Welcome to my book project. This abstract will give you a sense of where the projects is headed. In the coming months I plan to publish my book here in serial form, approximately one chapter per month. Please read, subscribe, enjoy, share, and send me your feedback!
Abstract
In our lives, a small set of risks could fundamentally transform human civilization. Among them are climate change and thermonuclear war. This book presents information integrity as another disruption risk.
American society and the democracy supporting it is predicated on the ability of citizens to make useful, rational decisions on issues of public import. Rational decisions depend on information, so information integrity is integral to this society. Information integrity is under attack. This battle is conspicuous in online media, but if we are blinded by the spectacle of new technology, our techno-reactionary tendencies may prevent us from recognizing a more pervasive challenge.
History documents the mechanics of information integrity through the people and technology that transformed it. While this book may not correct the obscurity of heroic and innovative librarians, their tribulations expose a pattern of new technology exploited by creators and destroyers of information integrity. The first technology was language itself, first oral then written, with early works supporting religious movements that inspire violent conflict to this day. Religion drove information innovation into the European Renaissance, with technology from Johannes Gutenberg complemented by the ideological upheaval of Martin Luther. Their work spurred an era of artisanal publishing, enabling the information context for modern science, industrialization, and democracy in the European Enlightenment.
In America, democracy replaced theocracy, and capitalism replaced religion. Newsprint made giants of Hearst and Pulitzer, but they were ultimately bettered by Adolph Ochs, who demonstrated through the New York Times that integrity can prevail over populist appeal. Examples from Europe show this pattern is not inevitable. Benito Mussolini used his control of Italian newsprint to demonstrate the dark potential of populism. He was followed by an admiring Adolf Hitler, who used radio as a tool to drive Germany into World War II. Meanwhile, Forester, Huxley, Borges and Orwell imagined the dangers of information and technology dysfunction in their fiction.
The history of information integrity is a repeating pattern of innovation and disruption. In our era, technologists like Tim Berners-Lee and Larry Page drove the digital transformation, but their story is incomplete without acknowledging the challenges exemplified by Valery Gerasimov, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. These historical episodes expose essential patterns and principles of information integrity. Prominent among these principles is publisher accountability as a requirement for information integrity in our time. How will this episode end? If we renew the information integrity that enabled modern democracy, we may perpetuate the illusion, enjoyed by many, that democracy is inevitable. If information integrity fails, something other than the democracy we know may be custodian of our written history. From a historical perspective, that would be normal. Democracy is not inevitable. It’s an aberration on the time scale of human civilization. And the next move is ours.