The information age was supposed to be the great liberator, making the concept of workplace and even nationality moot. Of course it didn’t turn out that way.
The main proponents of this ideology seem to have been Americans, a people who are ironically also very national in nature. People such as Richard Florida have made a living out of looking at the trends that grew out of the information age, notably the mobility of a certain kind of person.
Florida, in particular had ideas. Known as the creative class, Florida saw a generation raised on freedom of information, thought and creativity. This non-homogenous group crosses political spectrums, although tolerance for differences is a key element of the class definition. They should be guided by a “higher” calling, a belief that transcends the body politic, a sense of empowerment and guardianship of truth, equality and creativity. He saw people congregating where these ideals were best preserved. He didn’t foresee Karl Rove.
The naiveté of the creative class, or at least those epitomized by Florida, is encapsulated by the belief that information is without bias. Rove (and I am using him here to represent his whole clan: Wolfowitz, Frum, Cheney, Feith, Perle, Clarke in his heyday and others, many of whom I wouldn’t recognize the name of I’m sure) had what amounted to a brilliant insight. Control the flow of information and you control the perception of reality.
The Rove Agenda seems to have a three-part strategy, although the final goal is either still obscure (some kind of political hegemony) or blatantly obvious (lots of money from oil).
Hand pick and promote your own “facts.” This
is where Stephen Colbert gets to the idea of “truthiness.” If
it sounds like a fact, it must be a fact, therefore it is a fact. More
than any other time, what is fact and what is common knowledge are at
odds with each other, especially inside America. That’s what the
firing of district attorneys has been about, that’s what the
To read an interesting deconstruction of this methodology, read Freakonomics,
a book that is not in any way about politics. It is about the hidden connections
between apparently unrelated elements, and works well as a guiding methodology
for looking at any activity.
Deny awkward facts. Iraq has never successfully produced weapons of mass destruction. Yes, they had them in 1989 – they bought them from the U.S. (Donald Rumsfeld led the negotiations, and there is an embarrassing picture of him shaking Saddam’s hand.). Iraq has never successfully produced weapons of mass destruction. Yet a majority of Republicans in America think that they have. Facts have been denied and replaced with a comfortable truthiness. The average temperature of the oceans is going up. This might be because of human causes or it might be a cyclical planetary thing, but the facts are there. The ice caps are shrinking. Yet the U.S. government not only denies this, they try to suppress evidence. Which leads us to the third part …
Discredit the factfinders. Many of the people who hold key positions in the Bush administration are very young and inexperienced. But that’s OK, because they all graduated from Pat Robertson’s Christian university and law school. I’m not saying that people of faith automatically fear facts or science, but Robertson’s brand of faith is based on apocalyptical visions of a world that has to go to hell so that his kind can go to Heaven. The sooner the better. Top NASA and NOAA scientists are having their research edited by evangelicals to make it conform with religious teachings instead of the facts.
