Why ‘Elites’ Don’t Care About Transparency

From Steve Sailer via Land:

The technology of power is moving from the past’s emphasis on privacy and concealment toward more contemporary techniques of diversion, bias, misconception, and willful stupidity. The crude methods that George Orwell summed up in his image of the incinerator-chute “memory hole” are growing into more sophisticated devices for providing the public with misleading frameworks for mentally organizing (or rationalizations for simply ignoring) the overload of available facts, thus making it harder to remember or understand politically inconvenient knowledge.

[…] … erasing facts and even people from history could sometimes work because in the past, information was scarce since reproducing it was so expensive. […] Even without political ill will, simply maintaining the knowledge already existent was difficult: Libraries, for example, might catch fire and texts (and thus knowledge) could be lost forever. […] With the invention of the movable-type printing press in the West in the 1400s, redundancy began to win the war against knowledge decay. Eventually, there were enough copies of books that knowledge was unlikely to be fully expunged. […] In modern times, the urge to retcon reality is no doubt as strong as in the past. But information storage and communication are so cheap that old techniques such as book burnings can hardly be counted upon anymore to root out all copies of data. …

Consider the fact that despite gigabytes of leaked data from Wikileaks and Snowden that nothing has come of it policy-wise. If anything, the world has become so deluged with information that the potency has become diluted significantly (information and sensory overload), and people have become so inured that they have long passed the point of outrage, to now just ‘meh’. As many have noted, the world is less like 1984 and more like Brave New World, whereby powerlessness is not by suppression but by everything becoming so abundant that no one or nothing can stand out. But also, policy makers control the shots, not average people, and no amount of outrage or revelation will change anything if those with the power are shielded from the consequences of transparency. Transparency typically only hurts those on the lesser-end of the power balance.