Cory Doctorow, one of the driving forces behind one of the world’s best websites once wrote a book about a post-scarcity society. (A “post-scarcity” society is one in which, Star Trek like, resources are not limited. Housing, food and other necessities have become so cheap as to be universal regardless of other considerations.) In the book material goods have essentially no value and reputation trumps everything, and though I’ve not read it that concept got me to thinking. For everything else the naughts gave us and took away from us, they did do the one thing that was promised in the nineties: set information free. We’re rapidly approaching a post-scarcity world when it comes to the dissemination, if not the creation, of knowledge and opinion. Simply by typing in http//something you can find almost any piece of information you want.
The rub is that all such information is of dubious provenance. Even the most well established of facts have counterarguments waiting at a different URL. We have evolved into an on-line society where trust is more important that verifiability. For example, there is overwhelming evidence that men have landed on the Moon, but if you are inclined to distrust that there are plenty of counterexamples that project the same level of aesthetic authenticity. So even though it’s not true, you can still verify that the moon landings were faked.
For a less data bound example let’s look at two of the most prominent American men on the internet, Paul Krugman and Andrew Sullivan. Krugman’s record of foretelling almost every disaster that befell this country the last ten years is unequaled amongst nationally prominent pundits. I read his columns and his blog consistently, not because I always agree with everything he says but because he always gives clear reasons for what he’s saying and he’s willing to admit when he’s wrong.
Sullivan, on the other hand, seems to surf ever so slightly ahead of the wave of public opinion and stands by even his most disastrous decisions years after the fact. What this means is that I don’t often read Andrew Sullivan. I don’t trust him. Even if he wrote something I agreed with or found persuasive I’d need confirmation from other sources before I changed my mind or placed a lot of confidence in it. But since sources I do trust are just a click away my time is better spent just reading them and ignoring Sullivan completely.
Some will agree with my conclusions about those two examples, others will not. And neither Krugman nor Sullivan has much at stake in my opinion of them. But regardless of these specific examples the mechanism at work here is basically universal when it comes to the way we operate on-line. Vast internet fortunes have been made on trying to systematize trust (Digg, Amazon reviews, etcetera), but ultimately it is a personal choice. Any site can come with a pretty face, any site can look professionally designed, any site can shout credibility. But reputation is more important than those things because everything else can be faked or equaled. The many thousands of words I read of Sullivan’s (going back probably fifteen years now) before I decided I didn’t trust him are what can’t be faked. And despite Krugman’s sterling track record if he went off the deep end and starting making wild, evidence free accusations tomorrow I’d quickly stop reading him too.
But to stop reading him I don’t have to cancel a subscription or wait for some executive to cancel his show. I can just click elsewhere because there’s a plethora of other high quality commentary and analysis out there. This is one of the most important developments of the naughts; for the way politics operates in this country it might even be the most important. It’s one thing to talk about the rise of on-line political participation in everything from fundraising to blogging to organizing. It’s novel and it’s an easy story to tell because all you have to do is describe the new technology. But the deeper principal is one that says everyone is only as good as the last thing they wrote. It’s much more difficult to hide behind a reputable masthead and a good editor these days, and in ten years it’ll be even harder.
I try to keep my technovangelist leanings in check so I won’t go so far as to say that this is an unmitigated win, but it’s got a lot to recommend it. A world of infinite options means that your reputation has to stand up to constant scrutiny. And building and maintaining a reputation requires care, thought, and hard work, just the things one should look for in a source of information.
