By The New Scientific Priesthood Wants Complete Control of What We Are Told
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We are all familiar by now with the various efforts that are underway to govern what we are allowed to say, and share, online. But this is a much bigger problem than is commonly perceived – it goes far beyond the ‘mere’ suppression of misinformation or disinformation, as misguided and dangerous as that effort is. What it represents is in fact a problematisation of information as such. Increasingly, those who govern us simply take the view that it would be better if we had the minimal necessary supply of curated information, carefully vetted by experts, in order that we should arrive at the decisions they deem to be appropriate.
The result is not just suppression of speech through a ‘censorship industrial complex’ but a suppression of knowledge – a deliberate narrowing of our horizons – in the interests of ensuring that a particular moral ‘Truth’ is revealed. This makes it more apt to analyse our era through the lens of political theology than any other conceptual framework. As I have argued before, we are governed, more and more, by a form of politics that has greater in common with the medieval pastorate than 19th or 20th century liberal democracy – a sort of atheist theocracy rooted in a claim to have sole possession of the knowledge not of what is true or false so much as what is right and wrong.
The COVID-19 period (remember that?) should be seen as a crucial turning point in this regard. The war against so called ‘mis/dis/malinformation’ had been being waged for some time before 2020, of course, but it took COVID-19 and the response to it for there to emerge an idea that there needed to be a globally coordinated strategy to manage information systemically. This was what an international lawyer might recognise as something akin to a “Grotian moment” – a short phase of rapid change in which a new body of rules or norms develops and gains sudden and widespread acceptance. Before 2020, the chattering classes across the West talked about ‘fake news’ as though it was a problem. After it, governments and international organisations began to collude together in earnest to find methods to establish control over how much, and what, information populations get to consume. Read Full Article >
