"The age of disinformation" is the crucial fulcrum on which the entire premise rests. There is not more disinformation today than there was in days past. In fact, it is easier to check and see if something is true (not using self professed fact checkers and the priesthood of truth and fact, but by looking around and using your mental faculties) than it was when I was a teenager.
How many of you are old enough to remember bullshit like "if you ask a cop if they're a cop they have to tell you" or "you heard about the kid who's intestines got sucked out of his butthole in a swimming pool"? I remember people telling you things and you just went with it. It used to be very easy to lie. People made stuff up all the time, and said things that someone else made up that they believed.
To use the European context and Nazi Germany example, there is a big difference between then and now. That time was very much like my adolescence was with regard to access to information. Disinformation can spread wildly in an environment where people cannot verify it.
Currently, I could probably unilaterally get the equivalent of a university education in any field for free if I were so inclined, just by searching around on the internet. We do not live in an age of disinformation, we live in an age of unbelievable information availability, power structures and hierarchies once existed to enable the dissemination of information, and the ones that currently exist are beginning to show their cracks, simply because information can be effortlessly obtained at miniscule cost. I honestly believe we are living through social upheaval as a direct result of this revolution, and we haven't even seen the beginning. Making the majority literate was very, very hard. Making the next few generations well educated is something so easy it is probably best to just let people do it for themselves. I truly believe we will not need formal education within 100 years, people will just want to learn things and learn them at a whim.
I don't usually like to attribute motive, but I find it suspicious that it is the very institutions and organizations hammering away at this premise that stand to lose the most from this information revolution we are beginning to undergo. It is very convenient when the old entities with a grip on what people know and don't know happen to be the ones telling you not to trust your own judgment and defer to their own.
How many of you are old enough to remember bullshit like ... "you heard about the kid who's intestines got sucked out of his butthole in a swimming pool"?
How many of you are old enough to remember bullshit like "if you ask a cop if they're a cop they have to tell you" or "you heard about the kid who's intestines got sucked out of his butthole in a swimming pool"? I remember people telling you things and you just went with it. It used to be very easy to lie. People made stuff up all the time, and said things that someone else made up that they believed.
To use the European context and Nazi Germany example, there is a big difference between then and now. That time was very much like my adolescence was with regard to access to information. Disinformation can spread wildly in an environment where people cannot verify it.
Currently, I could probably unilaterally get the equivalent of a university education in any field for free if I were so inclined, just by searching around on the internet. We do not live in an age of disinformation, we live in an age of unbelievable information availability, power structures and hierarchies once existed to enable the dissemination of information, and the ones that currently exist are beginning to show their cracks, simply because information can be effortlessly obtained at miniscule cost. I honestly believe we are living through social upheaval as a direct result of this revolution, and we haven't even seen the beginning. Making the majority literate was very, very hard. Making the next few generations well educated is something so easy it is probably best to just let people do it for themselves. I truly believe we will not need formal education within 100 years, people will just want to learn things and learn them at a whim.
I don't usually like to attribute motive, but I find it suspicious that it is the very institutions and organizations hammering away at this premise that stand to lose the most from this information revolution we are beginning to undergo. It is very convenient when the old entities with a grip on what people know and don't know happen to be the ones telling you not to trust your own judgment and defer to their own.