Information Control is on a Historical Repeat Loop

I want to look back at history and see it repeating itself. I feel when we go through life today, a lot of the problems we are facing feel unique, but it is actually something that humanity has "been there, done that" before. So, with regards to information control and social implications, let’s go back and look at a couple of instances where this happens.

Printing

The first thing that comes to mind is the printing press. We know that the people that go crazy about losing control are the political elites, the religious institutions, and all these gatekeepers of written knowledge. They frame it as heresy; they frame it as tools for propaganda. They even pose it as a threat—a threat to losing your religion. But people adopt it anyway because there is a demand, a natural order of things that requires information to flow, for ideas to move around more freely and scale, and for literacy—which, you know, eventually becomes a good thing for the world.

Coffee Houses

Then, another idea comes to mind, which is the coffee houses. Although maybe not as impactful as the printing press, I read before that coffee houses were once seen as places of revolt. They were once seen as places where there’s moral decay, where people talk about things that would go against the status quo. But again, there’s information exchange. There is a lot of rooted, on-the-ground business news and social exchange.

To the point where I really love the story where there is a term called "Penny University"—because for a penny, where you can get a coffee, you can learn from the best minds coming to coffee houses. It elevates the brand of coffee as well; it elevates the notion of sitting down for coffee, having conversations, and bringing value to one another. I want to mention this because it’s very close to my heart, and it’s something that has had a tremendous effect on the way I have built my life in business. Coffee houses now link up to the brand of intellectuality—and now it's gone down the road of being hipster and so on.

Radio & TV

Next, we are looking at radio and television. Again, when these things come out, the print guys—who were once the villain and then became heroes—became upset because of the loss of control in the way information is mostly written. But I believe TV and radio became labeled as, again, more propaganda machines. The blame gets shifted over; they talk about cultural degradation. But perhaps this is the one time that corporate power takes over societal inclinations, because the powers that be actually see value in this new medium. So we're talking about corporate, we're talking about governments—they want to control.

This led to the regaining of control, which I think happens at every stage. The moment a medium exists, control measures have to be put in place so that, for the sake of the natural order of things and for the sake of avoiding anarchy, governments have to step in. The question becomes the relationship between corporate greed and the government, and what the people actually need in life.

Socials

Most recently, we have social media. Social media, you know, changes the whole status quo again. Like, all of it. Everyone's affected: governments, traditional media (which we call them now because they used to be the forefronts, but now we call them "traditional media" ironically), even brands or corporates are being challenged at this stage. Every single one that has power. Social media has instigated or become the catalyst for government upheavals in certain countries.

So, social media gets a bad rap. They become destabilizers; they're branded as destabilizers, attention destruction, social degradation again. So you start to see that history is repeating itself. Now, I wouldn't say ironically—it turns out it is exactly following the steps of the predecessors. Where the printing press was the symbol of freedom and then it became a slave, same with all the other things I've mentioned. And now social media, which were symbols of freedom and freedom of expression and so on, have now become corporatized and controlled. The worst of both worlds. And yet, we are still stuck with that attention grab that they have on us now.

AI

Although the theme of whatever I've said is revolving around social implications and information control, AI is coming in with its plethora of uses. So I'll focus on the information side of things: the churn of what we call now as "AI slop." We're starting to see it happen at an early stage where people are already calling it something negative. "AI slop," they call it.

But in the background, pretty much silently, AI is taking over all aspects of our lives. Corporate is consuming it, eating it up like crazy because, you know, it's more efficient. The ROI is better. Do we care that the energy used to run AI processes is crazy? Not really. Because we can then let go of people, which cost money to pay for, and channel a fraction of that to powering these data centers.

But the point here is the rise of AI and the democratization of the use of AI becomes another threat in this new cycle. Social media doesn't know what to do with it, so they're adapting. AI platforms—like when Sora decided to release as a social media platform—that’s a big sign that they see themselves as a threat to social media. Because they are appearing at a junction where social media itself is transitioning to "interest media," as instigated by TikTok. So now, AI slop is being attacked by people like writers, artists, educators, knowledge people... knowledge workers, or "knowledge peddlers," I would say.

But if you look at how history has unfolded with every time a new platform, channel, and medium comes up, we can predict where this is going.

Conclusionism

I would say, as a conclusion, that the most important thing as humans is the fact that we know we are resilient. So yes, people might lose jobs and all that. But it's all the more important for us to have roots and values, belief systems, ethics—things that make us human. Because God knows that in the past era, the efforts to take that away have been growing more and more. Whether you're talking about the printing era, to TV and radio, to social media, the dehumanization efforts are intense and getting more and more intense.

So now, as we take on this new revolution of AI into our lives, one way that we can go about it is to really look back at history, understand what makes us human, and triple down on that collectively.