Originally Published November 7, 2024

A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps, both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. – James Madison, 1820

There is a deep division in the United States and indeed throughout the world. This division is not delineated by ideology, but through our ability to make sense of information.

In a textual world, critically processing information requires complex and hard-won skills. You must be willing to pore over stacks of paper, both digital and physical. This takes time and constant attention, no matter how skilled you are at absorbing the information on the page.

Incoming streams of textual information still inundate those that don’t take the time to analyze information critically. Even if most of your consumption is through video or various forms of television, your information is a narrative constructed through or by text. Someone wrote the script. They control the narrative you are being fed.

More than anything else in the world, our ability to manufacture information products has exploded since the emergence of the digital world. Like every product, all this production has to go somewhere. We are suffering from an obesity epidemic of information.

It is just too much to process. Our bodies are shutting down. We shovel constantly just to get through the day, but it keeps coming. It’s mentally and socially exhausting.

That world has always been out there. The difference now is that we can see it and feel it to an extent impossible before.

The last time we experienced a narrative explosion of this type, we fell prey to demagogues. In the 1920s, radio exploded onto the scene. Like the newspaper, it was a storytelling device. Unlike the newspaper, it was far more accessible because you didn’t need it physically delivered to you and you didn’t have to be able to read.

Radio was also controllable because the technology necessary for broadcasting was big, expensive, and technologically complex. Narcissistic demagogues seized on this capability to seize the minds of vast numbers of people in a way impossible even a few decades before. If we were lucky, they were benign, like Franklin Roosevelt. If we weren’t, they were Hitler and Mussolini.

It’s no accident that during the Cold War, every time there was a coup, the first thing the insurgents seized was the radio or TV station. With that, they could try to control the narrative of what was happening.

With the digital revolution, suddenly everyone had a printing press, followed by everyone having a radio station, and then a TV station. But even here, there was a measure of control.

Those that had control over the means of distribution, social media companies from Google to Facebook to Twitter, could still influence the narrative behind the scenes through algorithms that controlled the flow of this vast trove of content, but the nature of this control was both more subtle and difficult.

As I discuss in Discovering Digital Humanity, a lot of good came from this explosion of content. Voices that were previously muted or unheard through the chokepoints of broadcast media, suddenly made themselves felt. We discovered our communities were far more diverse than we had previously imagined them to be.

However, even the good increased the cacophony of information coming at us. Most of this information was linear. Even a YouTube video has a linearity to it.

One innovation of TikTok is that it offers us a potential kaleidoscope of ideas in a nonlinear fashion. From a creator’s standpoint, at least, storytelling is short and unstructured. This comes through even though it they are manipulating it through an algorithm behind the scenes.

I am not a TikTok user (although many have urged me to become a creator) in part because I prefer to structure my narratives through the more traditional process of writing.

I am putting myself at a disadvantage because of this decision. My blogs fall into the maelstrom of information that is LinkedIn or the web (depending on where I post them). Few see them.

TikTok to the user, however, appears to offer an unstructured narrative environment unlike any other. It leans into the unexpected. This is also the way Twitter used to be.

We enjoy serendipity. Unfortunately, in an environment characterized by radical abundance, too much “serendipity” can easily become overwhelming too.

It’s easy to get tunnel vision as we struggle to make sense of the overwhelming flood of inputs. It is precisely this yearning that makes us so manipulable.

There is something profoundly unsettling about ambiguity. If someone comes along and convinces us they can make sense of it all, they have tremendous power over us.

But we don’t live in a mono-narrative world and that’s what makes it so threatening. Humans require information to survive. It is our evolutionary edge. We remember things and can make sense of things like no other species on the planet, but the other side of this is our struggle to define patterns.

It is because of our urge make sense of it all, that today’s most valuable commodity is structured narratives. The problem is that if we can’t make sense of the overwhelming flood information coming into our headspace, someone else will do it for us.

All around the world, we are seeing expressions of fear. It is not about competing narratives as much as it is about our inability to construct safe narratives.

The more information we get, the more we must filter out. We create systems to help regulate this, but even they are incapable of shifting fast enough to deal with the constant streams of conflicting information.

Our best defense against tyranny is a better set of information tools. When you are lost, the tool you need is a map. This is true whether you are a business trying to understand a complex world for competitive advantage, or an individual scared of the present and future.

We all survive on a little knowledge. There are a few who, through either training or skill, can step beyond that in to realize that our paradigms of knowledge are not absolute. Donella Meadows called this skill surfing paradigms.

The fundamental problem of our age is not the erosion of our societies. It is our societies’ inability to cope with a kaleidoscopic information environment using linear tools. If the world doesn’t make sense to you, someone else will step in and try to make sense of it for you. Now you have really lost control.

Most people are decent, and if we give them the right tools to feel safe, they will make the right decisions. If you think I am talking about the people that voted for Donald Trump this week, this is only partially true. The other side of the argument has yet to find a singular demagogue, but that doesn’t mean that it also doesn’t have its own holy narratives. This is an equal opportunity challenge.

If you threaten my dog, he will react in one of two ways. He might fight back, bark, or try to scare away a threat. However, my dog is equally likely, if not more so, to retreat and find a safe place to hide.

Humans hide in their narratives. If we are going to solve the problems of the world, we need to come out of our holes and look around.

Achieving narrative perspective will require a new way of looking at the world and new technological tools, which are just now beginning to emerge. At its core, this is the project I’m working on. If the events this week emphasized anything, it is the urgency of this task.