"When Knowledge is Outlawed only Outlaws will have Knowledge."
- Unknown -
We used to say this alot as hackers in the 90s or at least I thought we did. Searching for it now shows <10 results on the g--gle or b-ng. Hmmm. But this kind of goes directly into my point. The Knowledge we are allowed to access is the Knowledge we have. The googs filters your results. They give you the results they or their algorithm(which is they) want you to have. On tw-tter everyone retweets and on faceb--k people have been just posting what everyone else has been posting. Faceb--k now even controls your feed. You don't see everything that happens. You see what they want you to see.
So what is knowledge or information in this age? We are only as creative as the amount of likes on our faceb--k posts and we are only as brilliant as the repetitive media we agree with, the number of tw-tter followers we have and the number of people who like our faceb--k group. Society is being turned into a homogenous population. Holden Caulfield was wrong, people aren't phonies they are just a product of the perpetual regurgitation of things that people tell them.
Where does Knowledge come from now then? How do we find the brilliant pieces among all the chaff online?
Will that be the job of the future, Data Retrieval Expert? I already find it extremely difficult to search for Scientific information online. It is lost in the pile of data. How do we find the Knowledge or data? What happens when the Knowledge, Scientific or otherwise, we have access to is dictated by the search algorithms of places like the googs.
Maybe Knowledge won't be literally outlawed but it will be inaccessible. Is that the same thing?
Access all the Knowledge you can because you are the unfiltered storage device.
This post sounds a little crazy and hopefully a little punk but.... fuck it, I'm not apologizing for it.
