What the Hell Is Going On?

Like mass media and mass commerce, the average university is on the brink of collapse. Its structure is a rotting legacy of the Industrial Age. For years, anybody who wanted to learn on their own lacked the means to do so. Now, anybody with an internet connection has access to information. Harvard and Stanford will be okay, but dark days are ahead ... See more

Kanye or Kim Kardashian have a better chance of becoming president than the average, down-the-middle senator. Due to their reach and influence, both of them can already influence policy decisions and sway the American electorate, and they’re not burdened by a track record of senate votes. Moving forward, the most successful politicians will bypass ... See more

Caplan offers the following thought experiment: “Would you rather have a Princeton diploma without a Princeton education, or a Princeton education without a Princeton diploma? If you pause to answer, you must think signaling is pretty important.” In pursuit of signaling value, students flocked to universities.

Growing up in San Francisco, I had four choices: The San Francisco Chronicle, The Oakland Tribune, The San Jose Mercury News, and The New York Times. Reading the newspaper was my favorite ritual. But now, my daily sports entertainment comes from internet bloggers who tweet in their underwear. Unless I’m on an airplane with no Wi-Fi and out of batte... See more

Narratives, which once imbued gatekeepers with authority and prestige, are now instantly fact-checked by a skeptical public. Less than a generation ago, when the production and distribution of information was prohibitively expensive, the public had limited access to information.

According to Gurri, modern information technology enables the public, composed of amateurs, to break the power hierarchies of the industrial age. As the floodgates of information open, the public, organized on social media networks, is clashing with hierarchical, Industrial-era governments and institutions.

For decades, editors left thousands of important stories off radio, newspapers, and televisions. Without awareness of an issue, people are uninformed because they don’t even know an issue exists. But on the internet, mistakes are made out in the open, in public, where everybody can see them. Transgressions are captured, shared, and amplified by the... See more

As colleges lost their monopoly on information, college became less about learning and more about signaling. Whatever value they once provided is diminishing. Peter Thiel argues that college has become an expensive insurance policy for upper middle class parents who don’t want to see their children fall through the cracks of society.

The shape of information flow determines the structure of society.