Chapter 17: The Quality, Integrity, and Truthfulness of Readily Accessible Information
Under the dominant feudalistic socio-economic paradigm, there is strong reinforcement for selling products and making a profit. There is no reinforcement for presentation of truthful information about products, beyond what the law requires. This generates a relentless total-immersion avalanche of advertisements assaulting us wherever we go. We grow up in this ocean of ads, so we tend to take them for granted and not question them. The Internet has only provided a virtual Petri-dish for unrestricted proliferation of unsolicited advertising.
No company will ever say that their product is about the same as competing products, or even that they may be inferior or overpriced. Ads present each competing product as the best, uniquely superior, doctor or engineer recommended, and the best deal. This is obviously not possible. The competing products can’t all be the be-all-end-all, unless they’re indistinguishable from one another. In other words, we can’t trust advertising to aid us in arriving at an informed decision regarding which product best meets our needs.
Truth-in-advertising laws come only when prolonged, concerted public pressure briefly outweighs the constant lobbying and other pressure from corporations opposing such laws. Then enacted, such laws typically have loopholes, are not vigorously enforced except in the most extreme cases, and are quickly eroded under the relentless influence of lobbyists on behalf of modern feudal lords and their corporations.
Finding useful information is further complicated by the influence of economic pressures on scientists, engineers, and developers. Under the dominant paradigm, literally nothing can be done without currency. The very nature of the paradigm reliably keeps taxpayer-funded, government-sponsored research under-funded relative to need, except in wartime. The modern feudal lords don’t want new innovations to be freely, publicly available. The lion’s share of funding comes from the “private sector” AKA the modern feudal lords and their corporations. Research that isn’t considered rapidly profitable won’t be funded and won’t happen. Scientists and other researchers working for such a corporation must sign nondisclosure agreements; so if a developer is aware that the company’s advertising about a product they developed is misleading or downright untrue, they can’t reveal what they know without risking their careers and livelihoods.
Finding truly useful, informative information to guide us to make informed decisions among competing products requires inordinate amounts of time, energy, and know-how. In practice, every atom of useful information is buried in a planet-sized mass of misleading or useless advertising. Unless you’re a specialist with a strong background in literally everything as well as a multidisciplinary lawyer and doctor, it’s vanishingly unlikely that you’ll be able to find out what you would need to know. For example, which dietary supplements are really best for you? Do you even need a supplement? If you go by the ads, you’ll work an extra job to afford all of them and buy a storage container to keep them handy.
Critical examples of the possibly-irreversible damage inevitably coming out of this paradigm are the tobacco industry and the degree to which humanity is still globally dependent on fossil fuels. In both cases, the dangers and damage weren’t known at first. When Europeans started using tobacco as an everyday thing, which the Native Americans had used only for specific ceremonial purposes, they didn’t know its harmful effects. Likewise when internal combustion engines became one of the go-to technologies for everything from transportation, to power generation, to manufacturing, nobody suspected the possibility of global warming.
Eventually, in both cases, the danger and long-term damage from tobacco and from fossil-fuel use on a global scale, were identified and publicized by rare scientists who were unencumbered by corporate constraints or cold-war government restrictions. Physicians noticed tobacco-related cancers as early as the 1700s, and by 1950 major studies had shown that smoking causes lung cancer (Doll and Hill, 1950); the tobacco industry then spent decades manufacturing doubt (Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt, 2010). By 1965, scientists advising the U.S. president warned that carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels could measurably change the climate (President’s Science Advisory Committee, 1965), and by the late 1970s oil companies’ own scientists were accurately projecting the warming to come (Supran, Rahmstorf and Oreskes, 2023). The basic physics had been worked out in the nineteenth century. In both cases, mega-corporations whose profits come from tobacco and from fossil fuels became aware of the harm that their products cause. In both cases, companies invested enormous resources to suppress and discredit all such research and findings (McKibben, The New Yorker, 2015; Wang, Climate Liability News, 2018). Corporate lobbyists schmoozed with lawmakers, convincing them that making any serious changes would lead to the collapse of civilization and, even more importantly to them, of corporate profits.
In the case of fossil fuels, there are multiple alternative, nondestructive, sustainable technologies which could replace the vast majority of applications for fossil fuels without hurting our standard of living or quality of life. The shift to emphasis on these technologies would create far more jobs than would be lost in the fossil fuel industries: the International Energy Agency’s net-zero pathway projects about 14 million new energy-supply jobs by 2030, against about 5 million lost (IEA, 2021). Yet here we are, still stuck in dependence on fossil fuels, thanks to the unflagging efforts of the fossil fuel and related industries to convince lawmakers and the public that such a change would kill jobs and cause unspecified bad things. And we still have many people dying of tobacco-induced cancers.
Thus we find ourselves in a survival crisis with time rapidly running out. If we act globally and quickly on a massive scale, we still have a chance to avert a cascading ecological breakdown that would threaten civilization itself. Around a million animal and plant species are already threatened with extinction (IPBES, 2019). If we don’t act, we risk escalating what’s already recognized as a man-caused mass extinction to the point where our own species could join the dodo bird. Remember that many of the ultra-wealthy modern feudal lords are caught in a compulsion for extreme wealth, power, opulence, and privilege that follows the pattern of a behavioural addiction. As with anyone caught in an addiction, the compulsion can dominate their behaviors and decisions, even to the detriment of survival itself. If we are to survive, we cannot allow this situation to continue. We cannot continue to enable this compulsion by playing the game by the rules that reward it.
Once the current paradigm is decommissioned and replaced with the new peer-based, symbiotic paradigm, the current oceans of advertising and disinformation will evaporate. Advertising will have no purpose. Information among researchers will be openly and freely shared. Currency will be obsolete because the need for its will be eliminated. There will be no such thing as profit, stock, or market share. Goods and services will be developed to fill real, authentic needs. There will be no motivation to “manufacture” needs through psycho-social manipulation AKA advertising. There will be reinforcement for sharing of meaningful information. The proportion of useful, truthful information to disinformation will be reversed.
Scientists will still disagree, compete, and argue among themselves, ultimately producing a growing body of knowledge called progress. Some scientists may still lie or stretch their findings just for the sake of “being right.” Truthful, useful information will be the norm. There will be no corporations, no nondisclosure agreements, and no restrictions on collaboration. Theories and technologies will grow or wither on their merits, not on marketing or aggressive business practices.
Instead of multiple competing, redundant brands of things with no clear way to know which, if any, is “better” than another, there will be multiple designs which will compete within a wide community of researchers and developers who will no longer forbidden to share knowledge due to nondisclosure agreements. The best features of the formerly competing companies will be distilled and integrated into one complete line of, for example, cars which will span all real needs, from sports cars to eighteen-wheelers. Products will be flexibly customizable to users’ needs and tastes. All goods and services will use standardized protocols and form-factors to make them highly forward and backwards compatible an easily serviceable. That line of products will combine all of the best features of the formerly competing products, at the highest level of quality that the state of the art allows, and will be designed to last.
All information will be centrally and easily accessible to any and all persons. Search for what you want or need, narrow down to what version best meets your needs, specify custom features, submit then go to the supply depot of your choice to pick it up soon after.
In medicine, the only considerations will be purely medical. There will be no uncertainty over financial factors overriding or shaping medical decisions, to the patient’s detriment, as the norm now. Extra tests are ordered, or vital tests not ordered based on financial reasoning. Medications are marketed by mega-corporations who, in the United States, by one estimate spend almost twice as much on promotion as on research and development (Gagnon and Lexchin, 2008), and who decide what to develop and what not to, based on projected profitability in the long term. These practices will cease. Medicine will return to its central mission: ensuring and restoring the health and well-being of you and me.
As the hierarchy is dismantled, those who have been calling the shots will no longer be able to command others, or to decide on their own what everyone else may have. We will never start violence, but some may try to. If so, the response will be the same as in any democracy: law enforcement and, if necessary, the National Guard, acting under the law and accountable to the public, along with every person’s right to defend themselves. We must act with firmness and with compassion. We must not allow the old paradigm to be forced back upon us, and at the same time, we must not allow ourselves to slide into brutality or a desire for revenge.
In the new paradigm, truthful, informative, accurate and useful information will be easily available to all.