… history is the story of information becoming aware of itself. - James Gleick, The Information
Norse mythology tells the story of Odin, chief of the gods, who was always in pursuit of wisdom and knowledge. This quest led him to Mimir’s Well, a mystical well located beneath the roots of the World Tree, Yggdrasil. The well was guarded by Mimir, a being of immense wisdom.
To drink from the well and gain its knowledge, Mimir demanded a great sacrifice. Odin, determined to obtain this wisdom, agreed to give up one of his eyes. He gouged out his eye and placed it in the well as payment. In return, Mimir allowed Odin to drink from the well, granting him profound wisdom and insight.
Sacrifice in ancient stories often signifies a change of awareness. On the one hand, this story tells us that true wisdom requires great sacrifice. On the other, Odin’s willingness to give up his eye highlights the truth that to gain knowledge requires you to give up the very thing you think is essential to becoming visionary.
Odin could see perfectly well with two eyes. But he realized, in the name of wisdom and knowledge, that paying Mimir’s price would enable him—strange and ironic as it was—to see more clearly. He was after wisdom, not personal gain or glory. He realized that to see and understand, he would have to give up his old way of seeing; he also embraced the realization that wisdom entails sacrificing something he had taken for granted, something essential.
We are now at Mimir’s well.
Odin’s message for moderns
Of all the sacred cows allowed to roam unimpeded in our culture few are as revered as literacy. Its benefits have been so incontestable that in the five millennia since the advent of the written word numerous poets and writers have extolled its virtues. Few paused to consider its costs. - Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess
The irony and sacrifice in Odin’s story have a message for us. We would be wise to sacrifice the alphabetic logic of containment for the wisdom of flow. New tools— foremost among them AI, but digital information generally—work differently than books, magazines, and newspapers. These alphabetic staples have a different tool logic than digital tools such as quantum computing or Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Tools that are digitally-born work with a new dynamic: flow. To quickly grasp what I mean by flow, consider the difference between reading a book or magazine—a static set of words in a fixed container—and information coming at you online from disparate sources, updating, renewing, revising. That welter of information arriving from all sides and various destinations is characteristic of what I mean by flow. The sacrifice I believe we will have to make is relying solely on the logic and forms of the alphabet for organizing and filtering information. Here is a comparison of alphabetic logic and flow logic:
Today all of humanity is generating too much information, too much is coming at us from all directions. The costs of trying to manage the impossible are great. Giving up the protocols of our seeing apparatus is not easy. To be clear, I am not advocating for an end to pages, paragraphs, and lines of type—the work of the alphabet. But protocols such as fitting everything onto a page, limiting word counts, adjusting type sizes, making font differences—these are worthwhile endeavors; yet they are not adequate for the place where we now find ourselves. We have been trained to this containment logic, and now we follow it even in the face of monumental change. Our information (and our lives) are governed by that logic—yet we pay tool logic almost no mind. We are then blind to the new logic of flow that is emerging. (We even rarely acknowledge a broader context—the breadth and depth of technological change since we adopted the alphabet.)
Common elements of alphabetic logic which newer tools are displacing:
Page view: what fits on the page is what fits in our minds. This limits us to what is on a given page.
Single point of view: an author, an editor, a columnist—brilliant and worthwhile though they may be—can only give you their perspective. Yet our world contains multiple points of view.
Containment: we have been taught from an early age that success (grades, matriculation) means knowing what has been presented and then memorizing that presentation to fulfill a testing regimen. We carry that perception to our encounter with information: what is presented on a page contains what we need to know. That is now an outmoded thought since a single page cannot hold all the relevant knowledge that is expanding exponentially.
Static knowledge: One of the key discoveries of the 21st century is that what we know is in motion, in flux, revising, improving, enhancing or declining. Our tools are showing us the dynamic nature of information but alphabetic protocols have not caught up to our tools.
Wisdom when confronting our current information deluge suggests that we give up:
the comfort (the delusion) of containment;
the confidence of a stable point of view;
the satisfaction of narrative absolutes and pronouncements;
cognitive commitments that include assumptions of how the world works, the veracity of received wisdom, and the nature of knowing;
the belief that wisdom is heaven sent and does not need the power of factfulness.
What does sacrifice mean?
Christian and other theologies have presented sacrifice as propitiation to an angry or inscrutable god. This was a test of faith (for example, Abraham sacrificing his only son, Isaac, as a burnt offering). The Odin myth is different, and that difference is crucial. Odin gave up the very thing he needed to see—an eye—in order to see differently. Any other sacrifice would have been personally costly, of course; but it would not have the irony and power of sacrificing an organ of sight. In other words, Odin gave up the very thing he needed, the thing he depended upon, to do what he most wanted to do: see wisely.
We are in a similar place. We depend upon pages and scrolling and headlines for coherence, for reason, for information itself. Without these elements, we would be generating and passing gibberish. Yet newer tools are bringing us a new logic; an emergent phenomenon is upon us. Note that we will still incorporate and use basic alphabetic protocols—words, paragraphs, pages, headlines, etc. We still have one good eye.
But we need new ways of incorporating that new flow, new ways of seeing; gyroscopic configurations that move like mobiles, orbital configurations that change points of view easily, protocols built on motion and evolutionary change.
Why is there so much flowing information?
Eight billion people on earth—all deviced—are the engine of information flow. The verb flow means to move or progress in a steady, continuous manner. Communication tools present reality; changed tools present a different reality. There is more information now because there are more reality-capture tools that generate flowing information. This is not a problem with information itself; it reveals the inadequacy of the older tools we use to manage information. Information is now reality in flow. Understanding the basics of human progress is a test of our information discernment. Despite the information deluge, how many people are aware of basic life changes due to the beneficial effects of technology?
Medical innovations contributed to the decline in child mortality and the improvement in life expectancy. Thanks to the advances in agricultural technologies, higher crop yields and less undernourishment became possible. The long-term decline of global poverty was primarily driven by increased productivity from technological change. Access to energy, electricity, sanitation, and clean water has transformed the lives of billions. Transport, telephones, and the Internet have allowed us to collaborate on problems at a global level. - Our World in Data
Of course, those beneficial effects came with changes and consequences. Information embodies the ebb and flow of these new realities—and to see the full measure of what that means, we need:
information presentation tools and formats that are dynamic, even protean (able to change shape and form);
formats capable of presenting multiple simultaneous points of view;
formats that are factually relational;
formats that go beyond the page container/format to incorporate more discreet information tools such as objects that can be manipulated.
We can build this show-me capability into our information presentations.
Decrying information overload is the wrong approach to the information flood
What we are dealing with now isn’t information overload, because we are always dealing with information overload, the problem is filter failure. - Clay Shirky
Presently we have no dike, no mechanism for regulating information flow; we expect information to bring us clarity, yet often it brings confusion and contradiction. Not only is the volume of information coming at us daily overwhelming; its veracity and factfulness do not come with an authority, a fact-check tribunal. For example, if some rabble rouser says COVID is a fake disorder, as we hear those words we have only our inherent knowledge to either believe of disbelieve this claim.
The problem remains: what is the right filter? What does it even mean to filter information that comes to us in a deluge? The answer: look at the logic of the tool that brings the information. This will guide us to create tools that work to a different logic.
A new tool logic
Tool logic is the inherent logic or dynamic of a given tool we use. We could make that logic visible, present, available in every medium or on every device. At one time cameras did not come with meta data; now we use that data to improve and revise our images. The same could be true of information. Information consumers will often want two levels: a quick thorough summary; and an in-depth analysis with relevant connections and context. For example:
You choose to examine the logic of the medium through which you are receiving your information.
Having read a quick summary of the topic, you have the option of longer or shorter context—objects that give you the quick or the complex; related information or topics further afield.
You next have the option of changing the point of view of the topic presented.
For every claim or pronouncement, a banner of factfulness would appear: true or false; lie or fact. The banner could increase in size and intensity of color—say, red—depending on the truth or falsity of the information.
The improved information navigator would show you related resources, how the information you have digested is connected to a host of other information which can bring context and depth as necessary.
Today, our information is not free, balled up by media entities with paywalls, and is often mediated by algorithms tuned not to the truth but to sensationalism and stickiness. Hopefully, this will evolve to the dynamics of flow.
Flow summary
New tools like AI, Chat GPT, or Federated Learning create new ways of seeing information due to their inherent logic. I describe this new logic as flow.
Older tools that structure and contain information—like pages of text in books or newspapers—while wholly worthwhile, are no longer adequate to the herculean task of managing information anxiety and information overload.
New tools will be in motion, surrounding any given fact or scenario relationally; the context of the facts, the building blocks of that fact or scenario, will be presented as well. These contexts should be accessible, surrounding the information but not presented as interference or clutter.
New information management tools will be dynamic—like a weather report—changing and updating, evolving, correcting, cancelling falsehoods and gaining transparency. This protean shape of information is what we are beginning to experience now with streaming updates, but our tools are still too static so we often miss implications and relevance.
There are—given the billions of souls with devices—multiple simultaneous points of view in the world now. Akin to seeing information relationally, multiple simultaneous points of view should not be interference or clutter but remain accessible, surrounding the information as objects.
… the successful and powerful business enterprises of the information economy are built on filtering and searching…. The old ways of organizing knowledge no longer work. Who will search; who will filter? - James Gleick, The Information
This article sits right with me, it just "feels" right as I take in the information. I also appreciate the author bolding particular sentences and phrases so it helps me focus a little more on exactly what he wants me to take in.