Much bad information is free. Much good information costs money. Nathan J. Robinson, editor-in-chief of the left-wing magazine, Current Affairs, proposes solving this problem by establishing a single, central database containing, for free, the sum of all human knowledge.
It is an interesting observation that high-quality information is often paywalled, while endless fonts of information and misinformation remain free to read.
If you want good reporting from, say, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, The Economist, the Times of London, the Financial Times, or the Washington Post, you will eventually run up against a paywall. (Note: this is a non-ideological list; I pass no judgment on their respective opinion pages.)
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail, Fox News, MSNBC, Breitbart, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and countless lesser (but always hyper-partisan) rags – and, these days, podcasts – pump out news seasoned with a heady mix of misinformation and disinformation, aimed at the lowest common denominator, all for free.
So where do most people end up getting their information? Not only do they seek out media that validates their biases, but most people simply won’t cough up hefty subscription fees, sometimes running into the hundreds of dollars a year for a single publication. So they settle for the partisan populism that’s free.
There are exceptions, of course. The publication you’re reading is ultimately funded by private donors to a think tank that seeks to advance classical liberal ideas. One could argue that that makes it partisan, too, but at least it tries to maintain a decent level of discourse. Many other such publications exist, of varying quality, to further political goals.
Some publications are still funded solely by advertising, some by voluntary donations or ‘member’ programmes, and others by trusts or wealthy philanthropists. Some employ a combination of strategies to avoid having to put up a paywall, but ultimately, information must be paid for somehow.
Writing in Current Affairs, the left-wing magazine’s editor-in-chief, Nathan J. Robinson opens with a clear acknowledgement of fact: ‘Paywalls are justified, even though they are annoying. It costs money to produce good writing, to run a website, to license photographs. A lot of money, if you want quality. Asking people for a fee to access content is therefore very reasonable. You don’t expect to get a print subscription to the newspaper gratis, why would a website be different? I try not to grumble about having to pay for online content, because I run a magazine and I know how difficult it is to pay writers what they deserve.’
His article lays out, in considerable detail, the nature of the problem. The difficulty and cost of accessing information is not limited to news media, but also affects government information, legal documents, and academic journals.
The latter industry in particular is a nasty mess that gives capitalism a bad name. Private academic journals often charge researchers steep fees for publishing their work, produced largely at taxpayer expense, and then turn around to demand exorbitant prices for access.
That publicly funded research should end up as some of the most expensive documents on the planet is an indictment of a system of private profiteering at public expense.
There is an open-access movement for scientific journals, but this costs researchers more, and tends to produce lower quality papers. This means those without the luxury of institutional access to journals are pretty much forced to resort to illegal means to bypass journal copyrights if they need access to high-quality research.
Robinson is right to lament that the high price of quality information, and the hurdles one has to surmount to access it, is a serious impediment to productivity and progress.
I’d highly recommend reading his entire article before continuing, long (and ultimately misguided) though it is. It really does raise important issues.
Tantalising alternative
Ah, welcome back. Robinson posits a tantalising alternative to the dilemma that, in terms of quality journalism, research and other information, you tend to get what you pay for.
‘In fact, to see just how much human potential is being squandered by having knowledge dispensed by the “free market,” let us briefly picture what “totally democratic and accessible knowledge” would look like.’
Here’s what he has in mind: ‘…a single public search database containing every newspaper article, every magazine article, every academic journal article, every court record, every government document, every website, every piece of software, every film, song, photograph, television show, and video clip, and every book in existence. The content of the Wayback Machine, all of the newspaper archives, Google Books, Getty Images, Project Gutenberg, Spotify, the Library of Congress, everything in WestLaw and Lexis, all of it, every piece of it accessible instantly in full, and with a search function designed to be as simple as possible and allow you to quickly narrow down what you are looking for. The true universal search, uncorrupted by paid advertising.’
Robinson recognises that this idea would horrify not only publishers, but content creators, too. After all, even writers need to eat, and as a writer himself, Robinson recognises that.
So he proposes a system where content creators get paid a set rate per reader or user. If someone accesses the global information utopia and reads Robinson’s book, for example, Robinson would get $2, which is equivalent to the pittance an author usually receives per book sold.
If content creators could rely on a universal basic income, he adds, they might not even need compensation at all. They’d just do all the work of creating content for free.
These fees – or the universal basic income, in their absence – have to come from somewhere. Robinson being a left-winger, I’m sure you can anticipate whence: ‘Why, from taxes.’
He compares it to the UK’s National Health Service, which is free at the point of use, but doctors get paid by the government.
Let’s leave aside the stupendous amount of tax that would have to be levied to compensate all content creators in the Information Age. So, we now have a central respository of all knowledge, where all contributors are paid according to how many people access their work, funded by the government out of tax revenues.
‘Creators must be compensated well,’ Robinson concludes (and I agree wholeheartedly). ‘But at the same time we have to try to keep things that are important and profound from getting locked away where few people will see them. The truth needs to be free and universal.’
Rewarding popularity
Having hung up this magnificent piñata, it falls to me only to take a few well-aimed swipes at it.
Robinson’s dream, that in his new socialist information utopia people will read intelligent media (and ideally left-wing magazines like his own), instead of trashy right-wing dross, will not be achieved.
His system rewards popularity. Intelligent, high-quality content is often not popular. Tabloid garbage full of scandal, prurient interest and xenophobia, is popular. That means that the Daily Mail, Fox News, MSNBC, Breitbart, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and countless lesser (but always hyper-partisan) rags and podcasts will remain the winners in his brave new world, and the high-end papers will probably not earn enough to fund quality reporting.
The social media recommendations will continue to be noise from the populist fringes, composed of information that is only occasionally true, and then only by accident.
In fact, a system that pays purely on the basis of popularity, as Robinson proposes, is a highway to idiocracy. It’s why YouTube is filled with pratfalls and teenage videogame streams.
Why would anyone put in the hard miles to produce high-quality, reliable content that reflects all the complexity and nuance of a person, an event, or an argument, if they can rattle off an emotional screed with a clickbait title for orders of magnitude more money?
‘Phenomenal unleashing’
Robinson imagines a ‘phenomenal unleashing of human productive power that universal free access to all human knowledge would create’, and I, too, thrill at the exciting possibilities of free access to even expensive and hard-to-find information. However, that isn’t what his system will produce.
In his socialist world, the incentives are all upside down. This is not surprising, however, since that is how socialism always ends up: everyone gets something between the minimum quality deemed adequate by the central planners, and the maximum quality of which unmotivated worker collectives are capable, with the latter usually lying well below the former.
Robinson imagines that in his state-funded information utopia, publications will not be tempted to publish content ‘sponsored’ by companies he considers to be prime evil, like oil and gas major Shell.
Yet very few publications and content creators won’t want to supplement the income from their meagre state rations with lots of lovely lolly from sources both impeccable and dubious.
Similarly, billionaires, both benevolent and dodgy, will continue to fund media that, overtly or covertly, serve their interests, pecuniary or philanthropic.
Centralised
Perhaps the worst aspect of Robinson’s utopic vision, however, is that it is a centralised free-information library. He is handing the keys to the world’s knowledge to the politicians.
When private platforms decide what constitutes offensive content, or misinformation, there are always other private platforms, or even self-hosted, alternatives. When the sole repository of information is a centralised government database, the government decides what it may and may not contain.
Not only is that a censor’s wet dream, but which government would Robinson appoint for this duty? Presumably not his own UK government, with its history of puritanical and outright sexist censorship to protect the public morals, and prohibiting ‘information of a kind likely to be useful to a [terrorist]’, which could cover literally any information if the authorities had a mind to persecute someone.
Presumably not the US government, which would immediately wipe The Intercept off the map, followed by anyone else who dared to publish anything on Edward Snowden’s revelations of illegal systematic mass surveillance, or Julian Assange’s disclosures of war crimes and diplomatic skulduggery.
No foreign government would accept such national-level control over the central information repository, of course. China wouldn’t let its citizens access a US-run database, and the US wouldn’t countenance a Chinese or Russian-run library.
UNCIA
So the library would have to be maintained at an inter-governmental level, by a United Nations Central Information Agency (UNCIA).
This would make its content subject to international treaties. Can’t offend China, so nobody can write anything about Taiwan or Tibet or the Uyghurs or ghost cities or the perilously over-leveraged People’s Bank of China. Can’t offend the US and Israel, so we can’t include pro-Palestinian opinion. Can’t offend Bad Vlad, so suggesting that the Ukraine has right to choose its own alliances will get you poisoned.
We’d be left with a heavily censored information repository that kowtows to every petty tyranny in the world, and contains information so anodyne that the only ‘unleashing of productive power’ would be in what the global governments told its citizens to produce.
Analogies with 1984 are trite, but Robinson’s utopia would literally establish a global Ministry of Truth. It is a horribly dystopian idea. But then, all socialist ideas turn out to be dystopian, once you take the trouble to consider their implications.
[Image: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/books-shelves-library-doorway-5647210/]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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