I’m going to tell you a lie, but lead you there along a path of many truths. The destination of this journey is of dubious repute, but all the waypoints are honest establishments. I’m going to present a thesis about why we are drowning in disinformation. I hope you’ll reject the final allegation as being implausible, but that you’ll leave with some tiny intellectual souvenirs from the trip.
We’ll traverse an arc of two centuries of thought about power and access to information.
Pigeons of war
Imagine yourself as a pigeon in flight, peering down on the European landscape in the early 19th century. Sometimes terracotta rooftops, sometimes rolling golden fields, sometimes abysmally deep green forest. This sight is a rare privelege then: few inhabitants can picture the world they live in. Few have access to maps to peruse by the light of their candles. And they are inhabitants: not yet quite citizens. Not in the sense that we understand citizenship today, as an inalienable access to a set of state-provided privileges.
It looks like it’s summer. Somewhere down there, Beethoven must be busy incorporating themes from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons into his Pastoral Symphony, wandering the countryside deep in thought. Napoleon is re-shaping the political thinking of the continent. George III is king in England, Jefferson is head of state in the US, and in Australia, John Macarthur is getting Australia ready to make its fortune off the sheep’s back.
The global leader in information technology is Nathan Rothschild. One of five brothers in the second generation of the Rothschild family, and for a time the wealthiest person in the world. The Rothschilds elevated themselves to become almost a de facto royal house in Europe, with clever financial positions across Europe. One factor in their success is their communication network. And this is the reason that you’re flying across the European landscape as a pigeon.
Fanciful as it sounds now, one component of communication was the pigeon post. Not just for the Rothschilds, but generally for the aristocracy. And for senior military officers, who dispatched messages from battlefields via war pigeons. Nobody is quite sure how homing pigeons work. Perhaps they use cryptochromse that let them literally see magnetic fields. But we do know they can return to base from anywhere in their range, and they can do so carrying a note bound to their leg. And even compared to a well-run stagecoach service, they can get there quickly. Then, as now, information was power. Accessing information quickly and accurately was essential, and pigeons were a useful tool for the job.
Notably, as with maps, pigeons were not accessible to all. They were a powerful communication tool for the wealthy.
Now, the importance of the pigeon to the Rothschilds has been overblown in mythology. They also had an extensive terrestrial network which did most of their communication legwork. But I’ve introduced the pigeon, because there’s something interesting about it that I’ll return to. For now, just hold the image of the pigeon in mind, as an emissary for an important concept: access to information is power. To access information, we need tools. And those tools are not necessarily available to everyone.
Addresses
A pigeon is a kind of address. That’s a weird thought, isn’t it? Normally we’d think of an address as the street address of a building. Maybe a home. Maybe a business. Maybe a terracotta tiled villa in southern Europe. Maybe a tin roofed shearing shed back of Bourke in Australia.
An address is a label, or a reference, that uniquely identifies something. That something could be a building. In fact, it could be a location of any kind. A weather station. A lighthouse. A point, described with latitude and longitude, in the middle of a salt lake, where there’s so little to see in any direction that you can go mad for lack of visual stimulation.
Unique means that the address will give you exactly the thing you want. You won’t follow an address to Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse and turn up to find twenty of them. There’s just one. Otherwise you don’t have an address; you have a caboodle, which in today’s debased language we call a cluster…
But you can also have an address to something much more abstract. A reference to a formula for predicting the trajectory of a cannonball, for example. By naming something an “equation of ballistics” you can retrieve it from your mind, or the mind of someone else. That’s a reference Napoleon would definitely have had in his address book, because being able to call up accurate artillery fire was a critically important trick for him. Or you could have an address for a person: their name. If you can uniquely name a person - Nathan Rothschild - you have an address for the concept of that person, and all the information about them that’s available when you tug on that thread. You could call a person to you by name, or send something to them, again by name.
Perhaps this description of addresses sounds a bit out there. I just want to seed your mind with the idea that an address can be something very general, and very powerful. Later, I’ll give some examples of the power of addressing that melt my brain.
Something is missing, though, isn’t it? An address is useless on its own, isn’t it? Completely, utterly useless. It’s only useful if we have a system for resolving it - for materialising the thing that we’re naming. A system taking for taking a label, a reference, a name, an incantation in our mind and turning it into the real thing that’s represented by that label. That’s a genuine magic spell: say the right words in the right way, and you can create something out of thin air.
A postal address is useful when you have a postal system. A pigeon is useful when you have somebody waiting at home, ready to receive and act on the message you’ve attached to the pigeon’s leg. A person’s name is useful within a network of people who know that person.
An address on its own is worthless. It transforms into something magical when we have a system to resolve it.
There are a few more characteristics of addresses that I’d like to discuss - in particular, I promised to say something about pigeons, and to contrast them with other kinds of addresses. But right now, let’s skip forward just a few decades and think about a system that you’ll recall if you ever went to school.
Back to school
We left off at the beginning of the 19th century. Jump forward several decades, to 1876, an important year in the life of Melvil Dewey. The year when he published the system that made him famous. Dewey was a dismal human being by today’s standards. A committed racist and sexual pest, even in the different times in which he lived, he was widely regarded as a prick. It just goes to show that being a scoundrel is no impediment to becoming famous, because Dewey is everywhere. It was Dewey who stared at you from the spine of every book in the school library.
Heir to some of Sir Francis Bacon’s thinking about how to organise knowledge and information, he was also a precursor to today’s universal access to information over the internet. He created the Dewey Decimal Classification, which allows you to walk into virtually any library in the western world and find a book on a topic of your choice. Lost in any foreign city, you might not be able to find your way around town. You might not even be able to speak the language. You’re unlikely to appreciate the subtleties of local social customs. But you’d be able to find a book in the library with little trouble.
Dewey’s system, perhaps subconsciously in line with his beliefs about society, stratifies knowledge. It’s the system that separates the arts and science students to different floors of the university library, because it categorises knowledge according to field.
I sometimes wonder if this universal separation of fields of information in our primary information stores was an impediment to important mashups between fields.
Regardless, Dewey’s system made knowledge accessible with nothing more than an address. Libraries worldwide adopted the system - implemented the address resolution system - and gave people everywhere quick access to an incredible amount of knowledge. Organising knowledge was not a new idea, but this was a step forward in efficiency that democratised access. An important stepping stone on the pathway to powerful addressing.
More about addresses
I promised to say something more about pigeons. It’s this: not all addresses are equal.
Some addresses contain hidden directions about how to find them. A postal address, for example, gives you clues from anywhere in the world: first you find the country, then the state, the town, the suburb, the street and then the number. Your telephone number gives similar hints, with a country code, area code, and hidden within the number itself is more information about where to find the phone being called. Even people’s names historically embedded such information: an occupation, town of origin or a patronymic indicating heritage.
This is routing information. Instructions about how to get there, from wherever you are. We travel to the outer layer specified in the address: for example, the country on an addressed letter. Inside the country, the country context is implied, and we don’t need it to route a letter within the country. We can then hunt down the state, and then throw away the information about the state. It’s like going to a sauna: the closer we get to where we’re going, and the more we can expect people to understand what we’re doing, the less clothing we need to wear.
Other addresses are simply a label, with no route described. A pigeon is such an address. Each homing pigeon is a direct reference to its home, with no information about how the pigeon is to find that home (as mentioned, nobody is fully sure how pigeons work - it’s possible they can follow odor gradients). Or there are unique names for things which all of us just understand. Google. Guava. Greece. None of these names embeds routing information, but gives us easy access to the relevant concept.
These days we can go even further. We don’t even need to name the object of our desire: we simply need to describe it, and we can be taken there. We can tell our real estate app that we want a three bedroom home in Thirlmere, and ask the app to give us directions to it. We never even need to know the exact address. Or we could describe our dream job and ask an app to find it and give us directions to an interview.
Underpinning each kind of address is a sophisticated system: perhaps the postal system, perhaps the mysterious capabilities of the homing pigeon, perhaps a system for organising books or other information for efficient retrieval. But there’s always a system which gives us the illusion that the things we have an our address book are at our fingertips.
The internet is the most astounding illusion of this kind to date.
Internet
Digital technology has radically multiplied the number of things that have addresses, and the number of people who can find things with those addresses.
We’re all familiar with the idea of a web address. Perhaps we don’t think very deeply about it. Hidden in that address, though, is the ability to find a computer anywhere on earth, and then find a very particular piece of information amongst the haystack stored on that computer. Compare this to the Rothschild’s communication system, discussed at the start of the story. It gave access to five things: the five Rothschild brothers, distributed around Europe. These days, we can access, with clinical precision, an overwhelming number of things. Rule 34, which jokes that internet pornography exists on every conceivable topic, illustrates the mind-bending fractal nature of this power: not only can we find anything we can imagine online, but there’s an additional shadow representation of it as well. A kaleidoscopic cascade of depictions of anything we can name, each with its own address.
But that’s not all.
We can also dial up any human being on earth. We can call any one of billions of people, and if we’re a smooth enough talker, be able see the inside of their dining room, their kitchen, their place of work. And if we’re willing to work at having a conversation, we can see the inside of their mind.
We can order any manufactured item, from any warehouse bay on earth. Or maybe it’s not even sitting in a warehouse - maybe it will be 3D printed or manufactured on demand. In that case, the item is again retrieved from some ethereal world of the imagination, made real and then posted to us (only by pigeon if it’s tiny).
Stop and think about this. If you know the right numbers and letters to incant (a web address, an object name, a credit card number), you can will an object into your presence. If that’s not a magic spell, I don’t know what is. And unlike in the year 1809, the spells are now available to virtually all of us, in virtually the same form. Remarkable.
But is everybody comfortable with how level this playing field has become?
Disinformation
Let’s reflect on the journey so far.
We’ve travelled from early modern Europe, where timely access to information was restricted to the aristocracy, the widespread presence of the printing press notwithstanding. We’ve arrived at the present day, where everybody and everything is easily reachable by almost anyone.
Yet we still have a modern aristocracy with an ancient desire to stand at the top of the hill and look down. The modern aristocracy don’t command armies, but they do command corporations. An argument could be made that they would prefer there to be a gradient of accessibility to information. There’s no hill to stand atop without a gradient. They don’t want everyone to know as much as they know.
A dilemma. Universal access to information, but they want to create a gradient of accessibility, to preserve a social gradient of nobility. What to do?
They can’t suddenly revoke all the addresses linking everybody to the power of information. There’d be a revolt. But what they can do is pollute the river of information with tiny particles of negative information. Disinformation. So that all those downstream are choking on a filthy mix of corrosive ideas. Like every dealer in the supply chain for cocaine cutting their product with boric acid until the end user ends up with nothing but cockroach poison, they can adulterate the flow of information so that social media users end up drinking sewage. They can’t stop the flow, but they can make it bilious enough that people can’t consume it safely.
This, possibly, is what we might see if we investigated: 21st century information industrialists, pouring waste into our rivers of information. Maybe this is where disinformation is flowing from.
In truth, I don’t want you to swallow this crazy conspiracy theory. I’ve created it as a mnemonic hook on which you can hang the much more important idea: addresses are incredible, and only growing more so over time. We can’t control what rubbish gets dumped in the internet wasteland, but what is within our control is cultivation of a useful and healthy book of addresses - our links to people, and to ideas that strengthen and comfort us. There’s an incredible amount of stuff at our fingertips. We just need to practise flying straight home to the good stuff.