The personal life of information

There's a lot of bad information out there. The recipe for napalm. Grooming techniques. Vomit porn. All things I would rather not know about. Bad might be a characteristic of the information; the info lets you do bad things. Sometimes, bad information is incomplete information. To make an informed decision to buy a house or to send a child to a school or to vote, we need information on the options. If we don't have enough information, we might choose not to choose until a better option comes along.


If bad information is incomplete information, then complete information is good information. Take child sexual abuse, to act on a case of child sexual abuse, you need a sense of the big picture. With enough information, an adult can handle a disclosure from a child. That means, an adult is prepared for a child to speak to him about surviving an incident of sexual abuse. Perhaps we can say that good information is also actionable information, information where it becomes possible to take action.


I keep returning to Najib's speech at the Malaysian Press Awards 2009, where he said, "We need world-class, fact-based reporting in Malaysia. The media must be fair and responsible in your reporting. It is crucial if we are to foster a constructive debate about our nation's future." The kind of reporting Najib's talking about let's us take action and it's odd that, in taking the media to task, he doesn't use the word "freedom."

The role of freedom is in groping towards good information. We move towards a complete understanding of the stuff we care about, but we may never arrive at a complete understanding. Where do you get information? Some info is harder to get than other info. If you go deep enough into any issue, the problem of access arises. People ask questions like, why do you need this information? and what do you do again? You may not be in a position to get the whole story. Access affects the completeness of information. Regulation affects access, case in point, Sonia Randhawa wrote: 

"I've lived in two countries (Australia and the UK) where porn wasn't banned but regulated, and one country (Malaysia) where it's banned. It's in Malaysia that I've had the most porn, literally, thrust in my face. Primarily by VCD sellers. But before that, by video sellers and distributors. And I'm sure that there were others before my time. In the other countries, I could avoid it, I knew where it was. Or, of course, I could seek it out if I wanted to. In Malaysia, because it's unregulated, I don't really have that choice. And then there's the problems with the definitions of porn. Because the Little Napoleon's that our former PM complained about, take it upon themselves to include books on breast-feeding as porn. And books on mutual sexual satisfaction are often considered pornographic."


What comes across is that taboos that are banned end up getting regulated anyway, and poorly. Or rather, as the economist Nils Gilman observes, in addressing the demand of illicit goods, not the supply, informal regulation springs up. Gilman talks about the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, who observed that "societies are to a large extent... made up of and defined by their taboos." "That is, by what they prohibit either morally or in the case of modern societies, legally." That's true, right? The limits of behavior corresponds to what is not permissible. It is OK to buy a car, it is not OK to buy sex. It is OK to talk about Rosmah, it is not OK to talk about Altantuya. 


It is easy to get bad information. It is not easy to get good information; not everyone can see a classified report. Good information is subjective. The information you need to act is different from the information I need. The avocado has to be firm to the touch, not too soft, for instance. I don't have a car, so if I meet up with friends I make sure it's convenient for me. Good information has to be prepared. I don't understand a balance of payments sheet, but my colleague Suresh does. If Suresh understands balance of payments, I could ask him a series of questions. After that, I too will be able to read a balance of payments. I can even explain it to someone else.

We need to improve access to good information. I propose we change the operative meaning of democracy to David Mamet's: "That the individual is free to embrace or reject, praise or abominate any political position---that in this he is accountable to no one and need never, in fact, articulate his reasons or defend his choice." 

The story of teacher Shamsukal Abu Bakar, who gave a seditious thesis to his students, is informative. The thesis was, "Justice is eroding and lacking in the judiciary system of Malaysia." What if every student in the Form 2 class had disagreed? Would the question have still been seditious? By making a certain reading explicit, it makes other readings implicit. In the Sedition Act itself, it is seditious "to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility" among "different races or classes," but what about within a race or class?


The challenge becomes turning the bad information into the good. None of us can do this alone. We have to do this as a society, using every trick in the book. In our history, there was no such thing as a sit-in. It says something that the most successful grassroots organization in Malaysia is UMNO. It's a victory that many peoples' lives are not touched at all by human rights. And yet I cannot be grateful enough of walking into my kitchen and eating a piece of toast. I have to constantly check my apathy. One day, a child says, "Why are Malays special?" The next day, society has broken down, frogs tumble from the sky, mother holds the prone child covered in blood. "See? You should have listened to me!" she wails. Wong Chin Huat observes, politics has been successfully amputated from everyday life. We need to re-attach it.

With enough information, we can take action. What about on the level of society? As individuals, we're powerful, because we make decisions as individuals. Because we must always always exercise the power to refuse our consent. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to dramatize the issue so that it can no longer be ignored.” Direct Action is ultimately about access to information. It's about fostering discussion. Good info is process and we need to sharpen our wits to keep it good.

What is true is not always good and beautiful. I would like to think that if we shared enough, our suffering would be less. My greatest fear is everything I touch will turn to shit. Hot, stinking shit with bits of corn. I leave you with another bit of Mametian wisdom: 
And the Devil finally says to Bobby Gould, "You're a very bad man." And Bobby Gould says, "Nothing's black and white." And the Devil says, "Nothing's black and white, nothing's black and white--what about a panda? What about a panda, you dumb fuck! What about a fucking panda!"