Approaching the Informational Singularity

Danger, Will Robinson!

These days, a regular feature of my various in-boxes is content about whether or not there is a large rise in background mortality post-Covid, apparently resulting from the vaccination program.

Numerous lay figures and medical authorities, from both sides of the divide, weigh in with their considered opinions.

I’m not going to add mine. But I am going to point something out.

In an evolving free-market system, at some point regulatory and reporting capture becomes a mathematical inevitability.

One by one, people working in market regulation and professional journalism find themselves incentivised, through a variety of mechanisms, to drop objectivity and spin things towards the needs of the market. Whole governments, regulatory bodies and media corporations slowly turn. And no one is left to gate-keep the gatekeepers, save ourselves. This to me is simply inevitable as the system evolves.

When this happens, we will find ourselves surrounded by three broad categories of narrative:

• those that maintain that such-and-such a framing of events is true

• those that maintain that it is false

• those that take a negotiated position between those two poles, accepting parts of one but with caveats

We will find that we no longer have any “trusted authority” to whom we can turn for a deciding opinion. And so most of us will simply choose the one that most replicates our childhood experience of relating to authority - trust, distrust or learning to negotiate.

For me, I find it useful to understand the above. It helps me to not agonise over what is or is not strictly “true” - spending hours reading different reports and trying to decide between them. But rather to accept that corporate capture of regulatory and media bodies is an inevitability at some point. And that it is thus expedient to push back against it now.