Ted Gioia calls it the “Information Crap-pocalypse”:
People keep telling me that we’re living on an Information Superhighway. But that’s not true.
The flow of information today is more like a river. A very polluted river.
Folks have been dumping their crap into our information flows for a long, long time. Big corporations and institutions are the worst offenders — they actually get rich by polluting our data streams. But individuals are adding to the raw sewage too.
Some of them do it just for kicks.
It’s gotten worse lately. A whole lot worse. Just look at the polluted streams of information in your own life, and try to find a single safe space where the data stream is fresh and clean.
Some of us have stopped even trying.
This is how the Information Age ends, and it’s happening right now.
In the last 12 months, the garbage infows into our culture have increased exponentially. As a result, nothing is harder to find now than actual information — which I define as “knowledge based on demonstrable or reliable facts”.
The result is a crisis of trust unlike anything seen before in modern history.
We are bypassing the Web 3.0 we were promised — which was supposed to deliver trust-based systems and validation tools. Instead we’ve gone straight to Web 4.0, which is like the worst kind of Wild West Web. Outlaws and desperados contol all the data highways and byways. Trust and reliability are scarcer than gold nuggets.
Do you think I’m exaggerating?
Let me ask you a question. If your job was to destroy access to reliable information in our society, how would you do it?
You would start with the 30 steps outlined below.
