Philosophical Musings on the Underbelly of Information Age

espanolEste trabajo representa una mirada reflexiva a las entranas de la Era de la Informacion. Sus oportunidades y promesas han sido desviadas a dudosos finales, manipulando a los usuarios de las tecnologias de la informacion hacia recompensas economicas y poder politico. El analisis desde la investigacion previa y en curso, permite identificar diferentes maneras de caracterizar la Era de la Informacion como la Era de la Caverna de Platon (inspirada por Platon y Aristoteles), la Era de la Distraccion (inspirada por Heidegger), la Era de la Desinformacion (inspirada por la manipulacion de los contenidos de Internet para provocar guerras de informacion y desinformacion), la Era del Capitalismo Vigilante (inspirada por el uso que hacen las companias de tecnologias de la informacion, de programas informaticos y aplicaciones para manipular el comportamiento de los consumidores),y la Era de los Agravios Exacerbados (inspirada por el uso de los sitios web de Internet y las aplicaciones, para consolidar e inflamar los agravios politicos partisanos, asi como para mantener, conquistar o manipular el poder politico). Las ultimas dos plantean los mas grandes peligros para la destruccion de las democracias, los paises y el planeta. portuguesHa um ponto fraco da Era da Informacao. As suas oportunidades e promessas tem sido desviadas para fins duvidosos, manipulando os utilizadores das tecnologias de informacao para recompensas economica e poder politico. Baseando-nos em pesquisas anteriores e atuais, colocamos diferentes formas de caracterizar a Era da Informacao como a Era das Cavernas de Platao (inspirada por Platao e Aristoteles), a Era da Distracao (inspirada por Heidegger), a Era da Desinformacao (inspirada pela manipulacao do conteudo da Internet para provocar guerras de informacao-desinformacao), a Era do Capitalismo de Vigilância (inspirada pelo uso de software e aplicacoes das empresas de tecnologia de informacao para manipular o comportamento dos consumidores), e a Era das Inflamadas Reclamacoes (inspirada pelo uso de sites e aplicacoes da Internet para solidificar e inflamar as reclamacoes politicas partidarias de modo a manter, ganhar ou manipular o poder politico). Os dois ultimos representam os maiores perigos para a destruicao das democracias, dos paises e do planeta. EnglishThere is an underbelly of the Age of Information. Its opportunities and promises have been diverted to dubious ends, manipulating the users of information technologies for economic rewards and political power. Drawing and extrapolating on previous and current research, we pose different ways to characterize the Age of Information as the Age of Plato's Cave-Dwellers (inspired by Plato and Aristotle), the Age of Distraction (inspired by Heidegger), the Age of Disinformation (inspired by the manipulation of internet content to provoke information-disinformation wars), the Age of Surveillance Capitalism (inspired by information technology companies' use of software and apps to manipulate consumer behavior), and the Age of Inflamed Grievances (inspired by the use of internet sites and apps to solidify and inflame partisan political grievances so as to maintain, gain or manipulate political power). The last two pose the greatest dangers to the destruction of democracies, countries and the planet.


Resumo
Há um ponto fraco da Era da Informação. As suas oportunidades e promessas têm sido desviadas para fins duvidosos, manipulando os utilizadores das tecnologias de informação para recompensas económica e poder político. Baseando-nos em pesquisas anteriores e atuais, colocamos diferentes formas de caracterizar a Era da Informação como a Era das Cavernas de Platão (inspirada por Platão e Aristóteles), a Era da Distração (inspirada por Heidegger), a Era da Desinformação (inspirada pela manipulação do conteúdo da Internet para provocar guerras de informação-desinformação), a Era do Capitalismo de Vigilância (inspirada pelo uso de software e aplicações das empresas de tecnologia de informação para manipular o comportamento dos consumidores), e a Era das Inflamadas Reclamações (inspirada pelo uso de sites e aplicações da Internet para solidificar e inflamar as reclamações políticas partidárias de modo a manter, ganhar ou manipular o poder político). Os dois últimos representam os maiores perigos para a destruição das democracias, dos países e do planeta. his Theaetetus, Socrates suggested that knowledge is justified true belief (201 cd). For example, one may believe that the area of a circle is equal to πr 2 (pi times the radius squared) and then prove it (at which point it becomes knowledge) (see the slave experiment in Meno, 82b-85b). Some opinion cannot be so converted: e.g., a belief in the "best movie of the past year" or the "best political novel."

Palavras
Information specialists or librarians try to promote opinions (δόξα -doxa) as information -and within these, we hope at least to provide "right opinion" or the orthodoxy (ὀπθοδοξία, orthodoxia -"right opinion") that we hope will lead to some version of truth(s). The orthodoxy, to resurrect a not so common word, is the "knowledge" of a subject according to the prevailing paradigm of that subject, generally built on the consensus of its experts.
Imagining is a distorted perception of the sensible world. It is not hard to relate this state with the beliefs of many citizens in contemporary culture, for example, persons who believe in QAnon or that Trump was a competent strategist in handling the coronavirus pandemic. Plato's lowest category may be likened to a cognitive state where all fake news is accepted as fact. Understanding false beliefs or imaginings in the world of misinformation and disinformation, however, might be further elucidated by using Plato's Allegory of the Cave (Plato,Republic,. Socrates describes a situation that takes place in a dark cave. A number of prisoners have lived in this deep cave since birth, never seeing the light of day, and are physically constrained in such a way that they cannot look to either side or behind them. Behind them is a fire, and behind the fire is a low wall, from behind which various objects are lifted into the air manipulated by another group of people, who are out of sight behind the wall. The fire casts shadows of the objects across the wall facing the prisoners. The prisoners watch the sequences that the shadows play out and play games predicting the sequences and sounds that reverberate in the cave. When they refer to one of the shadows as a "chair" for example, they are not actually seeing a chair, but rather the shadow of a chair, Informatio 26(1), 2021, pp. 132-177 ISSN: 2301-1378 confusing its shadowy appearance with actual reality. Because of their condition and constraints, they believe their perceptions are the most real things in the world. They are so convinced of the reality of their context, they mock anyone who would make claims otherwise.
As the allegory continues to be extrapolated, the prisoners are forced to come to see their actual condition, first by being shocked into an awareness of their condition, by becoming aware of the real source of the light (the fire and then the sun), seeing how things are as they are forced to move out of the cave; and second through a mid-wife (a la Socrates), letting them, through an interrogation, to come to understand for themselves, in a form of self-realization, their actual condition.
In the Platonic/Socratic view of true education, there are two aspects of the Socratic method of education. Socrates as a stingray, electric eel or gadfly (to which he is referred variously Platonic writings), shocking or benumbing his interlocutors into an awareness of their ignorance as they are temporarily blinded by the light. The purpose of this shock is to clear away what one unidentified commentator referred to as "the conceit of false knowledge." It is a brilliant succinct description of the intent of the first aspect of the Socratic method. In the second aspect, Socrates plays a midwife -using questions skillfully to have his interlocutors come to a self-realization of their true condition, guiding them to the birth of their ideas.
This conversion process does not always succeed as many are secure in their state of ignorance; or they lack the wit to follow the logical conclusion of Socrates's questions. In current psychological jargon, they are victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect. They think that they are competent thinkers, but they lack critical thinking abilities that allow them to understand that there are alternate perceptions of reality or that their critical thinking abilities lack a foundation. They are unaware of what they are unaware and do not have the capacity to make themselves aware.
The Socratic method is prefaced, if you recall many of Plato's dialogs, with his profession of ignorance. His interlocutor in a dialog, e.g., Meno in the Meno, brings up a topic to be discussed, such as virtue. Socrates' response is an enthusiastic willingness to learn, because he professes that he has little or no knowledge of the topic at hand. His profession of ignorance has been referred to as ironic, because in the end, his knowledge of the topic, as 'limited' as it is professed to be, turns out to be the most informed.
What is fascinating is the condition out of which education takes place from a Socratic perspective: the rise of "imaginings" or ignorance. This condition can help us understand contemporary world politics, especially in U. S. presidential politics. Not only are many supporters of Trump are likened to Cave Dwellers but also that they are happy with their condition and do not want to leave. And they mock those who would claim otherwise, claiming that the outsiders believe in fake news. The irony is that their reality is fake, and what is fake to them is reality. The question is how and why. During the current coronavirus pandemic, Trump has made claims for his managing the pandemic in the best possible way, that he had anticipated the pandemic, that there were enough tests and ventilators.
All of these claims are verifiably false (by citing scientific evidence), but that does not seem to deter most of the viewers of Fox News (an ultra-right cable news propaganda machine) either to endorse his leadership or to ignore, dismiss or rationalize (e.g., he really did not mean what he said) some of his claims (e.g., to internally use bleach or disinfectant to cure the coronavirus).
It would seem that there is the cognition below imagining, where not only are false beliefs entertained, but they are proudly and loudly proclaimed as knowledge and any other sources or viewpoints are disavowed as fake news, that there is only one viewpoint, theirs, for which no claims or evidence will render it problematic.
It is where the weak willfully subject themselves to the strong, just as many female Trump supporters find no problem offering themselves for his sexual satisfaction. In another example, Trump supporters have screamed about their civil rights when asked to wear a mask mandated by the store in which they want to do some shopping. Their civil rights are neither civil (they ignore the general health of the public) nor a right (their rights only extend to the point where their rights impinge on the rights of others -i.e., in one's minimizing the general public's exposure to the coronavirus). They themselves are living in a fake reality.
According to them, their fake reality is their only reality. Not only that they are addicted to that reality because news sources like Fox News inflames their grievances and stokes them to get them addicted to one news source that keeps feeding their biases, a process that we will elucidate later. Plato could not have anticipated the sophistication of technologies to use psychology against the common good.
The communication among the prisoners has been enhanced. The cave has been extended and enlarged throughout the world. They can not only talk to one another, but in the current world, but also can create a misinformation disinformation ecology whereby news sources, like-minded friends, neighbors, political associates and religious leaders all make and reinforce the same talking points, memes, narratives and propaganda.
A somewhat confusing scenario needs to be sorted out: what information, disinformation or misinformation consumers receive is information that pretends to be knowledge, even if second-hand knowledge, and that may be claimed to be knowledge by the consumer, based on their belief in a cognitive authority (such as a political leader, religious leader, political organization or news organization) and yet which is at best in the consumer's mind second-hand knowledge that may be in actuality belief and even false belief, or in line with Plato's notion of imagining.
Many Trump supporters are now enslaved to their inflamed biases, way better than any Goebbels could have ever imagined -they have chosen to be enslaved and stoked in their biases. They would scream and punch any Socrates that would force them out of the Cave. immigrants or the exportation of jobs to cheap-labor countries) and distortions about the balance of powers (Trump is a king and should have no constraints in preserving law and order) or the rule of law (as the mechanism of the rich to keep their position of power and wealth). Trump would agree that democracy is the tyranny of the many against the superior individual, one with a lot of power.
Citizens should allow themselves to be ruled by these strong men (of which are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that" (Wolf, 2020). Trump and many Republicans agree, arguing that they would stop losing elections if the popular vote prevailed. Laws should not be made to restrict In contemporary jargon, we might refer to the speaker, author or writer as a cognitive authority. What is a cognitive authority? When one lacks experience, education, or knowledge, or does not have the time or inclination to acquire such, a cognitive authority is a person, organization, media source, group, or leader whose information one takes as second-hand knowledge based on that entity's credibility, trustworthiness, and reliability. This author extends the notion of cognitive authority from Patrick Wilson's book, Second-hand Knowledge: An Inquiry into Cognitive Authority (Wilson,1983). For an more elaborate treatment see four papers by the author, especially the latest one: "A not-so-brief account of current information ethics: the ethics of ignorance, missing information, misinformation, disinformation and other forms of deception or incompetence," (Froehlich 2017), "The role of pseudo-cognitive authorities and self-deception in the dissemination of fake news," , "Ten lessons for the age of disinformation," (Froehlich, 2020) and "A Disinformation-Misinformation Ecology: The Case of Trump," (in press). In the last two papers, I establish how there are false cognitive authorities that pretend to be genuine authorities but lack the necessary credentials and foundation. It would be helpful to contrast a legitimate cognitive authority from a fake one. For example, we will use a set of tables, contrasting The New York Times with Fox News.

New York Times Fox News
Center-left bias (mediabiasfactcheck.com) Because they have a bias does not mean that their reporting is not grounded in facts.
Strongly right bias (mediabiasfactcheck.com) Because they have a bias does not mean that their reporting is not grounded in facts.
Possesses expertise: they provide information that is accurate and valid Possesses expertise; they provide information that is accurate and valid Real News Real News (but other sources are Fake News) Trustworthy "captures the perceived goodness and morality of the source" (Rieh, 2010(Rieh, , p. 1337. Long history (1851) as a respected publication. Articles are well-researched and verified. Opinion is identified as opinion (e.g., editorials).
Possesses expertise: they provide information that is accurate and valid Produces (1) second-hand knowledge, (2) wellinformed opinion (with which other may disagree: e.g., Trickle-down economics is not successful), and (3) preferences (best movies to watch) Has a cadre of respected and experienced experts. When they become aware of false or problematic statements or reporting, they issue retractions Believe in fact-finding and verification by multiple sources Adheres to the Principles of Good Journalism (https://americanpressassociation.com/principles-ofjournalism/ ) The obligation to present the truth (or the best representation thereof, by providing evidence and upgrading narrative as facts and errors emerge) NY Times follows these principles Its first loyalty is to citizens, not to partisan politics For a measured assessment, see: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-york-times/ Practitioners must maintain an independence of those they cover -when covering anything connected to the NY Times, they note it Serve as an independent monitor of power -they don't fall prey to party or administration favoritism Must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise -all sides of an issue are striven to be portrayed and balanced Must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant Must keep the news interesting and proportional. This means that one does not sensationalize certain events and ignore others, stereotyping or being overly negative -all affected communities and perspectives must be taken in account.
Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience. Opinions of editorialists and reporters reflect an ethical framework.
Compare this table with the table for Fox News: They claim that they are trustworthy implying that they stand for "the perceived goodness and morality of the source" (Rieh, 2010(Rieh, , p. 1337).
It has a long history associated with right and conservative causes, a history which has been often shaky and scandalous, with commentators leaving (e.g., Bill O'Reilly) for various reasons, often sexual harassment. (Stelter, 2020;Smith, 2019). Sometimes their sources are conspiracy theories taken from altright web sites.
Possesses expertise: they purport to provide information that is accurate and valid They have various pundits, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Jeanine Pirro, Neil Cavuto, et al., who claim to be experts, but they are mostly apologists for ringwing viewpoints. Its second-hand knowledge on political matters is often at best opinion or opinion based on alternative "facts" or misconstrued data. Lou Dobbs praised Trump for being nominated for a "Noble" Prize, omitting the fact that anyone can nominate anyone for a Nobel Prize and that the nominator was a far-right Norwegian with an ax to grind about immigration to Norway (Harvey, 2020).
The obligation to present the truth (or the best representation thereof, by providing evidence and upgrading narrative as facts and errors emerge) For four straight months, they pushed misinformation every single day (Sullivan, 2019). Trump's failure or incompetence in dealing with the coronavirus epidemic is never mentioned, and in fact, he is praised for his superior leadership.

Its first loyalty is to citizens
Their loyalty is toward its partisan viewers, not to all citizens, though they hope to convert them. Practitioners must maintain an independence of those they cover The most obvious case is that of Donald Trump. They never criticize his speech or behavior and claim he is the best president that the US has ever had. He frequently is invited or invites himself for interviews. Their relationship is so close that Fox News is often referred to as "Trump TV." Serve as an independent monitor of power See the above; most commentary and commentators support right-wing causes: unfettered capitalism, oligarchy, pro-business, anti-labor agenda, etc. They endorse the Republican party and the Trump agenda, often ignoring previous principles of conservatism (e.g., anti-communism, fiscal responsibility).
Must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise They rarely invite speakers, politicians or commentators from the Democrats or the left. They also refuse to run advertisements that are critical of the president or right-wing agenda Must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant They are committed to reporting or making narratives that support the biases of their viewers, a right-wing or conservative viewpoint (which has been muddled).
Must keep the news interesting and proportional. This means that one does not sensationalize certain events and ignoring others, stereotyping or being overly negative -all affected communities and perspectives must be taken in account.
They are often committed to sensationalism, such as fear of migrants, fear of communism and socialism, turning peaceful protests into riots against law and order, etc. For an overview of a variety of issues, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversi es Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience.
When reporting, one should include their viewpoint reflecting their own moral conscience. Certainly, many of Fox News pundits do so: Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Jeanine Pirro, Neil Cavuto, et al. take that view, but there are serious questions about a moral compass that approves of children in cages, that support a continuous liar (20,000+ lies or misleading information until July 13, 2020 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/1 3/president-trump-has-made-more-than-20000-falseor-misleading-claims/) or ignore, hide or manipulate relevant information.
By any rational assessment, Fox News is a false or pseudo cognitive authority. It is not that Fox News is the only false cognitive authority in the ultra-right echo system. There are many social media sites on the internet that also play that role.
But Fox News is a major source. It persists as a reliable source of information to many information consumers, especially Republicans. A study Pew Research Center undertook in the fall of 2019 provides an analysis of how Fox News influences the American public. It concluded: 1. Around four-in-ten Americans trust Fox News. Nearly the same share distrust it.

Republicans [(2/3) and Republican-leaning independents (65%)] trust
Fox News more than any other outlet. Democrats distrust it more than any other outlet.
3. On an ideological scale, the average Fox News consumer is to the right of the average U.S. adult, but not as far to the right as the audiences of some other outlets [Such as Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones.] 4. People who cite Fox News as their main source of political news are older and more likely to be white than U.S. adults overall.
5. Those who name Fox News as their main source of political news stand out from the general public in their views on key issues and people, including President Donald Trump. (Gramlich, 2020) How is it possible? It is possible because these kinds of Trump supporters live in a "closed propaganda loop,‖ (Benkler et al., 2018) where they interact within the same disinformation-misinformation ecology, where each element (like minded news sources, political party, political leaders, religious leaders, peers and associates) echo and reinforce one another, and where they are conditioned to believe that all other news sources and social media sites are "fake news." They fall prey to confirmation bias, among many others (e.g., stereotyping bias, the availability heuristic, attentional bias, illusory truth, affect bias), all of which precondition Fox News viewers and other alt-right propaganda sites to accept their content uncritically. Confirmation bias is a common one. Confirmation bias involves interpreting information that supports one's existing beliefs, even when presented with conflicting evidence. Trump supporters hold all sorts of improbable beliefs because they concord with their preexisting beliefs: e.g., that Trump was a great president; he was successful in curbing the coronavirus, its infection, and death rate; he cares about poor people; he is draining the Washington swamp; he is a great businessman; that his tax cuts helped all Americans; and that he has an excellent plan for healthcare, all of which are false.
Not only do they engage a confirmation bias, but also a disconfirmation bias "in Pseudoangelos: On False Messages and Messengers in Ancient Greece‖ (Capurro, 2020). False cognitive authorities and false messages have been as old as man. If we take Genesis literally, Eve was tempted by the first false messenger (pseudocognitive authority), the serpent, with the first false message that it conveyed when she told it that she was not allowed to eat of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden. -And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. (King James Bible, 2017, Genesis 3:4-5). It turned out to be the first case of paltering, because Adam and Eve did come to know good and evil after disobeying God, but the devil did manage not to explain all the consequences that would come with having selfconsciousness. There are some correspondences between the trustworthiness of messengers and reliability of messages in ancient Greece and the criteria of cognitive authorities detailed above which are expertise, (i.e., it increases a person's perception that a source is able to provide information that is accurate and valid (Rieh, 2010(Rieh, , 1337(Rieh, -1138) and trustworthiness (i.e., the sources of the information are perceived to be good and they exist within an ethical framework, one at least that comports with the orthodoxy (Rieh, 2010(Rieh, , 1337). Capurro cites Lewis concerning the criteria for evaluating the news and the messenger as trustworthy: (1) identity (credentials), (2) class (status), (3) autopsy (eye-witness), (4) motive (financial gain, official herald) (Capurro, 2020, 113). The context is different (polis versus nation-states, such as the United States) and the notion of what is news differs between the ancients and moderns. There is no word for news as such in Greece, Lewis asserts, but is related to the word for report (Capurro, 2020, 111). With that caveat in mind, identity or credentials can be seen to map to expertise. Class maps to social strata, which is mixed in contemporary societies (different levels of message receivers exist in different societies and countries).
Most information sources in contemporary society claim access to eyewitnesses unless they are the eyewitnesses; this property maps to both trustworthiness and expertise, because the source of the information is perceived to be good and the source of the information is thought to provide accurate information. In both modern and ancient societies, there is an interest in financial gain (e.g., make profits from the news), but whether it represents an official herald depends on the  (Stelter, 2020, p. 20)) and it promotes a very right political agenda, in order to maintain power (trying to have Trump remain as president) and/or to gain power. In -A disinformation-misinformation ecology: the case of Trump‖ (Froehlich, 2020), creating conspiracy theories or spreading conspiracy theories taken from alt-right web sites, but to a specialized group, whose members that live in a closed propaganda feedback loop. They are a kind of polis, a city within the nation, whose boundaries are set by a misinformation-disinformation ecology of likeminded news sources, like-minded political leaders, religious leaders, colleagues, friends, associates, and partisans, enveloped in social and collective self-deception and rejecting any sources that do not conform to the beliefs within their filter bubble.
The difference between the wiles of rumor in Capurro's paper and in contemporary culture is that the nature of the group within which the rumors circulate or take hold and the nature of the rumors that are circulated. In the polis, the rumors were echoed through the class structure and the nature of the rumor is  (Qiu, 2020). There is no evidence for such a claim and yet it was Such chicanery is part and parcel of the Age of Distraction.

The Age of Distraction
We are all born into a world in a specific context at a specific time. resolutely decided to stay not only in the ordinary but also in ignorance -they've been chosen or enticed into being permanent and resolute dwellers of Plato's Cave. Inside of a disinformation ecology, their "understanding" is based on the "they" of their like-minded sources, cognitive authorities, friends, political ideology (not that their individual grievances are the same, but they participate somewhere in a partisan framework or filter bubble) with a commitment so strong that no adverse information is allowed to enter and any Socrates would be executed, not because Socrates offended the orthodoxy (e.g., as in Athenian democracy) or because he offended not the unorthodox, but that he questioned the anti-orthodox, where alt-right partisans live (though they live in a king of orthodoxy, where the rightness of their opinions are tied to their biases)> To say that curiosity is one of the aspects of fallenness seems odd at first.
Heidegger's notion of curiosity is not to be taken in the usual sense, but the ongoing fascination with the new. Situated within our ordinary, everyday existence, one is swept along by an endless quest for what is new, a quest that is endless. One seeks endless stimulation rather than focusing one's energies on meaningful action that will help one determine one's purpose is in life. "They" (society, culture, the Zeitgeist, Silicon Valley Tech companies, Facebook "likes") beckon us to seek more and more novelty, to grab our attention. How does that work in the disinformation ecology? In the disinformation ecology, the partisans seek more, different and new sources to feed their grievances, resentment, fear or anger in opposition to others not embracing their position. Driven by selfrighteousness or to bolster their self-deception and social self-deception, they seek to find new and more "evidence" about the rightness of their position and their Living in ambiguity represents a loss of any sensitivity to the distinction between the latest news, about calls from friends and solicitors, to the point of addiction (to which we will return shortly). While the original goal of this technology is to provide useful information, amusement, photography, among many other applications, it is also to make more profits for their creators, especially by expanding its use. This technology is not bad, but in our fallenness, it inclines us to fill the void avoiding the decisions to make meaning for our lives, our country, our world and our earth.
Given a partisan political obsession, this fallenness involves an ecology based on one's circumstances. This ecology predisposes the individual to a way of seeing and interpreting the world. Whether by conscious motivation (through "willful ignorance" or information avoidance), or unconscious motivation (through gullibility or cognitive bias) , their receptivity to the world is restrained, and their everydayness is deformed. The "they" that drives their explanations are a few likeminded or like-promoting sources or cognitive authorities (like Fox News or 8chan or Rush Limbaugh, a radical-right-wing radio host). The ecology most likely flows with a mixture of information, disinformation, misinformation, and opinions, whether true, false, or a preference. While may partisan adherents may think that they are getting knowledge, they are getting at best second-hand knowledge and at worst false opinions. Their cognitive authorities are like the Sophists, who had the appearance of promoting knowledge or wisdom, but could not do so, so they became known for their sophistry. They appear to have memorized the key points (a la Meno) suited to their cognitive biases, but they cannot explain the information they get or provide genuine arguments. It satisfies them that Trump said so or Fox News said so or Breitbart said so because it supports their emotional triggers. The sophistic cognitive authorities fool themselves into thinking that their thinking is the only correct one and they think that they communicate it to their students, but they fail, for the students only memorize the opinions, memes or talking points but cannot provide any grounds for it. These authorities and their students come to deceive themselves about what

The Age of Disinformation
The Age of Information has provided access to information throughout the world with the inventions of computers and networks that can share all sorts of information. However, it did not take time for disinformation and misinformation to wreak havoc on the internet, for all the good intentions for information-sharing turned to misinformation-or disinformation-sharing, mainly for political exploitation. The difference between misinformation and disinformation is that the latter is created with the specific intent to deceive. In many cases, it is not clear whether a piece of misinformation is just misinformation or disinformation because the intention may not be clear. This false information comes in various forms, paltering, lies, fake news, ignorance or attacks on credible sources. Access to the internet is now, more often than not, access to resources that reinforce biases, ignorance, prejudgments, and stupidity. Parallel to a right to information, we have created a right to ignorance. Not only that: we, whether as individuals, groups or institutions like the government, have the legal right in the United States to disseminate ignorance and to block venues of facts and truth and smugly claim to present lies and distortions as "alternative facts." According to them, individual civil rights trump any concern for the common good or public health. She has come to call it "toxic individualism" (Chittister, 2020). The notion of a public good has been currently challenged by the right, failing to see that, for example, education for all has benefits for all. Fake  (2) Even educated people are prone to confirmation bias, mathematical illiteracy, and failure to understand the scientific method as an evolving, self-correcting process.
(3). In academia, there has been a shift to the student as client or customer view, which raises two concerns: (a) while there may be some limited value in student assessment of teachers, it creates a "habit of mind in which the layperson becomes accustomed to judging the expert, despite being in an obvious position of having inferior knowledge of the subject material" (Nichols, 2017, p. 97) and (b) it also fosters the idea that When feelings matter more than rationality of facts, education is a doomed exercise. Emotion is an unassailable defense against expertise, a moat of anger and resentment in which reason and knowledge quickly drown. And when students learn that emotion trumps everything else, it is a lesson they will take with them for the rest of their lives (Nichols, 2017, p. 99). hand, because experts are smarter than others in certain subject areas, they often make the mistake of thinking that they are smarter than others in areas in which Journalism is now sometimes as much a contributor to the death of expertise as it is a defense against it…. This fusing of entertainment, news, punditry, and citizen participation is a chaotic mess that does not inform people so much as it creates the illusion of being informed. Just as clicking through endless Internet pages makes people think they are learning new things, watching countless hours of television and scrolling through hundreds of headlines is producing laypeople who believe -erroneously-that they understand the news. Worse, their daily interaction with so much media makes them resistant to learning anything more that takes too long or isn't entertaining enough. (Nichols, 2017, pp. 137, 143).
Citing a 2000 Pew Research Center study, uninformed citizens do not have access to information at all, and misinformed people reject evidence that does not accord with their belief system and seek data that harden their belief system. "And, of course, the most misinformed citizens' tend to be the most confident in their views and are also the strongest partisans'" (Nichols, 2017, p. 157). The earlier analysis of Fox News confirms this assertion as being a long-standing purveyor of disinformation and misinformation where contrary to factual evidence, they have promoted Trump as an excellent president and where there is no critical evaluation of him. As a result, "Those who say they trust Fox most as a television news source are far more likely to approve of Trump than those who don't. In fact, nearly every Republican who most trusts Fox News says they approve of how Trump's faring as president (Bump, 2020)." In October 2020 survey, Fox News Republicans approved of Trump at around 97% and for all Republicans, it is 78% (Bump, 2020).
World War III has started. As much as one would like to rail against the disinformation and conspiracy theories of Alex Jones, he is right about one thing: equivalent -some are grounded and others unfounded. The argument on the right is to insist they are the same, that the right's biases trump science, evidence, logic and facts. Science and advice from experts are treated as opinions in a political culture war. Of course, people on the left can exercise the same ploy (e.g., leftwing authoritarians), but research indicates that the strategy takes place more on the right than for the center or the left. Not only that, but Ingraham found that conservatives are more likely to fall for fake news stories than the left (Ingraham, 2019 shows that right and other media differ significantly in dealing with network information. By doing a rigorous analysis of online stories, tweets, and Facebookshares data points, the authors conclude that "something very different was happening in right-wing media than in centrist, center-left and left-wing media." (Benkler et al., 2018, p. 14). They observe that the behavior of the right-wing media ecosystem represents a radicalization of roughly a third of the American media system. We use the term "radicalization" advisedly in two senses. First, to speak of "polarization" is to assume symmetry. No fact emerges more clearly from our analysis of how four million political stories were linked, tweeted, and shared over a threeyear period than that there is no symmetry in the architecture and dynamics of communications within the right-wing media ecosystem and outside of it. Second, throughout this period we have observed repeated public humiliation and vicious disinformation campaigns mounted by the leading sites in this sphere against individuals who were the core pillars of Republican identity a mere decade earlier. (Benkler et al., 2018, p. 14).
Benkler et al. believe that the research they performed generally indicated that the left were less susceptible to their biases and that the right sought confirmation bias to their preexisting beliefs. They conclude that "the right-wing media ecosystem differs categorically from the rest of the media environment," and has been much more susceptible to "disinformation, lies and half-truths." As for Fox News's role in this, "we found Fox News accrediting and amplifying the excesses of the radical sites." (Benkler et al., 2018, p. 14).
The right and the alt-right trade in fake memes, tropes or narratives, especially in an extreme form. This condition of embracing and seeking exaggerated tropes,  (Robb, 2020). Fortunately, no one was hurt, but the narrative was so compelling to Welch that checking the facts did not occur to him (e.g., the restaurant had no basement). What is disturbing is his unflinching acceptance of the narrative, his emotional triggers having become supersensitive. Another case was the conspiracy theories about the cause of the horrendous fires in Oregon and California in the summer of 2020. The conspiracy theory was that members of Antifa (Anti-Fascists, started initially been to fight racism but expanded to include other extremists (Antifa, 2020)) set the fires. When homeowners were asked to leave their homes for safety reasons, they refused, arguing that they needed to protect their homes from the roaming gangs of Antifa (Healy & Baker, 2020). It Kierkegaard's sickness unto death and theirs was that his goal was redemption, while theirs is willful ignorance that pretends it is not willful, an addiction to some Gnostic gospel that is supposedly the subtext of all political reality.
What has changed the name of the game are the attention merchants who design the gimmicks, ploys or widgets to capture our attention, in Google, Facebook and other social media. It is often less a matter of what is left or right but what grabs our attention, politically, socially, commercially, etc. With that in mind, another way of characterizing the current age is the Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Wonderful insight about this topic is found in Netflix's documentary, The Social Dilemma (Orlowski, 2020).  get a different answer. One might be told that it is a hoax or that it is not manmade, and somebody else will be presented with an opposite view. As one observer said in The Social Dilemma, citing a lack of social responsibility of these software developers and companies, a disinformation-for-profit model. It can involve shaming by suggesting that one is not living up to norms (that is, the norms of a typical white male's version of society (i.e., that of the software developer This infinite, individual profiling is possible because of computers' enormous computational power, cheap and easily available storage, across and through world-wide high-speed networks. It will not only predict one's behavior but also it will slowly begin to control one's behavior through psychological mechanisms. The purpose of attention merchants is not only to engage your attention but also to promote addiction to technologies, sites and apps. For the surveillance capitalists, there are three goals: the engagement goal (keep the person engaged and wanting to return to a site), the growth goal (get the users to get others to join), and the advertising goal (to market and sell products) (Orlowski, 2020). These goals are driven by the desire to make money by attracting one's attention (which makes money from advertisers) or attracting one's consumption of products, goods and services. The problem is that there are no constraints on their money-making, despite its many damaging effects, such as adolescents cutting themselves or  26(1), 202126(1), , pp. 132-177 ISSN: 230126(1), -1378 committing suicide for a lack of getting enough "likes" in Facebook and other apps.
The Social Dilemma ironically notes that even the people who developed the addicting software fell prey to the software, even knowing what was behind it. To one, the addiction was Twitter, to another email, to another Facebook. The addiction is based on positive intermittent reinforcement (adding a reward, such as financial gain, in order to invoke a response). Like a gambling addict at a slot machine, when the last lever pull of the "one-arm bandit" did not succeed in a winning row, it entices the next lever pull by occasionally offering a win. Human (by leveling all forms of cognition), it turns one into a jerk (by squandering one's time seeking vapid methods for approval, like "thumbs up" or hearts on social media sites). Anna Lemke claims that social media is a drug (Orlowski, 2020).
According to the Newport Academy, a rehabilitation center for adolescents and (1) persuasive technology -their generated profiles leads "to persuade them to keep scrolling longer, so they will view more ads, invite more friends, and generate more money for the platforms and their advertisers"; (2) fake popularity -teenagers place great value on such short-term rewards as hearts, likes, "thumbs up," but when they don't get them they feel "even more vacant and empty" than before, citing Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook's former VP of growth, in the film; (3) snapshot dysmorphia --teenagers, especially girls, develop poor body images, as a result of the unrealistic standards for beauty depicted in social media, which may lead to cutting themselves or suicide; and (4) digital pacifier -there is growing evidence that teenagers (and adults) "have lost the ability to calm and soothe themselves with real-world reflection, activities, and relationships. Instead, they deal with challenging emotions by turning to social media for distraction and entertainment" (Monroe, 2020). Perhaps more problematic is the use of "digital pacifiers" shoved in front of children to occupy them to prevent them from being bored or crying, so that they learn to avoid developing any interior life, continuously externalizing their needs and wants. One suspects that some crying has moral benefits for children. 1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales; 2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification; 3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history; 4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy; 5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth; 6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy; 7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty; 8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people's sovereignty. (Zuboff, 2020, preface).
Given the context discussed above, she believes that human beings' experiences are commodities that are and will be manipulated by international tech companies for exploitation and profit, overthrowing democracy. It is a bleak portrait, but given the current trends in psychological manipulation with no impetus to stop it, it does represent a possible and frightening future, where the whole world becomes Plato's Cave.
Many unresearched adverse effects of social media and digital technologies are thrown upon the world because it makes money without concern about the longrange, not to mention the immediate impact, of those technologies. One of the most destructive phenomena is the algorithm that drives YouTube. YouTube engages a rabbit hole phenomenon that increases right-wing radical viewership.
When perusing YouTube videos for certain content, such as a specific conspiracy theory, the site's algorithm suggests more provocative videos to view, which in turn offers more provocative videos to view. The impact is to advance Google's profits, with dire political consequences. Sociologist and information and library science professor Zeynep Tufekci declared YouTube to be "one of the most radicalizing instruments of the 21st century" because of these mechanisms (Tufekci, 2018). According to the analysis of New York Times columnists Max Fisher and Amanda Taum, Brazil's ultra-right president Jair Bolsonaro owes his electoral success primarily to YouTube videos (Fisher & Taub, 2019). With such algorithmic features that inflame one's political grievances, it is easy to see another possibility for describing the underbelly of the Age of Information as the Age of Inflamed Grievances.

The Age of Inflamed Grievances
In the United States at the moment, there are two areas in which one's grievances are primarily inflamed politically: cable news shows such as Fox News described earlier and in social media. Take Fox News as the first example.
Fox News starts with or instills a maelstrom of grievances, resentments, a sense of invisibility or a lack of importance of its viewers. The wider culture often challenges many of their core values (e.g., white male dominance). It then tells those viewers what they want to hear, consciously or unconsciously, with claims  (Benkler et al., 2018, p. 14). The emotional triggers that it fosters are legion, not to say they are real, only that they work.
They engage in "motivated reasoning," especially when the topic at hand is something that promotes or inflames their cause. It is the effect of emotions that we associate with a given topic at a primal level. It is not really reasoning but rationalization, making our arguments fit a pre-determined end. Not only does it involve a confirmation bias but also, as noted earlier, a "disconfirmation bias" "in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial." (Mooney, 2011). When they grab onto what appears to be scientific evidence that supports their bias, they pounce on it. When one "scientist" proclaims that climate change is a hoax, they are featured on Fox News and the overwhelming majority of scientists are ignored, if not mocked.
These arguments from motivated reasoning or memes, myth, tropes and narratives are reinforced and repeated throughout the disinformation-misinformation It claims to the trustworthy -it is only trustworthy in that it reinforces and stokes bias. It claims to have journalistic integrity. It is not journalistic integrity when you make the narrative about the facts or the omission of facts fit your political bias or when you originate a narrative based on a conspiracy theory of a radical right-wing social media site. (Benkler et al., 2018, p. 14). It claims to have expertise, but its expertise is sophistry, because they are interested in political power and influence and economic rewards --as noted earlier, they make nearly 2 billion dollars a year (Stelter, 2020, p. 20), getting partisans addicted to Fox News.  (Gramlich, 2020). The right-wing mania awash with all sorts of false information is not mirrored in the center or on the right, as noted above by Benkler (Benkler et al, 2018, p. 14).
Regardless of topic, Fox News commentators are supposed to stoke rage and push the emotional buttons of their viewers. Tobin Smith, a former Fox News commentator, suggests that their programming fosters an addictive and resentment-based process to: [1] Understand the elderly white conservative viewer's pre-tribal mindset, which is a compilation of their resentments, indignations, cultural values, religious values, political values, racial perspectives, regional outlooks, and worldviews.
[2] Scare or outrage the crap out of viewers by boring down on a recently exposed tribal nerve like a psychic dentist with a drill, presenting hearsay or an innately scary image of non-white/non-Christian foreigners, immigrants, or terrorists doing horrible things.
[3] Produce each seven-minute rigged outcome opinion-debate segment around the carefully selected partisan hearsay such that the "fair and balanced" debate is massively rigged for the conservative pundits on the program to . . .
[4] Deliver the climactic and righteous rhetorical victory for the partisan right-wing viewer to trigger the jolt of dopamine and serotonin that the addict anticipated and knew was coming. (Smith, 2019, pp. 485-486).
In other words, Smith argues that Fox News programming fosters an addictive process, based in addictive fear, anger and/or resentment, that is played and replayed over and over again, and validated by a chosen-in-bad-faith, restrictive environment (i.e., their filter bubble) in which Fox News viewers live and dwell (i.e., peers, friends, political associates, religious affiliates, social media sources, etc., that reinforce their confirmation and disconfirmation biases).
According to Eric Wemple, the influence of Fox News cannot be underestimated.
There's simply no outlet that dominates any other part of the political spectrum in the way Fox News dominates the right. With that dominance, Fox News has done great damage. It's not as if Fox News's influence extends to only however many millions may be viewing in prime time. There's what experts call a "media ecosystem" out there, where people take nonsense uttered on Fox News, then share it on Twitter, on Facebook, with their neighbor. Nonsense has a high pass around rate. (Wemple, 2019) The dominance of Fox News recalls the dominance of government-controlled news in authoritarian countries, from the Third Reich to modern-day Russia and China. In other countries control is through some government-run propaganda agency, but in Trump's world, the enslavement to one's biases is self-imposed by fostering addiction and inflating biases or resentments. Fox News viewers have no desire to escape it (nor right-wing social media sites), as its system of selfreinforcing self-deception-individual, social, and collective-is more robust than past generators of propaganda could ever conceive. Tobin Smith, refers to the consumption of Fox News as addiction to "tribal partisan identity porn," based on cultural and political resentments that "trigger feelings of hate, anger and outrage-the addictive trifecta of tribal partisan pornography" (Smith, 2019, p. 459).
Social media sites can also act as cognitive authorities or pseudo-cognitive authorities (pseudoangelia). The problem with the internet is that is a self-serve "information" bank. Using Google or some social media sites like mediabiasfactcheck.com, one can often find legitimate information. For many on the right, right-wing social media (e.g., Breitbart, Truthfeed, Infowars, Gateway Pundit, Zero Hedge, QAnon) is a self-serve disinformation or misinformation bank. It is not quite self-serve because the self that is served is one that enprisons one's biases. Right-wing ideologues, foreign agents and click-bait entrepreneurs (all pseudoangelia) produce a deluge of disinformation of memes and narratives (pseudoangelos) to solicit (at a minimum) and inflame (at a maximum) the disinformation seeker at these sites. Self-serve engagement is mediated by cognitive bias, confirmation bias, and steerage to selective sources. Generally, there are little restrictions on the kind of content that is made available.
Conservatives are more susceptible to clickbait than liberals, more likely to fall for fake news. (Ingraham, 2019). Beyond specific right-wing media sources, as political commentator and professor Robert Reich argued in the Guardian, Facebook and Twitter are alarmingly influential. As he wrote: The reason 45% of Americans rely on Facebook for news and Trump's tweets reach 66 million is because these platforms are near monopolies, dominating the information marketplace. No TV network, cable giant or newspaper even comes close. Fox News' viewership rarely exceeds 3 million. The New York Times has 4.7 million subscribers. Facebook and Twitter aren't just participants in the information marketplace. They're quickly becoming the information marketplace. (Reich, 2019).
One of the most problematic aspects of social media are the number of hate groups and the far-right partisans that use it to attract followers and disseminate their propaganda. A report of "Hate in America," a project produced by the Carnegie-Knight News21 initiative, did a study of far-right users of Facebook, Twitter, Gab, VK, and others during a two-week period in June 2018. They tracked more than 3 million followers and compiled more than 2,500 posts from these platforms that threatened harm against Black Americans, Latinos, Jews, and LGBTQ+ people. These posts got over a half-million likes and were shared 200,000 times. This evidence shows the strength and breadth of these groups, who gain power by assembling a collective voice, despite some platforms' restrictions (Gardner, 2018). What poses an additional threat is the spread and speed of disinformation and the inflammation of emotional triggers (memes, tropes). MIT researchers Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral (2018) found in a study of rumor cascades from 2006 to 2017 that false information spreads more quickly and broadly than truthful information and that those on the right are more susceptible and more prone to disseminate false information than those on the left.
It is simply wrong to believe that Facebook as a whole is balanced or neutral and has no particular bias. The Economist did a study on Facebook using CrowdTangle, a Facebook tool that tracks how web material is shared across social media. They discovered that in August, 2020, the two most popular sites were Fox News and Breitbart measured by user engagements -shares, views, comments and other activities. They concluded that whatever Facebook's intentions, the social-networking site has more of a political slant than Mr. Zuckerberg lets on. Using CrowdTangle, we compiled a list of the media outlets that received the most Facebook engagement in August. We then examined the top 35 for which data on their political biases were available from Ad Fontes Media, a media-watchdog organisation. All told, these sites received an average of 8.7m engagements in August. Fox News topped the list with 56.4m interactions in the month; MSNBC, a rival cable-news network, received just 9.7m (Facebook. . ., 2020).
Obviously, it is nice to think that the truth will always win out. But in the Age of Disinformation, this approach seems too simplistic. Thus, we must ask, is there a limit to free expression when that expression leads to harmful acts to demonized populations, the destruction of trust in political, governmental and media institutions, the loss of expertise, and the denigration of science and evidence?
Robert Reich (Reich, 2019) argues that two actions need to occur to bring rational control back to the internet. First, there should be some anti-trust action that would break up the large providers, such as Facebook and Twitter. He argues that they have a too broad and monolithic influence. Second, we must prevent such providers from pretending to be neutral providers of information for which they have no responsibility. They must develop policies to constrain lies and disinformation at a minimum.
In sum, we have a diversity of sites on the internet and there are places where one can obtain reliable information. There are many sites where the opposite is true.
Fox News and alt-right social media sites are two of the major factors that have contributed to the uncivil discourse in American society, the undermining of American democracy and democratic institutions, the decline in law and order, an anti-science, anti-humanistic agenda, and the hypersensitivity to presumed threats to one's rights and ideology. These are sites that can serve to inflame one's biases, which one's proclivities and social media can solicit and inflame one's fear, anger and self-righteousness, particularly on the right. It is naive to think that users can sort out misinformation or disinformation by themselves: many lack the skills to evaluate information critically or to assess who are proper cognitive authorities, or they fall prey to the Dunning Kruger effect by being unable to recognize the limits of their perceptions, much like Plato's Cave dwellers. The problem is that they are enslaved in their biases and so heavy doses of information, media and digital literacies are not likely to reach into their filter bubble or closed propaganda loop.
If we had a choice to describe which Age was the best to describe the underbelly of the Age of Information, the last two, the Age of Surveillance Capitalism and the Age of Inflamed Grievances are the most potent, for until their issues are