Freedom's Fidelity

Thursday, April 07, 2005

Thought of the Day

Not from me, this one is from Wretchard and on one of my favorite subjects - how technology is changing the role of information in society.

My own view is that as the world becomes more dependent on information, the cost of purposely maintaining error grows ever higher. It is becoming too expensive to maintain an elaborate lie. The effort necessary to maintain apparent consistency with verifiable information simply grows to high too be worth it. Any database professional knows that the principal strategic danger to information assets is not a physical crash; there are recovery strategies to deal with that. The strategic danger is bad data. A company can recover from a server crash in a few hours; but it can never recover from persistently inaccurate information about its own operations. No information professionals except politicians will knowingly admit self-deception into their sanctum. And the Internet will make them pay the price for that.

I have written much in the past about the role of information. The short of it is that information is a valuable commodity that is bought and sold, however with the rise of technology, just about every piece of information is available at extremely low cost to anyone with internet access, which is to say - almost everyone. That is why conspiracy theories always remain just that, theories. If they were true they would have already been uncovered. For good or ill, there are simply too many interested eyes out there to keep anything, especially in the realm of politics, a secret.

posted by Paul  permalink | |