Bez Tytułu - Issue #234
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The Information War
Reading Time: 3 minutes
This idea has been running in my head for a while now, and finally got some time to write it down.
Have we come full circle in the relationship between information, access, and power?
Then You Couldn’t Read
Knowledge sat in a closed box. Only a few people had the key.
Most couldn’t read. Books were rare, expensive, copied by hand in monasteries that took months to make a single one.
The Church and a handful of rich men ran the whole show.
They decided what was true.
Everyone else nodded along, because nobody knew better.
Then You Could, But They Picked
Gutenberg showed up and the box got passed around.
Books got cheap. Pamphlets spread faster than the Church could burn them. Luther nailed his ideas to a door and within weeks the whole continent was arguing. Newspapers came first. Radio reached homes that never had a paper. TV took over the living rooms.
Now it was publishers, broadcasters, editors who owned the box.
They couldn’t stop you from knowing things, but they owned the printing presses, radio stations and TV shows. They decided what made the front page. What got 30 seconds on the evening news, and most importantly what stayed buried.
Now You Can Read Anything. You Don’t.
The last frontier was the internet, and in the last few years, AI.
Information is everywhere. It’s free.
AI can spit out a thousand articles before you finish your coffee.
Most of it is slop.
The box is wide open. The library of Alexandria fits in your pocket and it’s open 24/7.
You’d think this is the great equalizer.
The shift of power from few to masses.
It isn’t.
In the last 30 years we created almost all the information that’s ever existed.
Our brains consume more in a day than someone in the 15th century did in their entire life.
But attention is still limited. We have the same 24 hours as our predecessors.
Who Owns The Box Today?
So who wins?
The ones who control the flow. People who decide what shows up when you open your phone in the morning.
This is what Yanis Varoufakis calls techno-feudalism.
We log into their world, and following their rules.
Meta, Google, TikTok, X, Amazon.
We hand over our data, our time, our clicks. They make money from our attention.
We’re still the same peasants, with just a better lighting.
Their tools used to be scripture and printing presses.
Now they're code, data centers, and an endless flood of information and dopamine shots built to keep your thumb moving.
Same Game, New Rules
Old lords controlled meaning because most people couldn’t read,
New lords control flow because most people won’t as there’s simply to much to process.
That’s the loop.
The mechanism changed.
The outcome didn’t.
The tools to break out exist, and the opportunities have never been better.
You can learn anything, build anything, talk to anyone in the world.
And here's the uncomfortable part.
Most of us don’t.
So What
I don’t really have an answer.
Is it good? Is it bad? What can we do?
I can tell you what I’m doing.
Less doomscrolling. Trust people, not feeds. Do my research first, then talk or write.
All of it requires you to choose, instead of being chosen for.