The provision of information, if it is to bless mankind, must have quality control built into it… it must have a feedback mechanism with teeth. Barring that, it can spiral out of control, as, indeed, it has.

Consider that almost everyone in the modern world is flooded with information. Even the poorest people walk around with phones beeping at them a dozen times per day, delivering little packets of it. And for active people the info-delivery is far greater. Even the delivery devices themselves, smart phones, have become status symbols.

But who is providing all that information, and what price do they pay for delivering bad information?

The previous era of information delivery was dominated by newspapers; they provided most of the information for daily living. And that system, problematic though it could be, had effective feedback mechanisms. Newspaper readers paid for the information they received. And so, if they made bad decisions because of bad information, the newspaper would have a problem on their hands.

Newspaper operators feared such events. Too many cancelled subscriptions and they were in trouble. If too many people complained to advertisers, their ad revenues might tumble. And competing newspapers were sure to amplify any mistakes they had made, further inflating the problem.

So, the era of newspapers, again with all its problems, had strong correction mechanisms built into it.

But who suffers for the bad information that is delivered these days? The answer is usually "No one."

Free Information Has A Cost

The vast majority of information flooding the world today is free: people don't have to open their wallets and pay for it. Broadcast TV is free, radio is free, Facebook is free, YouTube is free, and so on at great length. Herein lies the crux of the problem:

By removing payment, we've also removed information's correction mechanism.

Who is there to complain to for bad information these days? When you pay for something, the seller needs to keep you happy; when you're getting free stuff, you're almost in the position of a beggar.

And so we see that that once people don't pay for it, the penalty for delivering bad information approaches zero. In other words, when information is divorced from payment, its feedback mechanism breaks. Hence my title, information is broken.