Free information & the tragedy of the commons

Have you heard of the famous phrase in economics - "The tragedy of the commons"? It talks about the notion that if we allow unfettered access to valuable resources, it typically ends up being over-exploited leaving us with negative consequences. Self regulation is a non trivial trait that we cannot easily master.

We have already proved this in the past by overuse of shared planetary resources like air, water and land around us. You may think with all the knowledge of today, we will not repeat it. However we are bringing the same practice to space, to the moon and beyond.

When I was a small boy, information was scarce and existed only in books. It took weeks or months to obtain a new book. There was no access to public libraries in the rural outback where I lived. I received an edition of a popular world book once a year but the wait was worth it. There was some pleasure in waiting.

Sometimes we value what we wait for. That annual summer holiday is much more enjoyable only when it is few weeks a year. If all the year was a holiday, would we still enjoy all the things we do? When we do not have to value it, we take it for granted.

During these periods of waiting, I used to imagine an utopia where information was so ubiquitous and free. Knowledge was unrestricted and everyone could get wiser by the second. I used to dream where such an abundant information age would take humanity to.

Naivety was always an integral part of my optimistic compositions of future. In my boyish thoughts, information was pure and empowering. It was going to liberate us all one day when we could have it for free.

And then, unexpectedly within my living life time, the dream already became reality. The age of the internet happened in a remarkably brief period in time. Such a change in information access has been the most important societal disruption that we have witnessed in the past 1000 years.

We live in that world already where information is ubiquitous and freely available. We do not have to worry about forgetting facts and trivial details. All we have to do is to ask our faithful search engine to spit out the answers. This cognitive outsourcing of all our memory intensive tasks is already creating new issues for our mental health.

Facts give us an illusion of knowing everything. We can wake up anywhere in the planet and learn of the happenings on the other side of the planet in a second. But does this make us wiser than yesterday?

Emperors and kings fought for this luxury of information for thousands of years. And yet, in the middle of this information paradise, I do not feel any ecstatic joy that I had anticipated from my youthful dream.

We twist information, discard it and manipulate it for the usual wants of power and greed. We take everything for granted and at the same time cook conspiracy theories of outlandish imagination. We spread truths and lies at the speed of the bytes travelling through optical fibers around the globe.

Information age has lead us to information fatigue. To add fuel to the fire, we are now facing the age of algorithmic AI that can create new information at mind boggling speed and pretension. Almost human is still not human and never will be. This nuance is already lost in our turbocharged discourse around this technology by techno-utopians.

It looks like we have ended up in yet another 'tragedy of the commons' with this abundance of free information. And our paradoxical existence marches on.