A rule in technology is that what can be done will be done--until we
find out what shouldn't be done.
But in a world flooded with information and opinion--a world where
everyone can be a reporter, a publisher, a producer, a broadcaster,
where the "news cycle" has the lifespan of a joke, and where news and
gossip have become almost indistinguishable while being routed
algorithmically to amplify prejudice and homophily, journalism has
become an anachronism: still important, but all but drowning in a
flood of biased "content" paid for by surveillance-led adtech.
[T]he Internet became the world-wide way to communicate because it
didn't start with billing... And it succeeded, producing instant
worldwide peace among otherwise competing providers of networks and
services.... [E]very one of the nine enclosures [restrictions on internet
activity and access] are enabled by programmers who either forgot or
never learned about the freedom and openness that made the free and
open Internet possible.
[W]hat we do with each other when we talk or teach is not delivering a
commodity called information as if we were forwarding freight....
Consider the word information. It's a noun derived from the verb to
inform, which in turn is derived from the verb to form. When you tell
me something I don't know, you don't just deliver a sum of information
to me. You form me.... In that sense, the word authority belongs to
the right we give others to author us: to form us.