It seems like the way author uses them, propaganda, censorship and surveillance are just versions of propagation, filtering and signal acquistion with a corrupt intent attributed. They are just basic elements of any information processing system.
> Speakers and Audiences — a public — divided across independent networks, with access to different editorial selection, from different distribution networks, with access to different input message streams, are far less subject to propaganda, censorship, or surveillance. Epistemic diversity resists control.
One downside is if factions can’t reconcile their views we get into heavy information warfare between little echo chambers like we do today, and we haven’t seem the downstream consequences of this in full effect. The AIs of the “non-mainstream” information channels we use, twitter, youtube, facebook, reddit, instagram etc, are very good at diverisfying their information streams to micro-target individuals, but with absolutely the wrong objective function; to increase engagement, not to increase sensemaking. The result is more stratified cultural factions with little hope of reconciliation and conversation in between.
And for certain things, the reality has the monopoly we strive to converge to. Scientific process doesn’t necessarily reward diversity, but it reliably rewards relevance and approaching to reality. For matters like how covid spread, whether masks worked etc, we would have loved to subjected ourselves to the monopoly of what it really was in itself, but instead we made another information warfare out of it, heavily politicized every bit of data, causing tons of unnecessary human death suffering in between.
Therefore the problem is not the topology of the information network, but the incentive scheme driving the network. Today we all answer to the normativity of markets, not patriotism, not religion, not intellectual honesty, merely markets, so changing the shape of the network would achieve so little to change the downstream consequences.
> Speakers and Audiences — a public — divided across independent networks, with access to different editorial selection, from different distribution networks, with access to different input message streams, are far less subject to propaganda, censorship, or surveillance. Epistemic diversity resists control.
One downside is if factions can’t reconcile their views we get into heavy information warfare between little echo chambers like we do today, and we haven’t seem the downstream consequences of this in full effect. The AIs of the “non-mainstream” information channels we use, twitter, youtube, facebook, reddit, instagram etc, are very good at diverisfying their information streams to micro-target individuals, but with absolutely the wrong objective function; to increase engagement, not to increase sensemaking. The result is more stratified cultural factions with little hope of reconciliation and conversation in between.
And for certain things, the reality has the monopoly we strive to converge to. Scientific process doesn’t necessarily reward diversity, but it reliably rewards relevance and approaching to reality. For matters like how covid spread, whether masks worked etc, we would have loved to subjected ourselves to the monopoly of what it really was in itself, but instead we made another information warfare out of it, heavily politicized every bit of data, causing tons of unnecessary human death suffering in between.
Therefore the problem is not the topology of the information network, but the incentive scheme driving the network. Today we all answer to the normativity of markets, not patriotism, not religion, not intellectual honesty, merely markets, so changing the shape of the network would achieve so little to change the downstream consequences.