#clay johnson

This is a dark side of transparency. Today, it’s a tool used as much by the corrupt and dishonest as it is by those who are actually honest. It’s used as an illusion to give the appearance of honesty without the intent of being honest. You can simply claim to be transparent, and create a halo of honesty about you, without actually being honest. Two factors empower this dark side of transparency. […] The first is our deluge of information and facts disguised as entertainment. Even the most open and transparent systems must compete with buckets of information that are more interesting. The second is our poor information diets - that we choose information we want to hear over information that reveals the truth makes the competition all the more difficult. Whether it is the press, the government, or businesses, without conscious and deliberate consumption, transparency does more harm that good. While it can be used as a means of disinfecting a system, transparency can also be used by the corrupt to create a false association with integrity and honesty.

It’s difficult to tell if you are suffering from information obesity or have poor information consumption habits. It’s impossible to know if you’re ignorant and as we’ve learned, even if confronted with our own ignorance, it’s likely only to make us run out and consume more misinformation in order to avoid being wrong. Socrates’ view on this was simple: just accept your own ignorance as the only thing to be certain about. This view is important to keep in mind, and a healthy foundation for an information diet.

The truth is, they’re both right, and pinpoint our new kind of ignorance: one that comes from the consumption of information, not the lack of it. The new ignorance has three flavours - all of which lead us to information obesity: agnotology, epistemic closure, and filter failure. He [Robert Proctor] defines agnotology as the study of culturally induced doubt, particularly through the production of seemingly factual data. It’s a modern form of manufactured ignorance.    Agnotological ignorance does not affect those who don’t tune in. It affects those who do. […] The more informed someone is, the more hardened their beliefs become; whether they’re correct is an entirely different matter. […] Climate change is the perfect example of epistemic closure: science is liberal; climate change is from science; thus climate change is a liberal conspiracy. Every news outlet that reports on it must also be corrupted by liberal influence, and thus can be dismissed. […] Epistemic closure is a tool that empowers agnotological ignorance. As certain information is produced, all other sources of information are dismissed as unreliable or worse, conspiratorial. […] Pariser’s filter bubble existed long before the invention of personalised technologies. We started doing it ourselves when we started forming societies and developing our own personal networks […] What is new is automatic personalisation as a way of coping with surplus information, and the fact that those choices we’re making are having more immediate, more transparent consequences. Personalisation is just a mirror that reflects our behaviour back to us, and while some might argue that the best way to make our reflections look better is to change the shape of the mirror, the fairest way to do it is to change what it’s reflecting. We build filters around us with every friend we make, and every time we click. Without careful consideration, we risk throwing ourselves into more agnotological bubbles, and drifting farther away from reality.