In the space of its short life, this column has emphasized the dynamics of the information age as of extraordinary but poorly understood relevance to skepticism as both a system of thought and a movement within society. Ongoing events require that this now be explained in a bit more detail.

Since 2005, I have been involved to various extents and capacities with the Anonymous movement. For the past year, I’ve been in communication with several of its most active participants, including one who had been outed by the Church of Scientology after helping to launch Operation Chanology, a global campaign intended to remove that organization’s grip on lives and government agencies alike. And for the past month, beginning with the Anonymous movement’s assistance programs to Tunisians, Algerians, and Egyptians who seek to win their freedom, I’ve become more actively involved in tactics, messaging, and now legal defense for my fellow Anons. Some have been raided by the FBI and other agencies, which have been investigating a campaign involving DDoS attacks against financial companies—those that had given in to government pressure to deny their customers the ability to donate to Wikileaks. All of this is now in the public record, and I confirm it here as a prelude to the subject of this column and in the interest of full disclosure.

We are coming to the close of a two-decade debate over whether or not the explosion of communicational possibilities brought to us via the information age is sufficient to allow a subject population and its supporters to overthrow a government and perhaps establish a freer one. In light of the demonstrably key role that the Internet played in Tunisia and Egypt thus far, and in a certain small sub-Saharan country soon enough, that debate should be coming to an end. Nonetheless, it will go on forever, because certain people are impossible to defeat via argument alone because they are invincible—at least in a rhetorical and professional sense.

A few months back I argued that Foreign Policy editor Eugene Morozov was not qualified to assess the above dispute, being incompetent on the subject and having at any rate committed himself to a certain position that was silly even before recent events rendered it sillier still. “Tweets don’t overthrow governments; people do,” Morozov proclaimed then, thereby dispensing with those who have presumably gone around claiming that Twitter will gain sentience and begin liberating populations into a Greater Social Networking Co-Prosperity Sphere. Out of fairness to Morozov, I’ll note that he does make somewhat more cogent arguments; out of fairness to everyone else, I’ll note that his arguments tend to be of the following caliber: “Neither the Iranian nor the Burmese regime has crumbled under the pressure of pixelated photos of human rights abuses circulated on social networking sites.” Thus it is that the infancy of the information age has not yet brought down two of the world’s most repressive regimes.

As I noted then:

Not only has Twitter failed to take down either of the two regimes Morozov lists, but one of those regimes has attempted to use the service for its own ends. Indeed, the Iranian authorities have been as eager to take advantage of the Internet as their green-clad opponents. After last years protests in Tehran, Iranian authorities launched a website that publishes photos from the protests, urging the public to identify the unruly protestors by name. We are not told how effective this turned out to be or why this necessarily cancels out the effectiveness of Twitter in organizing the protests to begin with or how the fact that dictators use websites shows that they are not being undermined by the use of Twitter. The fellows talent is being wasted in socio-political commentary when he could be writing mystery novels.

Today, I have a better and slightly less catty answer to Morozov regarding the question of whether or not the Internet is a greater boon to dictators or to populations. Rather, I have a question, for him and for everyone else who has spent the past few years building their careers on this incompetent brand of pseudo-skepticism: If dictators are so fond of the Internet, why did Mubarak turn the damn thing off?

Former “President” Ben-Ali of Tunisia did not turn off the Internet, of course, when Tunisian activists began coordinating with Anonymous and other parties in taking down the government’s websites and in some cases replacing them with messages of support to the Tunisian people, thereby proving that their government was not so powerful as it seemed; when Anonymous-affiliated journalists began bringing attention to the nascent protests, in an effort to alert those around the world who themselves were in a position to help Tunisia succeed; when guides were written by experts and distributed by Tunisians and other North Africans to the many among them who had no knowledge of street confrontation, but who now know as much as any black-bloc anarchist; or when the great and still-growing network of Tunisians, Anonymous, and other parties began building darknets and other solutions to the problem of government censorship and infiltration. Ben-Ali should have done so, but he didn’t, and even if he had, many of the same techniques used to reconnect Egyptians during the shutdown would have been employed in Tunisia with similar results. Tunisia, incidentally, is not finished with its ongoing troubles, but nor is this coalition finished with its ongoing work, which will at any rate be ignored by those whose professional interests coincide with those who would prefer that we spend less time thinking up new ways to aid subject populations and more time reading about how such a thing is impossible—despite the evidence before our very eyes.

Contrary to all the evidence, there are two general views on this matter: 1) that perpetuated by Morozov and others like him who believe that such things as Wikileaks, Twitter, Anonymous, and Facebook are not quite as relevant as many would believe, and 2) that perpetuated by those of us who have used those very same dynamics to prove that they are already more relevant than even the most enthusiastic of us were predicting not long ago, when we thought in terms of years rather than the mere months it has taken to proceed to the current situation. Everyone among the thousands of North Africans and others who poured into our IRC channels would seem to agree with the latter view, having consequently watched and participated in those things which are necessary to making any informed decision on the matter. When you have seen a teenage Tunisian girl translating into French and Arabic the guides that were minutes before compiled by activists living in five different countries and then passing them on to her family and friends and then asking what else she can do to help free her country—and receiving a dozen answers, all of them good—it is difficult to take seriously the output of those whose first instinct at such a moment is to downplay it in accordance with the opinions they already held to begin with.

This dynamic will continue and will have in fact already expanded by the time this piece is read, this being an age in which events overtake the quickest of mediums (and the slowest of dictators). Already a number of this column’s readers have worked to promote such a dynamic, and we hope that more will join us at this crucial time. Many operations are run out of irc.anonsops.ru in #OpTunisia and #OpEgypt; other efforts are hatched at irc.freenode.net #projectpm. I may be reached at barriticus@gmail.com or, for secure communications by those facing surveillance, transistor@hushmail.com. Join us for proof that in such a time as this, one can act against tyranny in the time it takes to complain about it.

(For Freemary, who earned her name.)

In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of “scare quotes” to ensure that it’s clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.

In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research “challenges.”

If the research is about a potential cure, or a solution to a problem, this paragraph will describe how it will raise hopes for a group of sufferers or victims.

This paragraph elaborates on the claim, adding weasel-words like “the scientists say” to shift responsibility for establishing the likely truth or accuracy of the research findings on to absolutely anybody else but me, the journalist…

Foreign Policy runs a regular feature titled "Think Again," in which one or another contributor addresses an issue he deems has been misunderstood by otherwise knowledgeable people. Each section deals with some assertion that the author seeks to correct or clarify; the intent is to bring a skeptical eye to widely held views on matters of global significance, which is a fine thing to attempt when the writer in question is a competent essayist and thinker rather than some other, lesser thing.

In the May/June issue, FP contributing editor Evgeny Morozov takes to "Think Again" in an effort to bring clarity to the general subject of the Internet as it pertains to freedom and representative government. The first section of the article asks whether the assertion "The Internet Has Been a Force for Good" is true. The answer, Morozov says, is no, and he begins to explain why the answer is no-rather than yes or "I don't know"-by reminding us of the hopes expressed by web enthusiasts back in the early days of connectivity, occasionally in their own words. "The Internet was lauded as the ultimate tool to foster tolerance, destroy nationalism, and transform the planet into one great wired global village," he reminds us.

Something seems to have gone awry, though, and fifteen years later tolerance remains unfostered, nationalism is still in existence, and our planet is hardly a wired global village. Morozov does cite one actual claim made long ago by the pro-Internet crowd, here quoting the 1994 manifesto "A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age," which, as he notes, promised the advent of "electronic neighborhoods bound together not by geography but by shared interests." This is an odd claim to cite as representative of unfulfilled hopes, considering that it appears to have been fulfilled if we observe that we do indeed now have online communities made up of people "bound together not by geography but by shared interests," including blogs such as Daily Kos, user-driven discussion sites such as Reddit, and thousands of other such things. If Morozov has a different definition in mind, he has kept it secret from us.

Incidentally, this marks one of the two occasions in the entire article on which Morozov bothers to quote any of the assertions he ascribes to his opponents, and on neither occasion are we treated to anything so bulky as an entire sentence-but then print magazines are subject to space constraints. Limited by his medium, Morozov is forced to continue here by merely summarizing an assertion by Nicholas Negroponte, who "dramatically predicted in 1997 that the Internet would shatter borders between nations and usher in a new era of world peace" or at any rate stated something approximate to that.

Whatever Negroponte said in 1997, it was apparently wrong. "The Internet as we know it has now been around for two decades," Morozov reminds us, "and it has certainly been transformative.… But just as earlier generations were disappointed to see that neither the telegraph nor the radio delivered on the world-changing promises made by their most ardent cheerleaders, we haven't seen an Internet-powered rise in global peace, love, and liberty." I wouldn't know how to measure the degree of global love, much less to what extent one should attribute any change in such a thing to the Internet. This puts me at a disadvantage when dealing with Morozov, who seems to have had a head start on this, so I will concede the point, which he hammers home by noting that the Internet has facilitated "the increased global commerce in protected species." Meanwhile, a group of Serbians have been "turning to Facebook to organize against gay rights" while a group of Saudi Arabians are supposed to be setting up some sort of online version of their Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice squad. All in all, "Many of the transnational networks fostered by the Internet arguably worsen-rather than improve-the world as we know it." Why this necessarily leads to the conclusion that the Internet has not been a force for good is left unaddressed, but there is: a full-page picture of a hand holding a mouse on the facing page.

Having accomplished whatever it is that just happened, Morozov moves on to address more specific assertions such as, "Twitter Will Undermine Dictators." This, it turns out, is wrong. "Tweets don't overthrow governments; people do," Morozov begins, adding that social network sites have proven "both helpful and harmful to activists operating from inside authoritarian regimes." Again, one expects to see Morozov at least attempt to make the case that they have been more harmful than helpful, but he does not seem to consider this a productive line of inquiry; he is busy forgetting what it is that he had set out to prove-that it is wrong to assert that "Twitter Will Undermine Dictators"-and has instead apparently just decided to make the case that Twitter has not managed to actually overthrow any dictators after its few years of existence. "Neither the Iranian nor the Burmese regime has crumbled under the pressure of pixelated photos of human rights abuses circulated on social networking sites," he points out.

Not only has Twitter failed to take down either of the two regimes Morozov lists, but one of those regimes has attempted to use the service for its own ends. "Indeed, the Iranian authorities have been as eager to take advantage of the Internet as their green-clad opponents. After last year's protests in Tehran, Iranian authorities launched a website that publishes photos from the protests, urging the public to identify the unruly protestors by name." We are not told how effective this turned out to be or why this necessarily cancels out the effectiveness of Twitter in organizing the protests to begin with or how the fact that dictators use websites shows that they are not being undermined by the use of Twitter. The fellow's talent is being wasted in socio-political commentary when he could be writing mystery novels.

"Take the favorite poster child of digital utopians," Morozov continues, citing a random example to which some digital utopians may occasionally refer. "In early 2008 a Facebook group started by a 33-year-old Columbian engineer culminated in massive protests, with up to 2 million people marching in Bogota's streets to demonstrate against the brutality of Marxist FARC rebels. (A New York Times article about the protests gushed: ‘Facebook has helped bring public protest to Colombia, a country with no real history of mass demonstrations.')" We might have been fooled into taking this as a factual assessment of what was going on in Colombia had The New York Times refrained from gushing about it, which is a dishonest rhetorical trick that we should be thankful to Morozov for pointing out to us. "However, when the very same ‘digital revolution' last September tried to organize a similar march against Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, they floundered." Facebook, then, cannot always be used to effectively undermine dictators in neighboring countries; pass it on.

"Internet enthusiasts argue that the Web has made organizing easier," Morozov continues. "But this is only partially true," which is to say that it is easier only to the extent that it is easier. "Taking full advantage of online organizing requires a well-disciplined movement with clearly defined goals, hierarchies, and operational procedures." I would retort that such things are necessary in order to take full advantage of anything, and there is nothing of which anyone has ever taken full advantage, but nonetheless these imperfect entities do manage to accomplish things. Again, Morozov was supposed to be showing that Twitter doesn't undermine dictators, not that it frees protester organizers from the necessity of goals and procedures.

Our correspondent next dismisses the myth that "Google Defends Internet Freedom," noting that the company does so "only when convenient." I'm not aware of anyone who argues otherwise other than Google's public relations people, but at any rate Morozov manages to shoot them down.

Next up on the chopping block is the claim that "The Internet Makes Governments More Accountable." "Not necessarily," Morozov retorts, noting that "even when the most detailed data get released, it does not always lead to reformed policies," here citing an example of a single occasion on which the Internet did not make a particular government more accountable, thereby refuting the argument that "The Internet Always Makes Every Government More Accountable in Every Way," which no one has ever made. True accountability, he adds, "will require building healthy democratic institutions and effective systems of checks and balances. The Internet can help, but only to an extent." That all help is inherently a matter of extent and not entirety does not prevent Morozov from throwing out this redundant qualifier by virtue of its perceived use in minimizing the fact that the Internet can indeed be of help in building or reforming such institutions.

The Internet and the claims made on its behalf merit skeptical scrutiny. Skepticism, though, is more than contrarianism in the face of a given claim, and it is wholly incompatible with the style of argument Morozov gives: a haphazard mixture of anecdotal evidence, selective amnesia, non-sequiters, and loaded terminology. When publications "gush" factual assertions and opponents are twice characterized as "cheerleaders" in the space of a single essay, it is not difficult to determine that the essayist in question is seeking shortcuts to persuasion. When an essayist sets out to debunk an assertion by using anecdotal evidence that is weaker than the contrary anecdotal evidence he seeks to nullify, shifting from attacking the original assertion to attacking a broader assertion that no one has made, we ought not be surprised that he has resorted to such shortcuts. We may even be inclined to allow these things as a handicap if we are the magnanimous sort, which we are not.

The Internet has not proven itself to be some surefire weapon against tyranny or injustice or bad taste, but the same can be said for the written word and, really, everything else. But aside from being wrong, arguments to the effect that the last decade has shown the Internet to be a failure as a tool of political change are almost beside the point if our intent is to better understand what the Internet will look like in the future. Had Morozov written a similar essay ten years ago, he would have been arguing against the revolutionary efficacy of a landscape that is drastically different from what we see today-one in which Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were as yet unknown. Ten years from now, new and entirely different tools will be in use, and existing tools will be used in different ways. The Internet will continue in its rapid evolution; the world in turn will be tugged along in the wake of its influence, and the means of human collaboration will continue to multiply just as they have for the last decade and a half-which is to say, orders of magnitude faster than ever before in human history in an environment of fast-increasing social complexity. We have barely received a taste of the phenomena with which we and our very dictators will be confronted in the coming years.

In my first column for this publication, I made what I hope was the convincing case that the rise of the Internet has had a net positive effect on the thought processes of those who use it regularly—comparable, perhaps, to the demonstrable increase in reasoning ability we see in the classical Greek world upon the adaption of written language, which itself appears to be something of a prerequisite for any number of abstract undertakings ranging from political theory to ethics. Appropriately enough, my argument in that instance was itself rather abstract, so would like to expand upon it here, as well as provide concrete evidence which, though anecdotal and thus by itself incapable of proving that the net effect of the net (sorry) has indeed been positive, ought to at least convince the reader that (a) certain dynamics now in play provide for the possibility of a net positive effect on the thought processes of Internet users, (b) these likewise provide for the possibility of a public that is more skeptical overall, and (c) it is extraordinarily likely that some large segment of the general population has already begun to benefit from these dynamics in such a way as to have vastly increased their knowledge and skepticism and that this last phenomenon is almost certain to make itself felt more and more as time goes on. We will be dealing, then, not with the subject of cognition per se, but rather with the specific subjects of knowledge attainment and extent of skepticism.

Such arguments I have made and am about to expand upon are necessary because there are a number of very well-informed people in a variety of pertinent fields who have declaimed my friend the Internet as of late. As noted in my first column, the publication Edge recently asked a number of relevant professionals about their thoughts on the subject. Several neuroscientists and others with similar backgrounds responded with their suspicions, and in some cases their outright declarations, that the Internet has had a deleterious effect on the cognitive functioning of its users. A few took the less critical but far odder stance that Internet use actually has no effect at all on the cognition of its users. This latter opinion is patently absurd; even the process of navigating a busy city street has been convincingly demonstrated to have some measurable effect on brain functioning in general and focus in particular—a negative one, incidentally—and it would be hard to show how a practice such as weaving through pedestrians is much more substantial in terms of the effects on its practitioners than the practice of sitting in front of a computer monitor for hours at a time each day and taking in, navigating, and creating content ranging in nature from text to video to interactive mediums of a hundred sorts.

It might also be tempting to ask those who argue for a negative effect and those who argue for no effect to argue amongst themselves while those of us who have determined otherwise go about making our own case—but it would be unnecessary, as there have been quite a few studies indicating that various computer-related activities do indeed enhance cognitive performance (as is noted by author and Wired contributor Jonah Lehrer in the article on city navigation linked above, incidentally). Still, the issue has yet to be resolved, and it will probably be years before anything approaching a consensus is reached by neuroscientists and others with a professional stake in the question. In the meantime, then, let us finally turn our attention away from cognition and to what we can indeed show to be the effects of Internet use on the knowledge of those who use it with at least moderate responsibility, what potential the Internet possesses in terms of our ability as skeptics to promote our approach to such knowledge, and what this all means for the future.

We would not be amiss in beginning with a quote by one of those experts to whom Edge put the original question of the Internet’s effect on our thinking several months ago—one who had a positive take on the overall dynamic, and who also happens to be noted skeptic Michael Shermer:

Thanks to the Internet, for the first time in my life I feel that I have a chance to compete on a level playing field. My academic background is embarrassing compared to that of most successful intellectuals…. Since teaching as an adjunct professor is no way to make a living (literally), I founded the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine just as the Internet was getting legs in the early-1990s.

Starting with no money, no backers, and no affiliation with elite institutions, the Internet made it possible for us to succeed by making knowledge accessible and searchable to me and my editors and writers on a scale never previously available. The intellectual playing field was being leveled and the Internet changed the way I think about the very real possibility of fairness and opportunity in a world that has for too long been rigged to favor the elite.

Here, Shermer has laid out the basic case for one superbly positive aspect of the Internet: its role in providing individuals with vastly increased opportunities to act, to inform, and to otherwise improve the environment, intellectual or otherwise—and to do so outside of the structures that have developed somewhat haphazardly around our major institutions, such as academia and media. Neither the Skeptics Society nor Skeptic would have succeeded, Shermer himself notes, without the Internet’s particular advantages—and certainly both of those institutions have had some great degree of positive effect on the thinking of a large number of people. Of course, it is also true that the Internet has given rise to all manner of deleterious institutions with net negative impacts on the thinking of individuals, such as Web sites advocating for crystal healing and e-mail forwards to the effect that Barack Obama is the antichrist or even Kenyan. I will note, and the reader will perhaps agree, that the sort of people who are taken in by such things were probably already lost causes to some degree or another, and that it matters very little whether such people add some additional piece of falsity to their respective quivers of nonsense. But I will not let myself off the hook so easily; instead, I will note that for every false assertion that spreads via the Internet, the actual truth of the thing is just as readily available to those who desire the truth—and those who desire something less than the truth will always get it, the avoidance of cognitive dissonance being the defining drive of such people.

Again, we cannot know with certainty the net effect of all this in terms of the distribution of the true versus that of the false, but it is worth repeating that the Internet has made available a vast storehouse of reliable information, far more than had previously been available to anyone who has ever lived. Significantly, such information is not only available, but quite readily so—and thus more likely to be accessed.

There is another factor at work here, one that amplifies the positive potential of the Internet as it currently exists: the particular Web institutions to which we turn for knowledge—regardless of whether we are erudite or ignorant—are in the control of relatively rational individuals who have wisely engineered such entities to serve as reliable sources of facts. Wikipedia, for example, has been the target of countless one-liners calling it an unreliable tool for gathering information. As is so often the case, it is the one-liners and the popular sentiment expressed thereby that are in error; Nature published a study in 2005 showing that the online encyclopedia was about as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica. This revelation was not particularly shocking to those of us who have kept a close eye on such emergent Internet phenomena as Wikipedia, which operates under a system of rules that require every assertion to be tied to a verifiable source and which, unlike printed works, also facilitates links to such sources and thereby allows users to verify context and otherwise ensure that the facts on display are indeed facts. Meanwhile, Wikipedia continues to improve as new experts join the ranks of its editors and scan articles to ensure accuracy. It is worth putting into perspective the concerns with this outlet being something that “anyone can edit,” as not everyone does, of course, and those who do are by definition the sort of people who would spend their free time editing an online encyclopedia for fun—not a surefire prevention of foolishness by any means, but one that at least seems to attract more technocrats than fools, as may be discovered by an examination of the contributions of the average editor and which may be confirmed in part by the Nature study.

The mechanisms and dynamics of the online world that we find in play within the enterprise of Wikipedia may of course be found elsewhere as well. At its best, the Internet outperforms the best of equivalent brick-and-mortar institutions hands down. And it is the best of the Internet that tends to draw the attention of those clever enough to make accurate determinations regarding such things. It is well known among observant people that such outlets as CNN and The Washington Post are quite inferior in many respects to the better blogs, for instance; as evidence of this, I will note that the former provides a largely uncritical outlet for such people as psychic Sylvia Browne and End Times advocate Joel Rosenberg, and that the latter has promoted Charles Krauthammer as some sort of expert on foreign policy, despite the fact—easier to verify, incidentally, due to the Internet’s archival nature—that the Pulitzer winner has been demonstrably wrong in his predictions about every single U.S. military action conducted in the past twelve years, at the very least. Incidentally, Krauthammer’s liberal counterpart, Thomas Friedman—another Pulitzer winner who is widely regarded by the ignorant as some sort of modern polymath—has been similarly wrong on such a wide range of subjects that I have composed some dozen articles and a book chapter on this unwholesome subject without expending the entirety of the examples I have discovered in my perusals of his past columns, and does not seem to have ever been particularly correct about anything that is not common knowledge among the educated. Meanwhile, no one has attempted to make a similar case against those regarded as among the best of the bloggers, such as Salon’s Glenn Greenwald or Middle East expert and independent blogger Dr. Juan Cole. In light of these and other observations, I do not think I would be amiss in thinking that it is the more orthodox institutions that merit scrutiny, rather than these more modern institutions, which are still evolving after existing for a scant decade—particularly since the former are largely insulated from any reasoned criticism of the sort that might be seen by their respective audiences, while the latter are each day subject to that very thing by way of commenters and other bloggers.

Plainly, the best of bloggers are not representative of the whole of them, no matter how much better they may be in comparison to the most unjustifiably prominent of columnists, and this is true of all emergent institutions we find on the Internet. Still, there are mechanisms by which the reasoned individual may quickly sift through the nonsense of the many in order to obtain the wise counsel of the few. This brings us to the example of reddit.com, a Web site at which users may submit various online materials for the consideration of others, who subsequently upvote or downvote these entries based on their perceived value. Thus, the collective usership of this entity promotes to the top those articles deemed to have merit while strangling in the crib those deemed to have none. It does not take much imagination to see how such a system can fail, but experience with this system reveals it to surpass the medium of the newspaper or television program in its usefulness. As is the case with Wikipedia, those familiar with the site in the first place have passed what amounts to a test of their knowledge—in this case, knowledge of the existence of some information-oriented entity. Such a test immediately excludes several billion people who are, on the whole, less knowledgeable than those of us with the benefit of having lived in the Western world—a Masai tribesman, for all his virtues, does not understand the theory of evolution and for similar reasons is unlikely to know of reddit or Wikipedia or even the Internet, and is thus not likely to show up at Wikipedia to edit an article on germ theory to include information on the demonic origin of disease. To a lesser extent, but by way of the same dynamic, the creationist Texan is unlikely to waste everyone’s time with the product of his more self-enforced brand of ignorance, not being as likely as a research scientist to learn of Wikipedia, reddit, or any of the other institutions that have come to exist as concentrations of erudite individuals with relatively high levels of education and intellectual curiosity.

Similar to the case of Wikipedia, then, is the more exciting case of reddit, filled as it is with implications for the future of human organization and collaboration. On a typical day some months back, one user submitted an article announcing that President Obama promised federal financial backing for the opening of new nuclear power plants. Other users understood the significance of this story and voted it to the top of the front page where it would be seen by all. Meanwhile, various individuals posted comments that would likewise be visible to anyone who cared to see them (and most users did seem to be so inclined). A few comments questioned the wisdom of nuclear power, citing the cases of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl; these were answered promptly by others aware of the actual facts behind the cases, such as the absolute lack of casualties of the former and the easily avoided failures that prompted the latter, and who were likewise quick to point out the widespread death and pollution caused by such alternatives as coal. Overall, the vast majority of the comments in question were made in justifiable defense of nuclear power, while the minority of comments in opposition were quickly answered with a range of verifiable facts. Compare this result to the impression one might receive on the subject from one of the usual outlets—in fact, such a comparison is provided by one of the commenters:

I was watching NBC news tonight where I saw the announcement of this and, of course, they were showing pictures of the Chernobyl aftermath. WHY?!

We need media that educates instead of terrifies...

Indeed we do—and by way of the emergent dynamics of the Internet, we are starting to get it.

By necessity, this essay has provided only an overview of the case for the Internet as compared to other mediums. Certain concepts described herein merit additional commentary, evidence, and context, and I hope to provide them in subsequent columns. In the meantime, I will end by noting that, whatever the advantages that the Internet may provide to our skeptical endeavors even without any direct action on our behalf, such dynamics also entail vast opportunities in this regard—opportunities that will be wasted unless we move quickly to identify and act on them. I provided one opportunity in my last column and have received responses from readers of the Skeptical Inquirer. Next month, I will announce a more specific, related opportunity, one with the potential to accomplish a great deal of what we all would like to see accomplished. I request that the reader consider the first opportunity and return here for the second.

Even more to the point, the situation has just recently entered a state of unprecedented flux prompted almost entirely by the onset of the information age and its all-encompassing primary feature, the Internet. If we’re willing to take the opportunity, the organized skeptic community can have a hand in assisting with the magnificent and unprecedented revolution that is now occurring, as well as utilizing its dynamics to spread skepticism in general—and our specific debunkings in particular—to a far larger audience than we have at present. More importantly, we will vastly improve our influence upon those who are not already active skeptics and who are thus more likely to personally benefit from the knowledge we bring to the table.

We have an opportunity to do something great, something unprecedented, something revolutionary. All that is needed is a viable plan—which, of course, is like saying that all we need to buy the Empire State Building is the money to do so as well as some people to handle the actual purchase for us.

If we acknowledge that things are not necessarily the way they should be but rather simply the way they are, we might go on to conclude that that which happens to be is not necessarily that which would be best.  The totality of human society may therefore be expected to exist in something less than a state of perfection. The reader is invited to confirm this for himself.

We are aware, then, that society has suffered from imperfections in the past and may extrapolate from this that society suffers from imperfections in the present insomuch as the present is simply the past in gestation, which is to say that we may find great similarity in the now as compared to, say, the now minus ten years. Still, portions of the past may differ in some respects from the present—the past contains the Ottoman Empire, for instance, whereas the present does not. This is reassuring, as it would seem to indicate that the future may differ from the present as well, particularly if we give it cause to do so.  Of course, we cannot help but give the future cause to take a certain form, as we influence it merely by existing in the present, which is the future’s raw material. The present, incidentally, is the unconscious conspiracy of the past; it does not come to us through design. The exception is that small portion of a given present—breakfast, a cigarette, an overthrow of some flawed institution—which is the result of conscious planning in the past by self-aware beings. To the extent that we are able and willing to do so, then, we may conspire against the future in such a way that will bring about such things as these. To have breakfast later, one makes the appropriate preparations beforehand.

The reader may object that it is all well and good to point out that things are not perfect and perhaps ought to be changed, but there is a great difference between pointing out flaws and eradicating them. The difference, our objector continues, is akin to the difference between breakfast, cigarettes, and institutional overthrows; the first two may be successfully pursued by individuals whereas the third tends to require some degree of collaboration, which itself is more difficult to set into motion. Certainly these differences are real, and certainly the overthrowing of institutions is a business best pursued in tandem with other individuals—and certainly such arrangements require the cooperation of others and are difficult to bring about. But in a more fundamental sense, an institutional overthrow can be set in motion by way of an individual action just as fixing breakfast or obtaining a cigarette can be. If, for instance, an individual is able to devise a plan by which such an overthrow may be successfully accomplished and is able to convince others to adopt the plan in such a way as that the plan is perpetuated to the extent necessary to achieve the intended change, then, yes, an individual may cause an institution to be overthrown.

Now the reader may also object that, aside from the semantics of what constitutes individual action, there is still quite a bit of substantive difference between making breakfast or acquiring a cigarette and convincing others to adopt some plan to overthrow an institution. The former actions are quite easily accomplished every day by quite a few individuals; the latter, we might agree, is a great rarity—but we would be wrong because such a thing is not rare at all. Each day, one convinces others to collaborate on some or another thing, such as the preparation of breakfast. It is simply a matter of convincing others to join one in doing such a thing.

Again, the reader objects, this time noting that it is nothing more than a transparent rhetorical trick to compare the persuasion of others to join one in making breakfast to the persuasion of others to join one in attempting to pull off something so ambitious as the overthrow of an institution. There is, one would note, a major difference in terms of feasibility between the making of breakfast and the making of trouble. To overthrow something worth overthrowing, one would have to concoct a plan that would be sufficiently promising to incite the interest of others. One would have to locate those individuals who are in a position to ensure that the plan is disseminated to the extent necessary for implementation, and then one would have to contact them and convince them not only to agree with the plan but to act on it. To the extent that the plan requires resources, expertise, and infrastructure, all of these things must be secured, and this may require one to convince others to provide these things. To summarize, one must put in place the conditions by which the plan is not only possible but deemed desirable and viable by those whose cooperation is necessary to implement it. One must set things in motion.

I will admit at this point that one perhaps ought not to consider contributing to a project unless it is reasonably expected to succeed. Likewise, I will admit that such tasks as described above are easier stated than done. I am happy to admit that I know all of these things must be done because I have already done them all.

The formal announcement and manifesto for Project PM will be forthcoming, although I have released bits and pieces of the overall plan in the three months since I first announced what I had in mind in an article for Vanity Fair. On this occasion, I would like to address the skeptic community as a whole in order to recruit as many as I can for the project, for much the same reason that the Byzantine emperors sought to recruit as many Varangians as they could for their own projects—there is no demographic that is better-equipped to operate in the landscape that is now open to us. And the landscape is very much open to us; the Internet has come about so rapidly that few have yet to grasp its meaning and its potential, while its particular wonders have come about with such regularity that we have ceased to wonder at them and indeed would only wonder if the wonders ever ceased.

A more intricate description of how Project PM works may be found here. Briefly, the effort involves two major components. Both of these components operate within a network that I have designed to take special advantage of the Internet’s peculiarities as medium while also avoiding those problems that have arisen almost universally within those communities to which the Internet has given rise. The first network encompasses commentators who operate at least partially online—mostly bloggers who got their respective starts as such but also journalists who have begun writing for online outlets after initially working in print, television, and radio. The second network encompasses everyone else—people with wildly varying skill sets, backgrounds, and physical locations across the globe, the common element being a great degree of erudition and intellectual honesty as well as a willingness to take responsibility for the future of human society. Both networks are designed to grow exponentially while at the same time retaining quality; how this is achieved is explained at the link above.

The first network will serve as the most efficient possible means of obtaining the most important information as determined by the most capable of commentators; it will also serve to confront and engage the amoral and rudderless media infrastructure as it exists today, combining forces on occasion to focus attention on a particular outlet or media figure who has managed to accrue some great deal of unearned influence and respectability. In concentrating on one particular target by way of advance agreement, participants will thereby create the critical mass necessary to prompt the major outlets to address those of its own failures that otherwise would remain unknown to the general public. This tactic will also be employed in a more general way, as a means of raising awareness of any particular topic that the mainstream media as a whole lacks the inclination to cover in any serious manner.

The second network will serve to run all aspects of Project PM other than those handled by the first network. It is best thought of as a sort of ever-expanding House of Lords, at least during such time as I retain control of the project; after this body has finished composing the more specific procedures by which it will operate on a day-to-day basis, the network will thereafter exist as something similar to what we saw in anarchist Catalonia. At that point, I will be stepping down from my current role so that the body may carry out its other fundamental mission—to demonstrate the administrative viability of a technocratic organization operating under this particular network schematic and recruited in such a fashion as I have gone about recruiting the several dozen members who have joined thus far, a process I will describe at a later date in order to provide others with the knowledge necessary to build their own networks. Similarly, the fundamental mission of Project PM as an entity is to encourage the development of other, similar entities—self-perpetuating, self-governing organizations harnessing human talent from around the globe, operating as representative meritocracies and built with the intent of shaking up the existing order. Such entities as I envision and hope to spur on by example will have numerous advantages over those more orthodox institutions on which man has relied for ten thousand years. Collectively, they will constitute a grand public conspiracy against every manner of nonsense.

All of that is decades away, though. Here and now, we have the specific goal of improving the process of information flow. As of this writing, I have assembled a fine cadre of bloggers with a collective monthly audience of several hundred thousand people, and each of these bloggers will soon be selecting others to connect to them within the network; they will in turn choose others, and so on. We have Allison Kilkenny, an up-and-coming commentator who deals in policy as a cable anchor deals in cheery banter, and who in addition to her blogging hosts the satisfyingly wonkish program Citizen Radio along with her co-host and husband, comedian Jamie Kilstein. We have Michael Hastings, who served as Newsweek’s Baghdad correspondent and afterwards covered the 2008 election, at which point he grew disgusted with the frivolous nature of political coverage in this nation and left a prestigious position in favor of more virtuous pastures. We have Charles Johnson, the pioneering founder of the blog Little Green Footballs who was among the most widely-read of political bloggers until he found himself at odds with the bulk of his allies and audience due to his support for science and his opposition to racism. I am also in talks with other, similarly prominent commentators and journalists who have likewise demonstrated themselves to be experts in their respective subjects as well as intellectually honest. Meanwhile, the governing network is thus far comprised of academics of various sorts, programmers, hedge fund managers, global risk analysts, political activists, as well as individuals of no formal credentials but of demonstrable honesty and erudition—all the credentials one requires in such an age as this, when institutionalism for institutionalism’s sake is finally and happily threatened by the meritocratic dynamics of the Internet and the culture that it has facilitated.

Today, I am seeking to recruit skeptics for both of these networks; I want them to be as over-represented within Project PM as they are under-represented in the U.S. Congress and every state legislature in the U.S. If you are a blogger or other media professional, get in touch. If you are simply a private citizen with a penchant for skepticism and the desire to take on those institutions that perpetuate ignorance when they could just as easily bring about understanding, get in touch. We look back on Houdini, on Sagan, on the still-cantankerous Randi, and we see how much they have achieved for the world and the manner in which the man on the street perceives it. They did what they did without the tools that we ourselves have. The only failure that awaits us is that which stems from failing to follow the example of those who stood up and acted in service to the cause of skepticism, which is itself the cause of truth.

The patent clerk myth had been printed as fact in quite a few respected publications throughout 1999—this, despite that very same myth having been debunked by the Skeptical Inquirer back in 1989. Ten years after the tale was shown to be false, a number of professional journalists and their fact-checkers got wind of it and determined it to be true. Yet another ten years on, I recalled the tale and was able to determine it to be false—and after less than half a minute of thing-clicking. This is hardly to my credit; I was simply working in an informational landscape vastly superior to that which existed a decade ago. For instance, humanity has made impressive strides with regards to the results one may obtain by way of thing-clicking.

Look back to 1989, when the Skeptical Inquirer article in question was released. Tens of thousands of people may have read the piece at that time and found it interesting, but altogether the author was unable to have much positive impact on the public understanding. The limitations of the era made it quite unlikely anyone who read the piece would happen to be in a position to use the information therein in any significant manner; conversely, those who could have used the information in some way that would be of measurable benefit were quite unlikely to have known that such a useful article existed, much less been able to locate it, and thus it was that some dozen or so feature editors ran the myth as fact. In terms of its utility to the public understanding, then, the article might as well not even have existed until it existed on the Internet.

Taken together, the rise of the search engine coupled with the digitalization of vast amounts of information that would have previously been either difficult or impossible to access has provided us with unprecedented opportunities to debunk that which requires debunking, as well as to ensure that a given debunking is particularly accessible to those who happen to be looking into a given subject. This is just as well; the rise of such things as e-mail forwards have provided our not-so-skeptical adversaries with similarly unprecedented opportunities to perpetuate things that need to be debunked, which you've probably experienced to the extent that you're included in the address books of people in whose address books you were not really intending to be included. The question that naturally arises, then, concerns whether the particular dynamics of the Internet have had the overall effect of fueling nonsense or throttling it.

The reader will agree that the extent and nature of the stimuli that one takes in has some effect on the content one accumulates in one's mind; the reader will just as readily agree that the Internet has some effect in turn on the extent and nature of the stimuli one takes in. To the extent that one uses the Internet, then, one is subjected to a different array of stimuli than if one did not use the Internet. We thus establish that the Internet does indeed have some effect on the content one accumulates in one's mind.

Less immediately obvious, though still fairly obvious, is the extent to which a given medium has an effect not only on the user's knowledge base, but even the structure of the mind itself, and thus in turn its potential products. The adaptation of writing by the classical Greeks, for instance, appears to have brought radical changes in the nature of Greek output, allowing for a fundamentally greater degree of abstract thought than was previously possible and allowing in turn for systems of ethics and high philosophical commentary of the sort that we do not seem to find in the oral output of the pre-alphabet Greeks or any preliterate culture, in fact. Plainly, this is an extreme example, and the transition from orality to literacy is likely of more severity in terms of the cognition of the user than is the transition from the printing press to the Internet (both of which are merely sub-mediums by which literacy may be conveyed). Even so, the severity of the former is of sufficiently high degree that the lesser severity of the latter is nonetheless potentially quite great in its own right. The shift from a textual environment defined by the printing press to one providing for the Internet as well, then, must have some undefined impact—perhaps even a great one—on the cognitive abilities of those of us who have participated in the transition, as well as those who will have grown up in the post-transition era.

The attentive reader will notice that we have yet to establish whether or not the cognitive impact that we have determined to exist along with the impact on one's knowledge base is a good or bad thing in terms of the mind's overall functioning. The more widely-read attentive reader will notice that my assertion to the effect that the Internet has any cognitive effect at all is itself controversial and is in fact disputed by a number of prominent neuroscientists and others whose views on the subject would presumably merit attention. Before we continue, such objections ought to be addressed.

In January of this year, the publication Edge released the responses to a question its editors had posed to dozens of authors, journalists, artists, and scientists: "How is the Internet changing the way you think?" The results were picked up by such mainstream outlets as Newsweek, from which science editor Sharon Begley makes the following observation:

Although a number of contributors drivel on about, say, how much time they waste on e-mail, the most striking thing about the 50-plus answers is that scholars who study the mind and the brain, and who therefore seem best equipped to figure out how the Internet alters thought, shoot down the very idea.

For instance, Harvard cognitive neuroscientist Joshua Butler responded to the question in part by way of the following:

The Internet hasn't changed the way we think anymore than the microwave oven has changed the way we digest food. The Internet has provided us with unprecedented access to information, but it hasn't changed what we do with it once it's made it into our heads. This is because the Internet doesn't (yet) know how to think. We still have to do it for ourselves, and we do it the old-fashioned way. Until then, the Internet will continue to be nothing more, and nothing less, than a very useful, and very dumb, butler.

Others, including some with backgrounds in neuroscience as well as psychology and related fields, expressed agreement with this general conclusion, if not necessarily for the same reasons. And thus Begley is correct to note that "scholars who study the mind and brain" dismiss the idea that "the Internet alters thought." But as she herself makes clear later in her piece, other scholars of similar and even identical areas of expertise entirely embrace the idea, while still others identify it as a reasonable possibility. One might wonder how Begley decided that the "most striking thing" about the answers is that some mind-oriented scholars dismissed the idea of the Internet's impact on thinking, rather than that other mind-oriented scholars embraced it. Begley herself quotes several of the latter group and even makes her own passing reference to "the (few) positive changes in thinking the Internet has caused" after having quoted additional experts who likewise ascribe to the concept of the Internet having an effect on the thinking of its users, although considering such changes to be largely negative. One might conclude that the truly "most striking thing" about the results is that mind-oriented experts are in fact split three ways on whether the Internet has positive, negative, or no effects whatsoever on the mental processes of those who use it, while others consider the truth to be undetermined.

Of those opinions expressed to the effect that Internet use has either no or negative effects, several appear not to make much sense. Begley provides a briefer version of the following excerpt from the answer given by Foreign Policy contributing editor Evgeny Morozov:

What I find particularly worrisome with regards to the "what" question is the rapid and inexorable disappearance of retrospection and reminiscence from our digital lives. One of the most significant but overlooked Internet developments of 2009 — the arrival of the so-called "real-time Web", whereby all new content is instantly indexed, read, and analyzed — is a potent reminder that our lives are increasingly lived in the present, completely detached even from the most recent of the pasts....

In a sense, this is hardly surprising: the social beast that has taken over our digital lives has to be constantly fed with the most trivial of ephemera. And so we oblige, treating it to countless status updates and zetabytes of multimedia (almost a thousand photos are uploaded to Facebook every second!). This hunger for the present is deeply embedded in the very architecture and business models of social networking sites.

Regardless of what one thinks of Facebook, it is difficult to see that Morozov has really shown that an obsession with photos and other records of the past somehow denotes some unseemly and unwarranted "hunger for the present." It would be even more difficult to see how the nature of the Internet, which has provided unprecedentedly facilitated access to the whole of the past at least to the extent that the past has been recorded, is of any greater detriment to man's collective focus on that which came before him. Sitting in an easy chair in some unscrubbed corner of Brooklyn, I may obtain, within just a few seconds, a general summary of any known event in the history of man or nature, coupled with links to more specific and comprehensive sources of information on some great number of aspects of such an event, including those pieces of data from which the general summary was originally composed in the first place. How long would this have taken in the 1950s, even for someone with the advantage of residing in some cultural node equipped with fine libraries, universities, and potentially accessible experts? It would have likely taken at least an hour even in such an optimal environment as the grounds of a university, which is the sort of place that not even a student is likely to be at any given moment, if memory serves, which it very well may not. It would certainly not have taken a mere ten seconds, as it would today for me to learn something about, for instance, the Russo-Japanese War. Incidentally, I just Googled that term, clicked on a link to its Wikipedia article, browsed the table of contents found at the top of that page, went straight to a subsection of that article, read the assertion that Japanese civilians were on the whole not particularly happy with the extent to which Japan pressed Russia for concessions after its victory, and then verified that this was the case by clicking on a citation which in turn led me to the text of a newspaper account of the treaty in question—a New York Times article from 1905, itself one of the millions of artifacts to which our predecessors would have been unable to receive access without some degree of wasted time and difficulty, if at all. The past has never been anywhere near as accessible, nor as accessed, yet some complain that the Internet has prompted us to become "completely detached" from the past in the favor of the present, which itself has never been so lacking in accessible content relative to that which came before.

Naturally, other sorts of objections are raised in the responses. University of California neurobiologist Leo Chalupa challenges the Internet's utility in a manner that does not seem to draw on his relevant specialty:

The Internet is the greatest detractor to serious thinking since the invention of television. Moreover, while the Internet provides a means for rapidly communicating with colleagues globally, the sophisticated user will rarely reveal true thoughts and feelings in such messages. Serious thinking requires honest and open communication and that is simply untenable on the Internet by those that value their professional reputation.

I know of no situation in which "honest and open communication" is necessarily tenable in the first place, although Chalupa is correct that there is more to lose in conveying unpopular thoughts by way of some facet of the Internet, which, as he notes, "provides a means for rapidly communicating with colleagues globally" and could thus be used to more widely convey some opinion that would consequently evoke some negative reaction from one's fellows, particularly if one's fellows are easily upset. But surely Chalupa has some useful information to convey that will not enrage his colleagues, and at any rate one would expect that the majority of the information he'd be inclined to disseminate by way of the Internet would be of value, and not damage, either to the world or to his own reputation. And surely the majority of accessible information is worth being made available to the majority of connected humans, and certainly the information to which one is likely to expose oneself on the Internet is, on the whole, accurate, and thus potentially useful. Certainly there is misinformation to be found and in some cases believed, and certainly there is some degree of irrelevant information that one might be inclined to take in at the expense of time dedicated to other, more useful pursuits. But the objection that the Internet's facilitation of information flow may damage one's "professional reputation" due to one's colleagues being unable to handle one's awesome yet edgy ideas does not strike me as a particularly damning condemnation of the communications age, although it may tell us something about neurobiology, which sounds more and more interesting.

There are certainly downsides—of both the merely potential and nearly universal sorts—to use of the Internet, particularly if the one doing the using is proceeding in an undisciplined manner. Even its advantages are potential traps, as is known to anyone who has sought out data on some relevant thing like Chinese wheat production only to spend two hours learning the plots of various Japanese role playing games. The potential for information addiction is real. But upon the harnessing of fire, man must have wasted quite a bit of time staring into it even after having properly utilized it in cooking his meals. Every new invention entails a test of our will.

Still, I will not cop out of this argument by suddenly declaring that we all have free will and what will be will be, a tact that God is always taking out of plain intellectual cowardice. Rather, I will note again that the views expressed above regarding the Internet's lack of impact on the human mind are countered by views to the contrary held by individuals with just as much claim to our attention by virtue of academic background as those with whom they are in disagreement.

While the credentialed debate the subject, we may consider that the perpetuation of information has, on average, been a positive thing for humanity's station on the planet, where we were once in actual competition with its other inhabitants but have since outran them all and are now preparing to decide which of our old adversaries will get to accompany us to Mars. Insomuch as the knowledge we have gained will soon allow us to spread the planet's life beyond the planet's own confines and thus to perpetuate it well beyond its earth-bound potential, and to the extent that we favor the perpetuation of life, we ought to agree that the process by which we have obtained the means to accomplish all of this—the general uptrend in the average human being's access to information—might very well be something worth maintaining. And then we might remember that no one is seriously arguing that the Internet has not increased the average human being's access to information. Whatever other effects it may have on one’s mind, it is at least providing it with the unprecedented potential that comes with having one's mind satiated as the mind wills. Likewise, it brings the revolutionary novelty that arises when individuals can obtain any information in any combination, individuals being to some degree defined by the information that informs their thoughts. No biologist should object to the mixing of genes; no humanist should object to the mixing of memes.

Though it has not been proven that the Internet has some overall cognitive effect on its users that we would deem positive, those who are convinced that the effect is largely negative or even nonexistent have yet to compile any airtight case. But if we ask the specific question regarding whether or not the Internet assists the cause of skepticism, we may show that it assists the cause of information and trust in our collective judgment that the former has nothing to fear from the latter.