Don't argue with strangers and 11 more rules to survive the information crisis

"A lot of the problems that face us, and the opportunities that present themselves, are defined not by our own choices or even the specific place or government we're living under, but by the particular epoch of human events that our lives happen to coincide with. The Industrial Revolution, for example, presented opportunities for certain kinds of business success it made some people very rich while others were exploited. If you'd known that was the name of your era, it would have given you a clue about what kinds of events to prepare for."

"So I'm suggesting a name for the era we're living through: the Information Crisis. It's not a single moment; it's an epoch we're in the middle of it already and it is going to continue for the rest of our lives. And I'd argue that this is the third great information crisis human beings have gone through: following the invention of writing and the Gutenberg printing press, we are now witnessing a crisis caused by digital communications technology."

"What we can see from the last two information crises is that they involve enormous leaps forward in knowledge and understanding, but also a period of intense instability. Following the invention of writing, the world was filled with new, beautiful ideas and new moralities. And there were also new ways to misunderstand each other: the possibility of misreading someone entered the world, as did the possibility of warfare motivated by different interpretations of texts."

Human lives and opportunities are shaped by the historical epoch in which they occur, often more than by individual choices or local governance. Past information revolutions created both major advances and deep instability: the invention of writing produced new ideas and moralities alongside new forms of misreading and conflict, while the printing press enabled scientific progress after turbulent upheavals. The present era, labeled the Information Crisis, is driven by digital communications technology and represents a third such extended transformation. These prolonged shifts produce enormous leaps in knowledge while also generating profound, irreversible psychological and social changes and periods of intense instability.

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