free knowledge vs. the intellectual trust
Most of us have love for this internet, but as a model for the pursuit of “free knowledge,” I must contest. The notion of a mass (or “open”) information consensus generator is not tantamount to “free knowledge,” as it says on the wikipedia homepage today. You do not need wikipedia, an internet connection or even property to pursue or express “free knowledge.” What we talk about when we talk about net neutrality is preserving our current intellectual trust, an open resource which, at this point, attaches some of us to our practices and most of us to what we deem valuable, but values change quickly. More quickly now than ever. What are we doing to anticipate those changes?
Consensus is possible because we can place our faith in the specialists around us, which may include ourselves (researchers, observers, cooks, so on). When we no longer trust the specialists or ourselves we can go above to the sources of those educations and put our trust in those things or add criticism and the consensus can be maintained. To attempt a deeper read than consensus falls beyond the boundaries of the current intellectual trust. The internet is an expensive, technocratic expedition into known space [note]. It is a system that augments, not allows for, the human “free knowledge” capacity by enforcing linguistic ‘givens’ so that we don’t need to question the relevancy of certain things for expediency’s sake. For example, when confronted with the feeling that one’s job generates misery for the self and the other, one can take that situation and report it with the intention of increasing the good humour of others. As we know these good vibes will come back to us amplified a great deal, we will see our own pain and our own desire return with a resounding “LIKE.”
So here is an illustration of the surface of the thing; how the open information consensus resource can interfere cooperatively with the idea of a task-at-hand, not lead us to overthrow the need for the task itself in our own lives; how it is a reflection of my expressed self-image and less a manifestation of a desire for actual change; it is a joke.
Wikipedia is an internet organ created to convert information into commodity within the body of the reality it claims to foster, like HAL 9000 in 2001. The directive of HAL in our case is facilitated by those who control the flow of information and how that information is to be presented to us. The internet is one form of possible consensus management. Like HAL, the management purports to contain within it the necessary items for advancement and social stability and prosperity, and so here we see on the list of necessary items for future society it has placed itself.
No doubt it is important to maintain discourse on the internet. No doubt it is important to use this thing as a means of organization, for a dance troupe must observe itself in motion many times before it executes the performance. But let’s not begin to believe that the thing itself is revolution. The expression of free knowledge is revolution. That happens outside of the consensus. By its nature internet is media and subject to coercive radiation. I suggest that it is a good tool right now, and that I wish I was part of more discussions surrounding better, simpler tools more fitted for liberty of thought and action. I wish I wasn’t drawn into conversations about how to save this particular system. I would rather replace it. Jan. 18th, 2012
[note: what is “known” vs. “unknown” here? I’m talking about the stuff we’ve mined from experience and made physical for checking and double-checking. I’d like to point out also that words like “overthrow” and “revolt” represent only the possibility for serious discourse, and as individuals who have been paying providers for this service for years we are only now coming upon the appropriate language for those discourses today and are discovering that the medium designed to contain us is being used to prevent its overthrow. This experience we all have here is traffic’d. So when I say linguistic givens I guess I’m lazily referring to the vernacular of the pharaoh, where the roles of starving student in forever-debt and well-intentioned protester waiting for the sky to clear are quick, easy and comfortable while the role of the mystic or the revolutionary still seems beyond what’s possible for most internet users, myself included.]
