Competing Knowledge
The internet is an exhausted subject. Everything about it has already been said, so any further discussion is just repeating what was previously stated elsewhere and often. No worries: I’ll never let redundancy stand in my way!
For those of us who lived in the pre-internet world, the adjustment to life since has been seamless. In some ways, it’s been gratifying to watch old paradigms gradually come apart and lose hold. Old familiar hierarchies that the internet has helped to flatten by amplifying dissenting voices often looked too comfortable and smug in their prior configuration. When the internet first came on the scene in the mid-1990s with the rollout of the World Wide Web, it was the object of fringe fascination in media reports. But no one had any true appreciation of how it would change the world in ways subtle and sublime.
The first tech bubble began building right from the start. It collapsed around 2000, when stock market investors lost oodles of money by betting on internet companies who did little more than register unique domain names, like the infamous Pets.com. The hand-wringing back then was that AOL and Yahoo! and Netscape would become unstoppable world-crushing monopolies without government intervention. Remember them? Never bet on the monopolists—unless government steps in to “fix” them.
The old hierarchies of the mainstream media, academia, government agencies: these each lost control of their narratives about how the world works, as Martin Gurri explained in The Revolt of the Public. Old power structures were challenged and undermined, even as they held onto the media access that gave them power to begin with. But their power of influence eroded, if not their monopoly access to the levers of power. A more uniform, unified narrative faded away as competing narratives rose up from the grassroots as evolving technology democratized media access.
Twentieth-century hierarchies gave way to a free-for-all, an all-out struggle of competing ideas, philosophies, and knowledge trying to establish a basis for authority. One early method was persuasion, which arguably didn’t last long. It turns out we don’t really respond to persuasion that much. We don’t reason our way into our beliefs as much as we rationalize having done so after the fact. We mainly stick to the familiar and what’s comfortable. Life is too short—the human day is too short—for having to reason our way through it from the pros and cons of getting out of bed in the morning. Taking cognitive shortcuts makes sense.
We could evaluate knowledge, but that’s too fraught. In the competition of ideas, it’s easier simply to banish ideas we reject, to rule them perpetually out of bounds and off limits, beyond what we’re willing to discuss. What is the point of discussion when our minds are made up?
What the situation demands, therefore, is monopoly. All the better if monopoly power looks like it tolerates alternatives while suppressing them subtly but effectively. Human competition eventually comes back to the animal need for hierarchy as a means of creating order.
This, then, would be an explanation for why our politics is so bitter: Whoever wins government control gets a chance to monopolize the official message, to become the arbiter of Truth. Control of government is the last chance of broadcasting authority, of holding the biggest megaphone, of drowning out alternative views.
At this stage in our social development, in our rich and successful democracy, the motivation for winning elections is to impose your narrative on everyone. Losing the reins of power is nearly the same as losing the ability to describe and define what is Truth. The struggle for hearts and minds has been forfeited, recognized as a non-starter. What matters is the ability to determine what those hearts and minds get to hear as the official narrative.
It makes it much easier to hear myself, more than anything else. I assume there is a volume difference, but I can’t discern how much is attributable to that sound hole.
Paul had received a large load of it from a friend of his. He told me it was wonderful to work with, and the sound is amazing. You mentioned how much sound your parlor produces - so does this guitar. Paul said it’s in the bracework inside. I love the guitar.