The Politics, Economics, and Philosophy of Information

Martin Gurri and Hannah Arendt on Authority

 
Former CIA analyst Martin Gurri writes in Revolt of the Public (2018) that as sources of information multiply, the authority of any single source declines in authoritativeness:

In the age of social media, it’s not that news becomes “fake,” but that there are fewer barriers to entry in the “information space.” Information is no longer scarce. If authority is the market price where the supply of information meets the demand for it, the market is so saturated with information supply that the price is basically zero. The price of information is so low that our attention is now the thing in demand—media will pay us for our eyeballs (and re-sell them to advertisers). The constraint is no longer information, but attention. As the Silicon Valley adage goes, “If you are not paying for it, you are the product.”

Of course, the New York Times does retain an imprimatur of prestige that some random influencer on Instagram or Youtube lacks, but the value of that prestige matters far less. The internet has done to authoritativeness what Uber has done to taxis and AirBnBs to hotels. It has both capitalized on and exacerbated an environment of compromised trust. We now shop around for information and “takes” the way we do for a ride or a vacation rental. Like or dislike it, this is the situation.

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Πηγή:  whatiscalledthinking.substack.com