CHAPTER 1

1.Information Overload and the Explosion of Knowledge

Unless you’ve missed the last couple decades, you know what information overload feels like.

Every year, there are six hundred thousand to a million new books published in English alone. Not to mention the millions of books published in other languages.

And that’s just books. More and more, as a society, we are consuming our information from anever-growing flood of newer media. These range from the traditional media, like magazines, television, and newspapers, to the more modern blog posts, podcasts, audiobooks, and videos. In short, we are producing (and consuming) more information than ever before.

Not long ago, books were a precious commodity. People were lucky to own one or two books, and they read those books over and over again, savoring each page. In 1731, when Benjamin Franklin established the first subscription library, he pulled all kinds of strings to amass justforty-five books.1 Today, around 250 years later, the Library of Congress holds overthirty-nine million books. And again, let me remind you: that’s just books. (Every weekday, the library receives about fifteen thousand items, adding about twelve thousand of them to the archives).

For the most part, this is a very good thing. Throughout human history, progress has been loosely correlated to how easy it is for the average person to create—and access—knowledge. In this light, we might look at a few key events throughout history as major “turning points” in our development. The foundation of our world, then, started with the invention of writing, around five thousand years ago. Sure, we take it for granted today, but writing is what allowed us to asynchronously record and deliver information and knowledge from one person to another. No longer did we have to transmit information from person to person orally. More importantly, we no longer had to rely on our imperfect memories to store that information. This might not sound like a big deal, but it is. After all, every great empire is built on technology. For the British, that technology was ships. For the Romans, it was roads and metallurgy. But thousands of years before that, it was writing and accounting that helped the Sumerians build the first massive kingdoms.

Of course, even then, new information technology was not without its critics. Socrates, a proponent of memorization and oral education, often spoke against the use of writing, claiming it “weakens the memory and softens the mind.”2 Imagine that. I guess every generation has their own version of “that thing is turning your brain to mush!”

Controversial or not, the creation of writing was a massive technological breakthrough. It empowered us to disseminate important texts—mostly religious ones, mind you—to millions and millions of people. This enabled mass education and mass collaboration on a scale never before seen in human history. Pretty great, if you stop and think about it.

In the 1440s, Gutenberg’s commercial printing press took this a step further. While printing presses had existed in Asia for hundreds of years, none of them were as practical or as