Notes Inspired by Larry Sanger

To be able to determine society’s background knowledge—to establish what “we all know”—is an awesome sort of power.  This power can shape legislative agendas, steer the passions of crowds, educate whole generations, direct reading habits, and tar as radical or nutty whole groups of people who otherwise might seem perfectly normal.  Exactly how this power is wielded and who wields it constitutes what we might call “the politics of knowledge.”
 

True, fighting over accepted ideology — really, over the people who buy into an ideology — often takes a political turn; but consider Sanger’s quirky dissimulation in the first sentence.  He’s equivocal about determination and establishment of what he has called background knowledge.  That’s too bad.  One approach seeks to find the generally accepted knowledge whereas the other approach seeks to shape what that knowledge becomes.  Either approach can be used politically, and both are.  Usually, appeals to the electorate take a form as blurry as Sanger’s conceptualization.  First, a study is made of what background knowledge actually already exists; next, reiteration occurs as the fruits of such study are delivered to the polity in a way that makes clear to everyone that the majority of people have a common understanding.  (This concept will play a role later in the essay, although Sanger did not specifically conceive it.)

I don’t think I would use the same terminology.  The process implied in the paragraph’s first two sentences happens with or without politics; the process just so happens to have a political use as well.

The politics of knowledge has changed tremendously over the years.  In the Middle Ages, we were told what we knew by the Church; after the printing press and the Reformation, by state censors and the licensers of publishers; with the rise of liberalism in the 19th and 20th centuries, by publishers themselves, and later by broadcast media—in any case, by a small, elite group of professionals.

But we are now confronting a new politics of knowledge, with the rise of the Internet and particularly of the collaborative Web—the Blogosphere, Wikipedia, Digg, YouTube, and in short every website and type of aggregation that invites all comers to offer their knowledge and their opinions, and to rate content, products, places, and people. 

Compare this to what I wrote in my first hard look at static vis-a-vis “Once - Upon - A - Time - World.”  (More in a bit…)

Today’s Establishment is nervous about Web 2.0 and Establishment-bashers love it, and for the same reason: its egalitarianism about knowledge means that, with the chorus (or cacophony) of voices out there, there is so much dissent, about everything, that there is a lot less of what “we all know.”  Insofar as the unity of our culture depends on a large body of background knowledge, handing a megaphone to everyone has the effect of fracturing our culture.

Yes, static.  This, incidentally, may be why John Robb writes what he writes and why he has a devout following (whatever its size.)  Establishment-bashers accentuate the fracturing Sanger is describing:  see cacophony ascendant over chorus, and rejoice.

A giant, open, global conversation has just begun—one that will live on for the rest of human history—and its potential for good is tremendous.   Perhaps our culture is fracturing, but we may choose to interpret that as the sign of a healthy liberal society, precisely because knowledge egalitarianism gives a voice to those minorities who think that what “we all know” is actually false. 

This is the voice of one not too focused on the negativity of cacophony.

However, Sanger does not avoid the negatives:

As wonderful as it might be that the hegemony of professionals over knowledge is lessening, there is a downside: our grasp of and respect for reliable information suffers.  With the rejection of professionalism has come a widespread rejection of expertise—of the proper role in society of people who make it their life’s work to know stuff.  This, I maintain, is not a positive development; but it is also not a necessary one.

Most of the rest of the essay looks at the role of experts while contrasting Wikipedia’s dabblerism. In essence, said neologism is what happens when people who are either afraid of The Establishment or otherwise would disassemble it get lost in the cacophony or else rejoice in being able to travel freely and build new paths within that cacophony.  [Hint: Global Guerrillas theology/theory.]  Dabblerism is a term that should be understood as a social phenomenon rather than a description of any given person’s activities.  (Although it could be used to describe individuals as well.)  That is, as Sanger has used the term, the total system developed in the absence of any recognition of special authority or expertise must necessarily result in a relativistic mish-mash — even if some parts of that system (in this case, Wikipedia articles) are indeed of high quality — since no common guiding lights direct the flow of activity.  When experts cease to be of much relevance, everyone becomes a dabbler with respect to the total system even if each person has a specialty or area of expertise.

Sanger’s critique of Wikipedia is rather brilliant and extends for most of the essay.

Sanger envisions a different kind of system —

The new politics of knowledge that I advocate would place experts at the head of the table, but—unlike the old order—gives the general public a place at the table as well.

That is, rather than a hierarchical institution of reality/Truth, and rather than the mish-mash of relativistic dabblerism — Sangler calls it epistemic egalitarianism —  the best system would provide for both, experts and the complex mesh of non-experts.  Consider the inclusive table Sanger describes while considering the concept of co-optation in 5GW. Then consider this passage from Sanger’s essay:

The notion that experts cannot play a gentle guiding role in a genuinely bottom-up collaborative project seems to be plain old bigotry. No doubt this prejudice stems from a fear that experts will twist what should be an efficient process into the sort of slow, top-down, bureaucratic drudgery that they are used to. But this needn’t be the case. Surely it isn’t impossible for professors to exit the cathedral—to borrow Eric Raymond’s metaphor in his essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”—and wander the bazaar, offering guidance and highlighting what is excellent. Will that necessarily make the bazaar less of a bazaar?

That, folks, is a description of 5GW.  I’m even tempted to mix metaphors and consider John Robb’s concept of “bazaar of violence” with this use of “bazaar” and say that 5GW forces may, as often asserted, utilize 3-4GW forces or Global Guerrillas by guiding them through that bazaar.  Pursuing this line of thought further, I would add another consideration from my first hard look at static:  that although an open-source architecture may exist, individual warriors within than environment may see it as static and not themselves be “open source warriors.” That is, they are experiencing the bazaar directly rather than seeing some sensible whole in which all possible knowledge fits neatly and succinctly together; or else, they see a “whole” which is localized, insular, and not truly open-source.

But I would also add:  With this paragraph and the earlier mention of The Establishment, Sanger points at the reason I have so often stressed the necessity of secrecy in 5GW operations.  I will break it into two points:

• First, who wants to visit a bazaar (or market, mall) and be led around with a leash?  No one.  In the explosion of choices and the apparent freedom of having no hierarchical authority, most people are loath to give up that freedom.  They may fear being led and instinctively oppose such attempts — this becomes even more likely when those being led just happen to see the would-be leaders as their enemy.


• Secondly, the cacophony cannot be hidden.  In fact, it becomes more apparent every day.  Open leadership requires convincing those being led that the apparent cacophony is not really cacophony:  “No, here’s the seamless whole, the true Path.”   With an explosion of sources within an open-source environment and the coextensive increase in static, issues of freedom or oppression and the fear of an Establishment may be beside the point, since advocacy by an openly acting leader will not easily mesh with the apparent cacophony.  This becomes even more likely given the fact that many more operators will be acting in various isolated domains with localized worldviews: they are not really “open source warriors.”  They will be operating from a different apparent order within the general cacophony.
  

That last bulleted point also ties in with Sanger’s allusions to the issue of group think.  When he describes background knowledge in his essay and its importance to cultural cohesion, he somewhat skirts the issue of why such knowledge is important.  He explores Stephen Colbert’s concept of “wikiality” when considering the negatives of group think —

It is quite another thing to maintain that crowds are wise simply because they are crowds.  That is a philosophical view, a variety of relativism, according to which the only truth there is, the only facts there are, are literally “socially constructed” by crowds like the contributors to Wikipedia.

It’s this view that Stephen Colbert was able to mock so effectively and hilariously as “wikiality”: reality is what the wiki says it is.  Colbert has in effect added to what “we all know.”  By brilliantly skewering the notion that facts are whatever Wikipedians want them to be, Colbert has added to our culture’s modest stock of background knowledge—about philosophy.  Thanks to Colbert, we all know now that reality isn’t created by a wiki.  That’s no mean feat for a humorist.

— but besides the fact that I doubt we all know who Stephen Colbert is and what he has said on the subject, I also would object to the light touch Sanger gives to the issue. Reality is what the wiki says it is:  This is what happens anyway, with or without wikis.  This is the basis of so-called social networks, of the Internet variety.  This determines whether one is a Catholic, a Methodist, or a Sunni Muslim.  I have lately begun to refer to this issue as “networked-truth”.  While I have used the term pejoratively and will continue to do so, I also believe we must come to understand why the tendency toward group think exists in the first place.  It is a stop-gap measure ensuring continued growth, an evolutionary response to the individualized OODA.  We seek confirmation to ensure the integrity of our own minds — and thus our ability to operate within the actual environment — but then we stop with consensus which gives the illusion of security.  I say, illusion, but only because the environment is changing at a quicker pace than ever before, with incursions into our own localized environments from without.

With these thoughts in mind, one might see how easily an eventual consensus might triumph over tyrannies and freedom-loving rebels alike:  by meshing them, or co-opting them.  In other words, a shared empire of mind capable of withstanding the assaults of both expert hierarchical opinion and general opinion.  One cannot as easily see what such an empire would entail, however — at present!


Addendum: I forgot one train of thought.  When mentioning the last bulleted point vis-a-vis secrecy, I had intended to include another:  that despite the diversely motivated groups within an open-source environment, and despite the apparent cacophony, any leaders capable of offering a buyable “way out” might lead toward the worst sort of tyranny.  This is always the danger.  As Plato explained it in The Republic.  This, incidentally, would be an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy, or of the force of an apparent “way out” to alter the world despite the opposing forces.