Symbols can live more than fifty times longer than humans. They require almost no energy to persist, just the occasional refresh every fifty years or so to not fade. How do we talk about this space where symbols are popping up, fading or being replicated, on surfaces and screens? I suggest a new word: Infosphere.
The Infosphere refers to the collection of all man-made, public, persisting symbols.
The Infosphere is not the natural part of nature. The Infosphere is not present in the woods, or on the beach, or in the mountains.
Books, newspapers, magazines, televisions, phone screens, radios - these are the realm of the Infosphere.
Your eyes and ears breathe the Infosphere as your lungs breathe the atmosphere.
We depend on the atmosphere to live and we depend on the infosphere to thrive.
A century ago in the western world new industrial technologies polluted our atmosphere.
We largely fixed this, but now our infosphere is heavily polluted.
Information pollution is very real.
Earlier generations spent far more time in nature. It simply wasn't possible to be exposed to the infosphere so much.
Now the infosphere is increasingly omnipresent, and, as it is filled with toxins, the latest generations, including mine, are the most lied to people in history.
You wouldn't want your children to breathe toxic air, why would you want them to breathe toxic information?
What is the source of these toxins?
The infosphere can nourish or poison, instruct or distract.
You would think our laws would be designed to encourage the former and discourage the latter.
But it is the opposite.
The primary source of infosphere pollution are those unarchived symbols that we are not permitted to adjust.
We have made widespread a thing called "copyright" law. What does this do?
It orders that new symbols be frozen for over 100 years.
It pretends that this would lead to a healthier infosphere, but any thinking man can see how clearly false this is.
Ideas work best continually refined. Freezing is non-nonsensical.
No honest scientist or engineer would ever say their symbols are perfect. Instead they constantly strive to correct them, iterating upon them until they die, and hoping that future generations will continue to iterate upon them after that. The scientist also publishes their work for all to see and learn from. Meanwhile, the copyrighter demands payment before one can see their work, then puts out dribble after dribble, and claims their symbols are immune from defects, and must not be altered without permission for over a century.
Which symbols do you think are healthier for the infosphere?
Nature provides incentives for improving the infosphere. Copyright provides incentives for polluting the infosphere.
Believing one can centrally set the optimal "term limits" on information is as naive as believing one can centrally set prices.
Free markets would far more intelligently organize the infosphere.
The information filter strips toxic information, such as orthogonal advertising, from the infosphere.
But information filtering is made illegal by copyright law.
As a result, toxins are incentivized and linger.
Advertising, the mixing of undesired symbols with desired ones, is like an industrial age smoke stack spewing soot into the air.
Advertising pollutes our infosphere.
Honest advertising needs no captive audience or copyright protection. Thus, most in the advertising business are liars.
Liars pay top dollar for ads. Often the purveyor of copyrighted materials tries to pretend they are in an honest business but their material is bundled with advertisements for dishonest products.
When you see "Our business model is advertising" you should interpret as "Our business model is lying."
What kinds of information are we most exposed to?
Are we exposed to high value, instructive information, or are we exposed to information trying to distract and mislead?
I often find high quality information buried under mountains of junk. We are exposed to the information on top, while the truth seeker has to go digging.
Sadly people are not allowed to filter the junk for others and so each one must waste their time doing so (or more commonly, give up and just accept what they are told).
What is the harm of a polluted infosphere?
Significant time wasting, for one. When one man's time is wasted, everyone is worse off.
But it does not stop there.
We saw in 2020 people worldwide held prisoner in their homes, ordered to cover their faces, and receiving forced injections, all uninformed orders made possible by a toxic infosphere.
There are countless Salem witch trials going on right now for conditions that don't exist; immunizations that doesn't immunize; medicines that don't heal.
An unhealthy infosphere is as deadly as an unhealthy atmosphere.
We have recognized that we need to take care of our atmosphere.
Similarly, we need to take care of our infosphere.