Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Part of it, I think, is that we're now well established in this 'information economy', in which having knowledge, and being able to leverage and manipulate it, is the main way of making money, in a way that manufacturing goods and trading in them used to be, and owning and exploiting land used to be before that. But information, unlike goods and land, is both intangible and inexhaustible, and is being generated at an exponentially increasing rate. It's also available to virtually anyone, and at little or no cost - even a homeless person with cheap, second-hand smartphone, as long as they have somewhere to plug it and can find a free wireless hotspot, can access far more information, and far more easily, than a computer scientist or data analyst could 30 years ago.
But people don't feel wealthy because they have access to a wealth that everyone else has access to - if a $100 bill materialised in the back pocket of every adult on earth, nobody would, as a result of that, be any richer than they were before, in comparison to anyone else. So nobody feels special because they possess a piece of information such as "the earth is approximately spherical". However, a piece of 'information' such as "the earth is flat" makes people feel special, because if gives them the feeling of belonging to an elite. Now the vast majority of people (I hope) will dismiss this as disinformation, or a delusion, or simply a lie, but another effect of the ubiquity of information has been the degradation of the idea of objective truth to the status of a personal opinion.
But people don't feel wealthy because they have access to a wealth that everyone else has access to - if a $100 bill materialised in the back pocket of every adult on earth, nobody would, as a result of that, be any richer than they were before, in comparison to anyone else. So nobody feels special because they possess a piece of information such as "the earth is approximately spherical". However, a piece of 'information' such as "the earth is flat" makes people feel special, because if gives them the feeling of belonging to an elite. Now the vast majority of people (I hope) will dismiss this as disinformation, or a delusion, or simply a lie, but another effect of the ubiquity of information has been the degradation of the idea of objective truth to the status of a personal opinion.
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