The day wildfires burned public libraries

- or the fall of the utopian information society.

9 min readDec 15, 2018

This dystopian view is also called post-truth. A world where some people can deny a sustained truth and at the same time, suffering in first person the effects of what they are rejecting. How do we arrive here? We can point to different reasons, from social to political, but the role of technology is evident. In the last 25 years, the Internet and technology have created tremendous advances in human communication, opening the doors to knowledge that was reserved before only for academics and democratizing information access. However, all these advances also produce an undesired side effect: the internet has been flip upside down trustworthy institutions like public libraries and news media and could be used to manipulate or distort our perception of what is truth and what is not.

Why is trust essential for our future?

Let’s start with a simple definition of trust:

Trust noun
\ˈtrəst \
1: assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something

Trust is the foundation of all human relationships. We trust in systems, institutions or persons. When we drive, our trust in the traffic light rules and driving signs in general, allow us to navigate from point A to point B without incidents most the time. The same happens with airplanes, as for non-technical people look almost impossible to explain how it can fly but still, our trust in the system make that we can sit inside of a metallic tube and flying for hours without panic.

Trust also had helped societies to grown from a hundred to millions, based on a collective belief of a better life. Also, the lack of trust in governments is the principal reason why thousands of people migrate from unstable countries to more prospers ones.

Why do we need to care about trust and truth and why they are so important? Because trust helps us to navigate reality and it is essential for our survival. In the WWII, history showed how the radicalism of the truth ended with millions of lives based on pseudo-science, political propaganda and a racist belief system. Unfortunately, we have seen the return of the radical tribals groups based on what they believe is the truth, and their conviction did not come from rigorous research in trustworthy information sources. It comes from what they have seen or read it on the Internet (Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Wikipedia).

http://chainsawsuit.com/comic/2014/09/16/on-research/

Pre-internet information society

For those who grew up without internet, email or smartphones, perhaps remember the fascination and almost venerable act to visit the public library. It was a sacred place, a temple of knowledge, with a strict conduct code and index cards. Some of the reasons we trust in the information from public libraries are:

Quality Control.
Updated content.
Quite and Safe place.
Meeting rooms.
Professionalism.
Public service.

Who pays for that? Taxes and donations.

The news media, on the other hand, depended on the trust network between readers, journalists, and clients to maintain the flow of press. We are talking about respected news institutions. Some of the reasons we trust in the information from media news are:

Rigorous Research
Editing Filters
Quality control
Journalism
Curated content

Who pays for that? Advertisers and readers. Also, we do not consume lousy press if we do not want it.

Interpretation: In the pre-internet era, content and information were controlled and curated by media companies, universities, and public institutions. Access to knowledge was limited to a few channels, creating a significant inequality in the distribution of information. That gives immense power to a few people. In another hand, the privacy of our data was not a problem because we do not have to provide our personal information to buy a newspaper, a book or enter the public library. Access to information was slow and required time and effort.

The internet: the information superhighway

In 1994 the internet started the path to become the next big thing, but nobody knows how could be monetized. The freedom to create content and the promise to access unlimited information sources made initial internet incredibly challenging to find anything and also produce the first online business model: search engines. AltaVista, Yahoo, Lycos, InfoSeek indexed web pages and presented a result page ready to be clicked. Advertisers start to see the value of clicks. By 1996, Yahoo had 183 links on their homepage, and sponsors pay millions for every single one. Then Google arrives with a simple homepage with two links and a better index algorithm, blow up all the competition and become an internet titan. Also, they were innovating in a new business model: With all free content, they collected users personal preferences and data to present better content and advertisers can know what or when to show some ads, to get more attention and clicks.

These had all the elements for a perfect information utopian society. Don’t be Evil was Google’ motto (4), The democratization of information access was a huge deal, free access to content: millions of hours of video, text, and audio. It was like rediscovery the Library of Alexandria collection and make it available 24/7/365. The level of excitement was real, the human could become a super intelligent species, self-educated, with unlimited wisdom and it could accelerate the progress of sciences and arts. That was right for some number of academics and scientists that already know how to extract information from data, but for the vast majority of people, the internet is only an infinite source of entertainment and distractions. For example, the most view internet video of all the time is not how to cure cancer and how to be a millionaire, is the music video “Despacito.” (9)

On top of this, the advent of social media unveils a scarier concern: the evidence that the social media business model is created with user’s emotional data and allowing advertisers to target people using that information. The problem begins, as Facebook ex-director Chamath Palihapitiya said, we have the idea that on the internet all content and services have to be free. However, if we do not pay anything we have to be open to the idea of maybe we are not the customer, and maybe we are part of the product itself. (5)

Interpretation: the current internet business model, as everything is free, has created the idea that it is okay that companies collect people data even if we do not trust them. Current Silicon Valley’s wealth is created by an advertisement machine that sells, to good and bad actors, direct access to people so they can influence or manipulate a broad audience using paid content. See more details about the internet advertisement machine in the book Chaos Monkeys by Antonio García Martínez (12)

We are hackable

What does it mean to hack a human being? It means to create a model or algorithm that can understand you better than you understand yourself. Therefore, can predict your choices, manipulate your desires, and make decisions on your behalf. (13)

When we think in a narcissist person, we often imagine someone with an exacerbated self-love and compulsive behaviors. That is correct for the toxic narcissist, but what we need to understand is we all have narcissist impulses, like many others human motives. Author Robert Greene extends this in his book The Laws of Human Nature (6). From the moment we are born, we have a constant need for attention, and that helps us to develop our self-esteem into a healthy level of narcissism in us, what is right to operate in the world. (6). The reality is, as human beings, we are not as advanced as we think we are, we have habits, repetitive patterns, and bias, and with enough data about our emotions and aspirations, companies and politics can influence and manipulate our decision and believes. (10)

The tremendous success of social media was something their creators never intent on the first place. They just wanted to connect their peers using technology. Computers had proved they are very efficient in processing vasts amount of data, but also have shown they are excellent to channel human necessary for connection and attention. This discovery has made the line between social media and the internet disappear. Based on attention, the current business model drives human interactions by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” Every business online has become or is the path to become a social media platform, including search engines and media news. This transformation also comes with a dark side: As Chamath Palihapitiya, ex-Facebook director, told an audience of students at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business: “we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. … The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no co-operation: misinformation, mistrust. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”(7)

However, is it not what advertisers or religions have been doing for years or centuries? Yes, but internet companies today have engineered ways to collect data and design apps that exploit human psychology weaknesses and trade that to advertisers. (8)

For Christianity took centuries to be the world’s largest religion, with an estimated 2.2 billion adherents, but for Facebook took only 14 years to have 2.27 billion monthly active users. It makes more likely that Mark Zuckerberg influence billions of lives that the pope.

After twenty-five years imagining a perfect information society, we have a rude awakening in an information dystopian reality.

Here some examples the state of affairs we have in 2018:

Companies like Cambridge Analytica was allowed to harvest and exploit Facebook data to influence elections around the globe.
Hostile governments are trying to influence local elections or change people believes.
The increase of fake news on sensitive issues like climate change, Guns control or Child vaccination.
The decrease of discussion or debates.
The wrong use of personal data by big internet companies.
Lack of regulations to protect user privacy.

How do we fix this?

Personal Level:

Building self-awareness. We are hackable animals. We can be persuaded by technology to change behaviors and beliefs. (11)
Constraining the time do we spend on social media and with our devices.
Paying for ads free products and services (i.e. medium.com).
Supporting newspapers and journalism. Every time a library or newspaper is closed, we are losing an independent source of information.
Developing new mental habits as meditation or read more books to manage the device dependency.
Using more apps to control others apps. (Productivity tools, internet blockers)
Developing a critical mental model and always verify with more that one source any suspect information.
Being open to discussion, especially with persons that do not agree with us.

Corporation Level:

Demanding free ads services, and more human technologies.
Asking for more transparency and accountability, especially with our data.
Creating awareness as a worker, promote conversation about ethical issues with current technologies.
Reducing or stopping the use of non-ethical apps.

Government Level:

Coordinate with others around data privacy and government regulation of social media platforms.
Asking political leather how they are planning to manage the current advertisement internet model and protect private citizen data.

We have to be optimistic, even in the current time, because companies have started to pay attention to this issues, and governments have to understand this is not a national problem, it will need global cooperation for a long-term solution. (11)

References:

(1) See how a warmer world primed California for large fires

(2) ‘Evolution didn’t work on truth, it worked on survival’: A psychologist explains why we cling to our belief, CBC The Current. Dec 4, 2018

(3) Alternative facts

(4) Don’t be evil

(5) Chamath Palihapitiya, Youtube Video min 2:50: You are not the customer, You are the product

(6) Robert Green, The Laws of Human Nature, Chapter 2. The Law of Narcissism.

(7) Chamath Palihapitiya, Former Facebook exec says social media is ripping apart society

(8) Sean Parker, Facebook founder warns of social media addiction

(9) 15 of the Most Viewed YouTube Videos of all Time

(10) Yuval Noah Harari and Tristan Harris interviewed by Wired

(11) Definition of trust