my House application free-for-all essay

This is the absurdly long (over 3000 word) essay I wrote for my House topical essay. If you guys could skim it over and offer commentary or criticism on it, I'd appreciate it, and I hope you find it "really really really interesting." Mind you, there are some unfinished sentences and such, which I'll smooth over later. Please, tear my ideas to pieces.

I also apologize for subjecting you to such a grossly long post.

Manifesto of an Informed Age

We live in what has been dubbed the “Information Age,” surrounded by media during virtually all our waking hours. Yet this Information Age has been one not of knowledge, but of trivia, an age in which meaning and reality have been obscured by image and artifice, an age of viewers and listeners and subscribers helpless against the torrent of stimuli washing in through the television and radio and newspaper. The citizen of the Information Age is adrift, passive and voiceless and drowning in useless information foisted by media barons and corporate conglomerates.

But there is an new alternative media, taking over where the mass media fears to tread.

The weblog is a medium of recent birth, allowing for any person or group to run a web page of news stories and commentary on the day’s events, or offer an online journal of personal reflections. Once an obscure underground form of media and current events commentary generally operated as a hobby by news junkies, the weblog has become a remarkably influential medium, with major news media and columnists responding to posts made by webloggers and politicians such as Howard Dean starting weblogs as a means of garnering support. Even the Democratic National Committee has begun a weblog, entitled Kicking Ass.

The concept of freely available information being distributed without checks or balances is directly antithetical to the corporate structures that dominate the music media industry, and the rapid uncontrolled spread of music downloading has terrified and angered the executives who lead the recording industry. The current lawsuits for copyright violations against individual users are a clear acknowledgement that peer-based file-sharing networks pose a threat that cannot be contained except by legal action – and yet file-sharing continues and evolves in form, extending to other media such as movies and changing in form as to be impossible to shut down.
Clearly, there some sort of change afoot, a major trend that more and more people are beginning to notice each day. The basic structures of modern societal discourse, in media, politics, and economics, are being transformed by the new information technology, in a way that emphasizes the active engagement of the individual. What is coming about is not a revolution in the way society works, but a fundamental evolution. We are seeing a transition from the passive Information Age, with the citizenry intellectually oppressed by modern, subtle propaganda, to an activist Informed Age, with the individual citizen fully established in and empowered by a transglobal network of information and communications.

structures of power, structures of deceit

It is undeniable that in the course of human history, great power has been wielded by a very few. The masses, the majority have ceded responsibility into the hands of a specific minority of influential leaders, whether self-appointed or given responsibility and power through a social contract.
The necessity of placing societal power and responsibility into the hands of a specific minority of leaders has been well discussed in studies of society and government, beginning with the classical Greek philosophies of government, such as Plato’s ideal Republic ruled by a philosopher-king, and evolving to the Lockean concept of the social contract that a government has with the people it serves. The people give up a certain degree of freedom to assure that vital needs are met and rights protected.
Even apart from ideal theories of government, power and influence have tended to be concentrated in the hands of a small majority. It is simply absurd to say that Joe Six-Pack from Minneapolis has the same ability to influence world events as do Dick Cheney or Bill Gates.
From where does this power emerge? Karl Marx attributed it to economic forces, and this has consistently been a popular argument for the source of power and influence: control over resources and production is control over the course of history. From this emerged Communism, advocating seizure of the means of production by the workers, and thence transferring power from the hands of a bourgeois elite to the true majority.
I don’t think it’s altogether presumptuous to claim that Communism in practice has consistently failed to fully achieve its noble ideals. Indeed, Communist revolutions have often devolved into brutal, miserable authoritarian regimes that once again concentrate power in the hands of a powerful few, which seems to be the very antithesis of what Communism stands for.

information capital

The source of power and influence comes not primarily from controlling economic systems, but in control of “information capital.” Information capital is somewhat of a misnomer, implying that power rests in holding facts almost quantitatively – that whoever knows the most bits of trivia is the most influential. Rather, information capital encompasses not only mere data, but structures and processes of knowledge – how to assimilate, analyze, manipulate, and present raw information.
Throughout history, those individuals and institutions who have been in positions of power or influence have been the best informed and with the greatest access to knowledge, as well as the most capable of manipulating, presenting, and controlling knowledge in order to maintain power. As such, leaders have sought to retain influence by controlling information capital, limiting its free flow between people.
Intimately connected to information capital is economic capital and economic power: the wealthiest and most influential in terms of immediately affecting the course of societal and political change (such as corporate executives and many politicians, but excluding such wealthy yet generally non-influential people such as actors and athletes) tend to be the ones with degrees from Harvard and Yale and Princeton and the London School of Economics. The great centers of learning in a consumer capitalist society have always charged a premium to gain access to the elite knowledge of academia, requiring a complex and expensive initiation for the exclusive information available in universities.
From the unequal distribution of information capital have emerged distinct power structures characterized by a very specific stratification: the hierarchy, the basic organizational layout of Western society today. Heading the hierarchical power structure is the small elite that controls information flow, and as we trace the structure of the hierarchy, the information capital held by each node shrinks even as the number of nodes increases.
From the basic hierarchical power structure emerge the institutions that have defined modern society: the corporation, the bureaucracy, and the nation-state, among others. These hierarchies have thus far effectively dominated societal discourse, using the established structures of power to maintain the disparity of information capital between the leaders and the citizen at the bottom of the hierarchy.
Propaganda is the ultimate expression of inequality in information capital: the knowledgeable elite utilizes manipulative techniques to present distorted and false knowledge to the uninformed, who, without information capital, lack the necessary critical methodology to effectively filter and analyze the pseudo-knowledge presented to them.
As such, it is clear that hierarchies are founded on a “need-to-know” basis, with the individual agent given only the minimum sufficient knowledge to complete assigned tasks. Indeed, excessive independence of lower-level agents in a hierarchical structure pose a direct threat to the integrity of the chain of command.

It is key to note that although means by which hierarchies operate have changed, the structural features of hierarchies have remained relatively constant since their first establishment. From this structural constancy emerges the major weakness of hierarchical control structures – their scalability is limited. By nature, hierarchies are inflexible, centralized systems that take time to adapt to changing circumstances – major systematic changes must be implemented at the highest level and filtered down through the command structure. Lower-level agents must have decisions checked by higher-level agents prior to execution. This is not a problem for small-scale hierarchies, which are a highly efficient system for management
But when a hierarchy grows to include millions, even billions of people, the inefficiency grows rapidly; the top-level executive agents simply cannot manage on such a vast scale and inter-level communications are not fast enough for

The hierarchy is a slowly dying institution.

evolution of a new structure

In the past, the hiearchy has always been able to maintain control over information capital by relying on certain ineffeciencies in the information infrastructure – the means by which information capital is produced, distributed, and collected. Th

it has been possible for hierarchies to use information infrastructure to further their own ends, as the information infrastructure was definable and mappable, with distinct nodes in which information capital was concentrated, in governments, corporations, universities and libraries. Communication systems were centralized and controllable, such as mail and telephones, and the media was passive and censorable, such as newspapers and the epitome of passive media, the television. This information infrastructure closely paralleled the hierarchies of power, forming the foundation of the hiearchical ideology in society.
But at the same time, the course of information infrastructure development was not under the direct control of hierarhical power structures. Knowledge, in itself, is a powerfully self-propagating entity – perhaps even independently of human will, if one suscribes to the controversial science of memetics. human tendency to create tools that facilitate the transfer of information. Language itself is one such tool; writing is another. Tools have evolved to promote the spread of information, with development of information technology such as the printing press, the radio, the television, and so forth. Paralleling this has been evolution in communications technology – postal services, telegraph, telephone. Thus far, these evolutions in information infrastructure have always been managable
Nevertheless, a clear trend can be seen in the course of history: information has been becoming increasingly democratized, in fits and spurts, over the millenia. Only comparatively recently, virtually all knowledge was held under the control of powerful ideological state apparatus – centralized religious institutions. Even the wealthiest and most powerful in political terms were often illiterate, allowing religious institutions to have enormous ideological influence over people and events. Information capital was heavily concentrated in organizations such as monasteries, and information infrastructure was poorly developed, with communication of knowledge a laborious and difficult task.
But with development of information technology such as the printing press, the monopolistic control over information capital was broken, and
the pace of this evolution has been rapidly increasing over the past few decades, and is approaching a critical evolutionary threshold for society.
information technology has evolved to a point where the convergence of knowledge and communications is producing a new unity of knowledge, one in which the collective information capital of citizens will achieve parity with the information capital held by traditional hierarchical structures such as nation-states and corporations
the emerging new information infrastructure is not one that is physical in the traditional sense, nor limited by the capacity of the single human mind to contain and communicate knowledge. It is one accessible instanteously furthermore, this unity of knowledge is emerging from an information infrastructure entirely different from traditional hieararchical control structures: a decentralized, interconnected, symmetrical web.
this evolution in information infrastructure is occurring independently of traditional concentrations of power itself, and rather than complementing hierarchical control structures, is beginning to produce societal structures directly opposed to hierarchical control structures. this is a fundamental, bottom-up shift in society that is beginning to undermine the foundations of hierarchies, and will eventually replace the outdated hierarchy with a societal structure at once ancient and wholly modern – the networked community .
the decentralized information infrastructure has already dramatically altered the dynamic of social movements. For example, the recent movement against the American invasion of Iraq was organized almost entirely through the Internet, with such incredibly disparate organizations such as neo-Stalinist groups and churches cooperating to mobilize the massive world protests on the eve of the conflict.
So-called “smart mobs”are another example of a decentralized information infrastructure’s power – using the short text-messaging service of cellular phones to rapidly organize and orchestrate groups for social action, often gathering dozens, even hundreds, within the space of a few minutes.
The Mexican indigenous people’s movement in Chiapas, the Zapatistas, also leveraged the power of a decentralized form of organization and the global decentralized information infrastructure – although not directly connected to the information infrastructure, they mobilized a powerful coalition of activist non-governmental organizations
netroots – the organization of sociopolitical movements through information technology
- howard dean meetups
- draft clark
this ability of decentralized information infrastructure to produce change has already been referred to by RAND analysts as “social netwar”

the open-source society
The implications of information infrastructure change on so great a scale are staggering. It will see the end of such vast monolithic opressive hierarchies as multinational corporations and nation-states, bringing about a new and equal global community that is as close to the ideal of a particiaptory democracy as is possible in in a world of six billion.
Yet at the same time, this new society will not be a democracy in the classical sense of the word – it would be more apt to describe it as an “open-source society.”
The concept of open-source comes from the world of computer programming, in which computer programs are constructed by writing code, which determines the tasks that a given program carries out according to user input. The source code refers to the often-lengthy code document that ,when appropriately translator by a compiler, becomes a self-running program.
Typically, the source code for a program is a well-guarded secret, as any self-respecting programmer could use the source to compile his or her own version of the program, or integrate the source code into another project. The concept of open-source turns this secrecy on its head – rather than keeping the source a protected secret known only to the individual programmers working on a project, the source code is made freely available via the Internet, downloadable, compilable, and changable by anyone who cares to do so. Any programmer can release his or her own version of an open-source program, or use the source code in other projects.
The most famous open-source project to date has been the operating system Linux, which is an open-source variant of the older operating system Unix. There are hundreds of versions of Linux available for a wide variety of computers; a version of Linux has been been made for Apple’s iPod MP3 music players. Linux is widely recognized as a fast, stable, and secure operating system for computers, and even many corporations have switched to Linux for running network servers and other such critical applications.
Linux finds its particular strength in its open-source availability – the collaborative work of hundreds of thousands of programmers have created a uniquely flexible and capable operating system that is becoming a fast-growing standard for information technology applications. This stands in direct contrast to Microsoft’s Windows operating system, which dominates by controlling over 90% of the market. Microsoft has been famously secretive about revealing the programming details of its operating system, as any follower of the antitrust suits is aware, and Windows is quite possibly the most-attacked operating system available, constantly infected by viruses and exploited for its security holes by malicious hackers. Even government agencies have been virtually shut down by viral attacks such as the recent W32.Blaster worm – to the point where the State Department was unable to issue visas, and airports were closed because air-traffic control computers were under attack.
The same ideals of collaborative progress that drive the open-source movement in programming are the ones that are driving the emerging open-source society. This global community of the future will be one in which all members are informed and empowered citizens, constantly aware and critical. The strength of this new decentralized society is found in interlinked diversity and even disagreement, evolving through active dialogue, rather than demanding ideological conformity as in authoritarian hierarchies. Every member will be able to contribute to the construction of a better, more socially and ecologically responsible society aware of its evolution.

junk DNA
A common criticism of the decentralized, open-source concept of society is that the Internet is “90% garbage” – and as such, it is a disorganized, clumsy, and unruly mess that is ultimately insignificant in its impact on society. This is a patently false assertion that ignores the power and efficiency that decentralized networks have already shown in the real world. For unlike hierarchies with their highly limited scalability, decentralized networks gain effeciency as size increases, and become highly inefficient on a small scale – witness the directionlessness of a classroom without a teacher in the average high school.
The efficiency of large-scale decentralized networks for data processing has lready been proven in use of enormous “supercomputing clusters,” in which large numbers (from tens to thousands) of ordinary desktop PCs, even outdated models, are interconnected to form a massively parallel-processing supercomputer capable of completing immense calculations far faster than the single-unit supercomputers of the 1970s and 1980s. This has been further expanded online in vast “distributed computing” projects such as SETI@home and Folding@home – the first aiming to search interstellar radio signals for signs of extraterrestrial life, and the latter a project of the National Institutes of Health examining the complex chemical problem of protein folding. These distributed computing projects send raw data out over the Internet to be processed on computers at homes and offices, and thens returns the processed data to the institution. Already an impressive degree of progress has been made thanks to the efforts of hundreds of thousands of volunteers donating extra computing cycles.
The same principles of decentralization and interconnection hold true in biology – the evolution of ecosystems has not been controlled by some central commanding figure, but has come about through cooperation and competition of a diverse array of species within a system to form a dynamiclly adapting network. This also applies on even the genetic level – genes themselves have cooperated and coevolved to form today’s lifeforms. This is where the “90% garbage” argument can be fully refuted – a large portion of the genome contributes little to the upkeep of an organism, instead consisting of so-called “selfish” genes that seem to serve little purpose in the grand scheme of an lifeform. In any sufficiently complex evolving system, there will also be a large amount of material that does not directly contribute to the system itself, but is a necessary byproduct of the evolutionary process. As such, useless, false, and even malicious information on the Internet is to be expected, and does not constitute a major hole in this argument.

what the future holds
The opening of this essay mentioned the online medium of weblogs, and their growing influence in societal discourse and as an alternative to the mass media of the Information Age. Intriguingly, science fiction writer Orson Scott Card anticipated the weblog in his novel Ender’s Game – and in this novel, two extraordinarily gifted teenage siblings used their own weblogs to provoke online dissent, and through this were able to topple a world government.
This will be the power of the informed citizen in the new interconnected society – to change the world through expression of a single idea.