Election special: Revisting Cass Sunstein’s INFOTOPIA

How valid and informed is your knowledge on a given subject of choice? Say justice, law or the running of a country? Or something less complicated, like who will be the next PM and should we go to Mars or stop first climate change? Are you an expert in any or a non-expert with some knowledge of many?

Infotopia proposes: if you are an expert, your expertise is less informed than the aggregate knowledge of a large number of non-experts – think focus group versus the expert. The exception which proves the rule is: if the non-experts polled are ignorant of the subject, their aggregate evaluation would be wrong to the power of their ignorance – think Galileo versus the church saying the Earth is flat. In a nutshell, when it comes to solutions, the diluted knowledge spread around many may go a longer way than the knowledge of one expert in the field.

Statisticians and marketeers have applied with success this rule for ages, though Cass leads us to believe using empirical data, that there’s more to it. In our technological society the route to validate information and decisions should be done by means of aggregating the knowledge of the many non-experts. Link that with the internet and social media where a google-ian pool of non-experts lies in wait and you get a glimpse of the infotopia in the palm of your hand and its possibilities to find better answers than experts provide.

In the infotopian landscape we may find the true ways to address the causes of terrorism or global warming or poverty or all three at once. So, Greta darling could you move over, what you’re asking is likely not the most viable solution…and Boris, on your bike, you may get Brexit done, but can you get it done proper? Experts see themselves as people with the right answers, fulfilling a saviour-like role, but this is not only wrong at some level but appears to be ineffective. Take the example of any recent US war where the aggregate global consensus went against it, and you can see the problem with the influence peddled by experts and the agendas they shield knowingly or unknowingly.

Cass a White House expert and a Harvard slim-but-fat-academic, doesn’t walk that distance, neither he indulges us closer to his home. One corollary to his theorem might have been: his (final year) students may know on aggregate better law than he does, and not the other way around unless their ignorance at Harvard – as the myth goes – gets the better of them. Probably not.

Cass rooted his book comfortably in a zone within infotopia where he is pro wikipedia growth and adverse to personal social media and to deliberation – a process by which corporations, academic organisms or political systems function employing panels of experts. However, the big-data elephant in the room governments and companies want to control still refuses to shape shift his way into benign knowledge. Just to mention at the opposite if not opposing ends, the Wikileaks and the Brexit.

At one end, we have a triumph of the non-expert views to the power of their ignorance, where the aggregate ‘truth’ – or lack there of – generated the political capital Boris and Farage could build their Church of Brexit on. A church which denies by default Earth is round when any Galileo contests it with a telescope, simply because the factual argument of one cannot match the aggregate zealotry of the many.

At the other end we have Wikileaks, a website fuelled by individual whistleblowers who are kicking to expose the crimes governments, the army and politicians want to bury under secrecy. However, the volume and implications of the truths so exposed and probably the plight of Julian Assange the director of Wikileaks, frightened the many into ignorance where they’d rather enjoy the comforts of the echo chamber provided by the daily me and the mainstream media – as formulated by Cass too in a previous book.

Ultimately, the more ignorant the general public is seduced to be, by circumstances or design… or fear, the more likely OUR cumulated ignorance will be surveilled first and foremost to be aggregated into an information dystopia that is someone’s powerbase. Our ignorance as lowest denominator and the ‘strong opinions’ which go with it, is more often polled than our knowledge on a subject. Politicians ultimately thrive on our ignorance not on our emancipation.

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the details of the book:
Cass Sunstein – INFOTOPIA: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge
ISBN13: 978-0-19-518928-5 ISBN10: 0-19-518928-0
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Cass R. Sunstein is an American academic who writes books of information society. In Republic.com he’s argued that the perpetual ‘daily me’ of the blog and later social media culture, leads to information becoming cocooned and not free to permeate and challenge our minds.

With Infotopia, Cass goes a step further by focusing on how the internet could validate knowledge – and its opposite we add – and how this could inform (or disinform) decisions. A proof being evident in how many recent strategists have manipulated the aggregate ignorance of many, for opportunistic political gains.