High Quality Information

!

It's often said that we're in the Information Age. I'm inclined to call our culture disinformation rich, it's the new normal. Hard to find the good stuff. Doubt is everywhere. Gosh, this is a silly use of language: disinformation weilded like a magician to divert your attention away from where the action is happening.

Our natural affinity for language is beatiful. Saturating our information system with bogus material strikes me as greatly harmful to our species. Like purposely holding a delicate and finely crafted surgeon's tool under a blowtorch, ruining it.

So, what can we do about this? Punishment rarely works on us as adults. What often does work is reward. Thus, we want to reward transparency and honesty with regard currency. Let's promote the idea of being trustworthy about information as part of the path to influence and power.

Imagine seven billion people being trustworthy in all their attempts to prosper. Like a strong wind blowing us all towards whatever goals we take up. We could be that wind.

Our experience of the information age has burdened us with unwarranted suspicions that cloud our awareness. Prejudice, urban legends, illusions, and ill-founded conclusions abound in our culture. Scarcity, in particular, incites artificial fear of loss.

What's the root cause of all this? I think it's a mixture of ignorance, intentional deception and poor thinking skills. Will a regard-based economy help? I think so, not all of it, but in 2.0 I want this kind of misinformation to be watched for and corrected in our education and knowledge systems, rewarding these corrections with regard.

Corporations treat knowledge as property. They hide it, protect it, build up an infrastructure, identify those who need to know, force people to create and later change passwords, impose a significant duty on all employees, hire guards at entry ways. Post-graduate researchers often hide their work and results so they can be first to publish. Some of this will still be needed in 2.0 but clearly most of this exists only to monetize information through making it unavailable.

Should information be free? We think so. Looked at from the perspective of the human species as a whole, information is something we are good at creating and then using. Making information free will empower our species to achieve incredible heights of creativity and abundance. This is a huge gain.