Our disagreements over the meaning of “truth”, whatever they may be, conceal a degree of tacit agreement. There are no arguments around what might be called “trivial truths”, like what I had for breakfast or what time my alarm is set. At the other extreme, the profound truths of existence are expressed in numerous ways as being beyond our everyday experience. Between these two extremes—the trivial and the profound—lies an intermediate realm of truth that we have slowly and carelessly excised. In so doing, we have opened ourselves up to new political projects of censorship that are facilitated at root by the gradual shift from a focus upon speaking the truth to the realm of information.
In English, this troublesome concept “information” has been kicking about since the fourteenth century. It was joined around 1580 by “misinformation”. Since at that time informing was an action done to others, misinformation meant to incorrectly inform. I rather suspect, given its use in connection with King James, that it served as a euphemism to avoid directly accusing monarchs of lying or being stupid. In any case, in earlier times the pair “information” and “misinformation” meant, respectively, acts of education, enlightenment, or explication, and the misfiring of such acts.
The shift of the term “science” from designating any kind of formal knowledge to exclusively referring to experimental investigation accompanies a change in the course of these meanings of “(mis)information”, and the arrival of the computer completes the transformation. The coinage “information technology”, to refer to the essence of computational design, effectively removes any possibility of maintaining the older meanings. As they are nothing more than tools for transferring and modifying bits and bytes (binary information, as it were), any sense in which computers might be understood as independently capable of information in the older sense is fanciful.
As they are nothing more than tools for transferring and modifying bits and bytes, any sense in which computers might be understood as independently capable of information in the older sense is fanciful.
The arrival of the computer did not just change the meaning of the already declared “Age of Information”, it changed our thinking about ourselves. The recalcitrant Catholic priest Ivan Illich, perhaps more than anyone else, felt the millennia-long transitions in communication and their relationship to how we imagine our minds. As Illich attests, oral traditions created the opportunity for writing, and the first appearances of phonetic symbols in Europe consist of solid blocks of characters, with neither spaces nor paragraphs. Every word had to be sounded aloud: reading was expressly an act of speaking. Only around the eleventh century was this link between speaking and reading broken by the arranging of still-handwritten pages into a format meant to be read silently, within our own minds: the book as we know it. Illich argues that this transformation of the book precedes and outstrips the impact of the printing press. After this change, the book became a dominant metaphor for mind.
Around the eleventh century, the book became the metaphor for mind.
The Enlightenment heralded a new era of mechanical imagery. For Descartes’s attempts to imagine the workings of bodies and minds, the clock was a central metaphor. This tendency to think of the mind in terms of mechanism arguably reached its apogee with B.F. Skinner and the behaviourists in the early twentieth century. However, it is the arrival of the computer later in the century that completes the transfer from book to computer as the preferred metaphor of mind. This can be seen in the work of psychologists such as George Miller in the 1950s, as well as in the 1970s concept of “deprogramming” cult members. It can also be seen from the 1980s onwards in an ever-growing number of science fiction tales entailing “uploading” or “downloading” your mind into a digital format. The mind itself is now largely conceived in terms of information—if it were not, the inherent implausibility of such stories would scupper them.
The computer completes the transformation of the book as metaphor of mind to that of the computer. This can be seen in the 1970s concept of “deprogramming” cult members or in science fiction tales entailing “uploading” or “downloading” your mind into a digital format.
Illich speaks of two different kinds of mind that result. To the literary mind (those informed by the metaphor of the book) each statement is an utterance by someone who both means and feels what they say. To such people, books and essays are conversations allowing us to face other people. Books make human encounters meaningful. Not primarily because they allow empathy, but because they connect humanity’s fundamental universality to equally radical singularity: anything that a human being thinks or feels can be thought or felt by another human being without losing its significance as a singular event.
Conversely, when the mind is conceived on the metaphor of the computer (that is, when the mind is comprised of information) you can no longer face someone, you can only interface with them. What results are entirely different relationships with truth. To someone whose sentences are a bridge to other minds, utterances can witness and offer testimony (they can speak the truth) or they can bear false witness (they can lie). To someone whose sentences are informational statements, what matters is not anyone being spoken to, but whether your statements are true or false in the Boolean logical sense that is also the underlying mechanism behind the computer.
When the mind is conceived on the metaphor of the computer (that is, when the mind is comprised of information) you can no longer face someone, you can only interface with them.
In the transition from book-mind to computer-mind, from sentences passing between two souls to the uttering of mere informational statements, it is the realm of truth we have lost. While both kinds of communication can express the trivial truths of facts (it is not coincidental that games of recalling facts are called “trivia games”), only one of these ways of speaking can share truth between two people who face one another.
In losing our capacity for what Mattias Desmet has called “sincere speech”, our capacity for exchanging our experience of truth face-to-face, we imprison ourselves in the realm of information, that has usurped our very perception of reality. For all the petty assertions of “my truth” that fuel our culture wars, we have lost almost entirely the role of language in connecting two minds—the “truth” that is being claimed as “mine” is the trivial truth of belonging to some identity or other, that is, an informational statement. We are exhorted never to deny people their freedom to express such information about themselves, while we have forgotten any capacity to bear witness in a form that would entail a far more authentic—and elusive—freedom.
This well-known corruption of scholarship into information-management is intimately tied up with contemporary censorship efforts. Without universities losing their interest in the deeper and more challenging aspects of truth, they could never have undertaken such monstrous endeavours as the free-speech curtailing Stanford Internet Observatory. In the 2020 presidential election in the United States, members of that nation’s intelligence community swore blind that a laptop belonging to the son of then-candidate Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, was scurrilous “Russian disinformation”. Please avoid the temptation to describe the actions of those intelligence agents who intentionally set out to censor legitimate news stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop as “spreading disinformation”, if you still care about the truth. What they were doing was lying. The disapprobation due to such scurrilous behaviour is euphemistically concealed by terms like “disinformation”.
Please avoid the temptation to describe the actions of those intelligence agents who intentionally set out to censor legitimate news stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop as “spreading disinformation”. What they were doing was lying.
If we reduce “truth” to mere factual statements, we eliminate not only any hope of touching upon the profound truths that lie at the heart of arts and philosophies, but also the sense of truth that each of us can express through our discourse. That we must try to discover the worthwhile truths was once the central tenet of the sciences, and perhaps the very reason that religion came to be viewed as their opponent, since truth within Christian traditions was supposedly “revealed”. Truth is not information in any substantial sense, for while informational statements may be factually true, and may provide evidence for or against some truth, information itself is merely data until it is transformed by human practice into reality.
Information is also not truth in any sense worthy of our attention. While the archivists of the internet gather gigabytes of data every second on the myriad activities of humankind, disembodied algorithms find their purpose in farming our attention and monetizing the information glut. This is the true sense of the “information age”, not an age where we are adequately informed, but an age where our minds, our feelings, and our worth as people are reduced to a thin gruel of bits and bytes. Truth is always much more than mere information. It is something that humans act upon and that acts back upon us in our encounter with other humans. It is a social phenomenon—and in that sense, truth is uniquely human.
