“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” – John Gilmore
We are prisoners of narrative. This is because we struggle to make sense of a world that seems too complex for our imaginations.
I have always been at war with complexity. Sometimes it is necessary, but that only occurs at the fringes of science. For most of us, the most important thing we can achieve is a clarity of vision. It is possible to oversimplify stories, but overly complex ones are vulnerable to manipulation by those who claim to understand them.
We need technology tools to carry us out of this trap. The Knowledge Navigator project is based on the naïve thought that we might learn to see better and what that would mean to human societies.
We yearn for an escape from this hall of mirrors. Popular entertainment has really explored this in recent years, most notably on two shows from Apple TV+: Severance and Silo.
A society of 10,000 people in Silo lives physically confined within an underground silo for an unknown reason. It is a fascinating exploration of what it takes to keep this kind of constrained reality under control.
The leadership of the Silo does this by controlling what the population sees. If you can’t see, you can’t construct narratives that make sense of what’s going on.
The brilliance of Hugh Howey’s story (he’s both author of the books and a producer on the show), comes from his exploration of this layered seeing. The reason it is so chilling is that it reflects how our own society controls what we see and tries to dictate narrative.
We don’t live in physical holes in the ground (at least not yet), but we do live in informational silos. Elites shape them by manipulating what we can and cannot see.
There are no monolithic Illuminati here, but there don’t have to be. There just has to be blindness and more sight. In the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king. The leader of the Silo in Howey’s book can control the Silo, not because he is omniscient, but because he knows more than everyone else.
Elites have controlled how we see the world since we organized into complex societies. I wrote about this almost 30 years ago when I was writing about nationalism and ethnonationalism. In my very first scholarly article, “What is Nationalism Really?” I discussed how elites shaped the character and direction of any national or belief-structured discourse.
Some ethnic communities are benign and some are aggressive and hostile. The stories we tell ourselves shape these realities. Our elites shape those stories by making sense of complexity through their manipulation of narrative.
Recently, political discourse in many countries has taken a dark turn. This reality is only possible because of the fictions that we allow ourselves to believe.
The Enlightenment and Scientific Method taught us to always question assumptions about the way the world worked. This questioning has always been difficult for humans.
It comes naturally to us to follow the dominant narratives we’ve encountered. When someone undermines those narratives, it can be profoundly disquieting.
Whoever has the power to define or manipulate those narratives has immense power over our societies. This makes them dangerous if left unchecked.
We can overcome irrational excesses if those narratives are characterized by questioning and rational inquiry. However, as a teacher, social scientist, and observer of politics, I know how poorly people understand the processes of rational inquiry introduced by Enlightenment thinking.
The power of the story concentrates power among those with the power to tell it. Money often accompanies the power to tell stories these days, but not invariably (it does offer an advantage, however).
Making sense of the information noise that confronts us every day has become an immense chore that sucks up far too much of our time. As a result, we are stuck in our individual silos, trying to make sense of it all.
I conceived of the Knowledge Navigator as a tool to put that power back into the hands of individuals. Perhaps I have too much faith in the power of individuals to discern rational patterns in information if they could but see them.
As a teacher, I’ve always seen that as our only hope. As an educator, I’ve long seen how the system itself is a narrative that works against this.
The technologist in me, however, is forever looking to technology as a way out of human limitations. We travel the world in our machines. We see it through our machines most of the time. I think we can apply the same to our thinking and our siloed narratives to feel our way out of our current dark narratives.
Severance takes siloed narratives to a whole new level. It posits a world where mind control allows us to be isolated from our consciousness. The company completely controls the narratives of severed workers while they are at work.
The show is an exploration of the power that emerges from this simple thought experiment. If you don’t know what’s going on for half your time, how do you know what’s going on for the rest of it?
This is Silo taken from a societal level to a personal one (although Silo does explore the personal level more thoroughly in books and perhaps in future seasons).
Severance takes Silo to its horrifying logical conclusion. It is a society of the blind. Unlike Silo, its Innies have no perception of the alternative world other than an awareness that it exists. Both shows are an active exploration of the power of controlling what people see and don’t see.
Technology provides us with an escape from our blindness. In the past, we had little choice but to believe what our elites told us. They controlled all but the most personal levers of information.
The internet changed this. In a 1993 article, John Gilmore, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, recognized this power over narrative when he said, “the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
There are other early internet documents such as the ClueTrain Manifesto that proclaim a vision of seeing incorporated into a decentralized thought network. This vision is still there, even if it is clouded by corporate social media and other narrative platforms.
The internet brought with it the potential of transparency. However, it did not solve the problem of elite manipulation of information. Information is not the problem now. Connected knowledge is the deficit we’re struggling with now. As long as we allow elites to make those connections for us, they will still control the narrative.
AI will provide us with a new way to map these connections and make connections as transparent as the internet made information. This is the vision behind the Knowledge Navigator.
The Knowledge Navigator would be a tool to harness the connective power of generative AI to see. I know we can build it. The question is whether people are willing to climb out of their silos and face a world where reality is not dictated to them. The question is not whether an AI connection tool can be built, but whether we are ready to see.
Empowering human agency is key to our future in a confusing and complex world. Without sight, agency is impossible. And in that world, we’re always going to be prisoners to circumstances dictated by those with power over our narratives.