Information Most Free Is Most True

Posted on June 13, 2008
Filed Under Ideas |

I like what the Obama campaign has done with its Fight The Smears website. This is an attempt to correct the distorted information generated through largely deliberate rumor mills by facing rumors head on, and offering a source of validation for the facts underlying the falsities.

The centerpiece of the effort is a website, fightthesmears.com, which Obama’s campaign will use to draw notice to untruths about him, his background, religion, and family and prove them false. Obama’s decision to counterattack reflects a determination not to be defined by political opponents, as past Democratic nominees have - most recently in 2004 when Senator John F. Kerry was “swift boated” by critics who attacked his war record.

“The Obama campaign isn’t going to let dishonest smears spread across the Internet unanswered,” spokesman Tommy Vietor said in a statement. “It’s not enough to just know the truth. We have to be proactive and fight back.”

Launching the website breaks what has been a conventional mindset in American politics: that giving attention to rumors only dignifies and broadcasts them to more voters. But the rising influence of blogs - and the attention more mainstream media outlets now pay to them - makes it increasingly untenable for candidates to ignore swirling speculation, even if it’s baseless.
Obama camp creates website to fight rumors - The Boston Globe

It’s been obvious for some years now that the climate of consensus-making in the US has broken down. National broadcasting has fragmented into specialized, niche treatments of information. Journalistic standards have lost a lot of their influence under a two-pronged attack: the blogosphere taking over the marketplace of news and information; and the censorship and spin of corporate publishers and special interests.

I have long thought that it was only a matter of time before the infrastructure afforded by the Web came to the rescue of a situation it helped to precipitate, albeit innocently, by exploding information access.

The decision of the Obama campaign to believe in the power of truth over lies is a powerful step, and perhaps even an historic one, towards an acknowledgment at the most practical levels that information wants to be free, and the reason for this is to establish the truth, the nature of reality, the facts.

It has been said that to lie is to defeat the purpose of communication, and I’ll say that I believe this, but more importantly I would claim that the Web believes this also. The whole structure of the Internet derives from information racing to find its way to its destination, routing around obstacles in a completely pragmatic way.

I’m glad to see the Obama campaign choose this tactic, it speaks volumes about Senator Obama’s trust in the people. This matters because in my judgment the Internet is best seen as belonging to the people, essentially ungovernable, and essentially self-governing also.

The title of this opinion claims that information that is most free to circulate will also refine itself over time into information that is most accurate. The arguments against this claim are obvious - look at the urban legends we believe. But this I think is not an argument against the claim so much as a reflection of the poverty of our infrastructure, and of our economy.

Too many liars can make too much money exploiting the gaps in our systems of information sharing, and this applies to spammers, scammers, crackers, and Press Secretaries equally. This is no reason to stop rooting for free information, however, and personally I’ve seen too many instances where freedom produces more wealth than slavery to believe that this can’t also be true of information.

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