World After Capital: Freedom to Share

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from my book World After Capital continues the chapter on psychological freedom. After the prior excerpts on freedom to learn and create, today is about the freedom to share.

Freedom to Share

Even after we have created something, many of us are afraid to share it. We fear that someone will call our painting ugly, or our code incompetent, or our proposal naive. Given the state of much online commentary and “trolling” those fears are well founded. But at the same time, they need not fundamentally or permanently inhibit participation in the Knowledge Loop. Part of the answer is to work on the inner strength to continue sharing despite criticism and even despite personal attacks.

Another part of the answer is for each of us to cultivate empathy. Whenever we comment on the work of others online, we should keep in mind that they worked up the courage to create and to share. And we should remember that by contributing to the Knowledge Loop, they have engaged in the quintessential of human activities, the very thing that makes us human. Our empathy is central to others’ freedom to create and share. Furthermore, those who operate online communities should provide the tools for flagging and, if needed, banning people who engage in verbal abuse or make threats aimed at shutting down sharing.

Even that will not be enough if you live in a country subject to dictatorship, censorship or mob rule. In these cases, sharing opinions or art or research can result in imprisonment, torture, or death. And yet, despite all of that, we routinely find people who overcome their fears and freely share. We should take inspiration and courage from those who do for our own acts of sharing. And we should support sharing in those circumstances by building systems that allow for pseudonymous, and if necessary, anonymous expression.

In the Knowledge Age, there still is such a thing as sharing too much. I’m not talking about sharing too much (personal) information (as in the acronym “TMI”), but rather mindlessly sharing harmful information. Threats, rumors, lies, etc. take on lives of their own if we share them without comment or counter argument, or in some cases if we share them at all. We can wind up contributing to a so-called information cascade, in which an initial bit of information keeps picking up speed, becoming an avalanche that destroys everything in its path.

So there is a dual nature to the psychological freedom to share: We need to free ourselves from fear to share our creations, our opinions and our ideas and at the same time we need to slow ourselves down and control our emotional responses so that we do not share information that disrupts the Knowledge Loop. Ask yourself: Will what I’m sharing enhance the overall pursuit of knowledge, or will it hurt it? If the answer is not obvious, then it is better to sleep on it, think more, read more, talk to others rather than simply post, tweet, or whatever other digital sharing mechanism is at hand.