoring elite control over the flow of information, but under the power of a few unaccountable individuals fixated solely on profit at all costs, rather than our democratically elected governments across the world reflecting our local norms. What does this tell us about the future of our digital world?

From the dawn of civilization, information has always been costly, relegating it to the domain of the powerful and wealthy. Information itself is a valuable commodity, conferring military or economic superiority.

The high cost of conveying information, whether through publication or transmission over distance, historically relegated the flow of information to the elite class. Governments and the business class controlled what their societies were aware of, shaping narratives to fit their political and economic needs.

Technology has long chipped away at this control. The printing press in particular marked a cataclysmic collapse in the cost of information sharing, dramatically expanding the portion of society that could have their thoughts heard, but still placing it beyond the reach of the everyday citizen.

The web’s great contribution was to bring the monetary cost of publication to zero. Ad-supported communities and eventually social media platforms emerged to give anyone with an internet connection the ability to publish their thoughts, beliefs and narratives to the entire planet.

The carefully governed informational spaces of our past abruptly descended into anarchic chaos almost overnight. In the place of gatekeepers enforcing societal values, attention-maximizing algorithms took over.

On paper, the playing field was now level, with a head of state no more able to have their voice heard than an ordinary citizen. Minority communities and those who had never before had a voice were suddenly given megaphones able to reach to the highest levels of elected officials and beyond to the entire planet.

Yet, as a rising tide lifts all boats, so too were the most hateful and destructive shadows of society suddenly given that very same megaphone to amplify their local hate to global prominence.

Fraudsters, rogue nation states and even those simply looking to help the world burn, all similarly found themselves suddenly able to access a global audience unprepared to cope with this newfound anarchy.

Whereas in the early days of the web we lauded its gatekeeper-free anarchy as the future and lionized its rule-free chaos as the perfect informational medium, suddenly we realized that all was not rosy in this dystopian place. Just as social media’s ability to overcome information asymmetry could help democratic protesters overthrow a repressive regime, so too could it bring together small pockets of hate into powerful fronts that could silence all other voices and flood the digital domain with horrific content and fraudulent falsehoods.

Our information scarcity of the past played a critical role in bringing us together as a society. Our local newspapers kept us rooted in our local communities, while our few national papers dictated the country’s daily discourse. The limited offerings of radio and then television ensured we experienced events together as a nation, rather than as millions of isolated siloes. Even our cultural touchpoints were often defined by what the media chose to emphasize.

In other words, scarcity kept us anchored as a society by unifying us in shared experiences and information access. We all saw the same things and were exposed to the same information and viewpoints. This necessarily meant that only the narratives and information conducive to unity around elite goals was permitted. In short, this unity of shared experience and narratives masked myriad societal divides.

The web abruptly ended this elite control, rushing information online and making it freely accessible globally. Most importantly, the web broke down the traditional geographic barriers to information access, ensuring governments were no longer free to constrain access to information that undermined their own authority or official narratives.

Though, as Google’s General Counsel David Drummond noted in 2013, “Governments have learned in what might be the steepest learning curve in history that they can shape this global phenomenon called the Internet and in ways that often go beyond what they can do in the physical world and they’re doing so at an alarming pace.”

The world of the past seemed so neat and orderly because we had access to only one side of every debate. Indeed, while today we think of news media as offering objective factual reporting, their pre-WWII existence was largely prefaced on telling us how to think about events, rather than providing us the facts for us to make up our own minds.

Suddenly, the web gave us access to the chaotic cacophony that is real life. We emerged from our information-sheltered lives in which gatekeepers carefully managed societal cohesion through information access. Suddenly we had access to everything, true and false and had the burden of sorting through it all placed onto us.

In other words, we speak of a “post-truth” world today, but for much of our history “truth” was merely the byproduct of enforced information scarcity. Our accepted truisms were often merely constructs of limited information carefully doled out by elite gatekeepers to enforce societal or economic order.

Elites themselves existed on pedestals they themselves could construct by constraining what was accessible about their pasts or even their presents. With the web, suddenly their entire history, good and bad, was accessible from birth, allowing us to see our leaders as the flawed humans they are and undermining their authority.

As my colleague Anthony Olcott charts in his 2012 book, there is no such thing as “truth,” merely an understanding of the world at the moment through available information and how we place that information into the service of our own ends and beliefs.

The concept of information literacy was never something our societies emphasized, since such literacy would risk the carefully gatekept informational worlds they had constructed. Instead, journalists were installed as gatekeepers to the world around us.

Journalism is struggling in our digital era in part because it is used to defining truth, not merely being one of the many participants struggling to be heard. Whereas once upon a time our local news outlet was our only lens onto events happening across the world, today we can directly access all of the conflicting and chaotic information emerging from the scene in realtime. We are able to pick apart news reports by identifying information that conflicts with their narratives but lack the information literacy and experience to sort fact from fiction in the way journalists are trained.

Most devastatingly to our gatekept world, social media has had the effect of humanizing our traditional gatekeepers. Government officials are seen to have ethical and financial conflicts, while journalists are seen to express strong commentary in their personal social accounts on the very topics they are expected to be dispassionate and uninvolved in, undermining their trusted neutrality. In an era of print and broadcast, media was local, whereas in the digital world we can turn to any source that agrees with our viewpoints.

The fact checking community reminds us again and again that the public merely wants to be told what to believe and are largely uninterested in the data and evidence that might help them decide for themselves.

Stepping back, we don’t live in a “post-truth” or “post-fact” world since there has never been “truth” or “facts.” We live in a post-enforced-consensus world in which increasing accessibility of information has enabled us to bypass our traditional gatekeepers and experience the world in its raw form. Rather than a “post-truth” era, we live in a post-elite era in which our access to information has allowed us to question our traditional narratives, for good and bad.

In essence, we’ve been cast from the orderly governed civilization of information scarcity into the vast unknown of infinite information access, without being equipped with the necessary survival skills like information literacy. Unaccustomed to having to decide what to believe, we are seeing the impacts of a society that lacks the basic information literacy skills to make sense of the raw firehose suddenly available to it.

With the rise of the web we are witnessing the cataclysmic breakdown of the absolute control of our traditional gatekeepers over our national narratives and the descent into chaos of our traditionally orderly informational ecosystem. As governments emerged to manage the anarchy and chaos of early society, so too has our digital universe begun to recoalesce towards control.

Social media companies are emerging as our new “governments,” exerting absolute control over our digital world, but these new digital dictatorships span national borders and are ruled by just a handful of Silicon Valley men fixated on profit over all else.

These new platforms are reestablishing our forced “trust” in information by once again reestablishing the role of gatekeeper in determining what we are permitted to see and say and silencing all dissent.

In testament to the power of information, these new governments are wielding their ever-growing power over human society not through physical force of arms but merely through absolute control over the flow of global information, much as all dictatorships have learned through history.

Putting this all together, to understand the path forward towards combatting misinformation, we must recognize that what we think of as “truth” was merely the byproduct of enforced information scarcity by our traditionally orderly information ecosystem ruled by gatekeepers that ensured political and economic stability through the creation of artificially limited information constructs designed to perpetuate the narratives of the state and business leaders. Our momentary experiment with informational anarchy has led to the reimposition of our gatekeepers, this time in the form of the digital dictatorships of social media companies.

Yet, these new dictatorships are already raising concerns over their ability to undermine democracy’s sacred ideal of a representative government and their placement of profit over the good of society.

In the end, in just three short decades, the web has taken us from governments as gatekeepers to absolute informational anarchy to a new era in which a handful of private companies act as gatekeepers to the world. Instead of once again ceding absolute control over the world’s information to a handful of digital dictatorships, perhaps the path forward is to create an information literate public that can tame the chaos on its own. Much as the advancement of science is based not on unquestioned “truth” but rather on momentary consensus based on currently available data that can be freely upended tomorrow, so too must society learn how to navigate the informational waters of our new era of abundance.