You'll think what you're told

Welcome to this week's Reno News & Review.

It's funny how real life and real-life art sometimes collide.

We live in a world where literally everything that human beings know, all of science, all of spirituality, all of … everything, could be available to all of humanity on the internet. There's already a lot out there, far more than any single human could comprehend.

But isn't it weird how much is not available, and the way the information that's on there is presented in a way that prevents regular users like you and me from accessing it? For example, I want to know who was arrested in the United States on April 8, 2002, and every person arrested in the United States every day since. (And by the way, this is a purely hypothetical situation, I don't care about arrests.)

Arrests are public information, right? They are public information because Americans don't want to live in a country where the government can take people and disappear them.

So, if everything can be put on the internet, and if I accept the assumption that public information should be available, but that some things—schematics for Little Boy, or the genome and construction instructions for Ebola—should not be available, how would it be decided what should not be on the internet?

What wouldn't be available to the public would be information that some power-that-be decides is dangerous—information that would have bad repercussions for the entity that controls the information.

That suggests that the information available is not the most powerful information. But the data that is available is so vast that determining what is missing is beyond anyone's ability.

This concept isn't that profound. The marketplace theory of democracy is that if presented with all the information, Americans will make the right decisions. These days, though, we're only told what powerful entities want us to factor into our thinking. If it's not available, it's because somebody doesn't want us to make informed decisions.