You've just went and created some misinformation! Yes, you! Sacrilege. You must now burn at the stake!
It's been an interesting couple of years. We've seen the rise of a few new buzzwords around the topic of speech. One of them being, "misinformation!" and we're sort of acting like it's the worst affliction on humanity the world has ever seen.
I'm not too sure about you, but has no-one else had an old racist granddad or uncle? One that you couldn't take to parties because he'd complain about "the foreigners" or "the Africans" or something or other that he's taken off the news cycle from the 80s and white knuckled those ideas well into the 21st century?
Racist or not I still love my family. Sure, they may be old and have some outdated views but in reality they were always good to me as a kid so it just means I won't be taking them to any social gatherings anytime soon.
It's like we've got up and gone all puritan on ourselves. Where we judge others, and pile on other people that have said something that doesn't have mainstream consensus and we condemn them to fire and brimstone whilst also forgetting that we are no visions of perfection ourselves. That's why I am trying not to judge others for not necessarily holding the same viewpoint as I do.
Of course judging is a necessary function of life. Judging that it doesn't look too safe going into the dimly lit bar in a backwaters bar of London could just save your life. It's not essentially prudent to be non judgemental. But always prudent to keep your judgements to yourself.
I think anyone who tells me they don't judge anyone else is full of shit. Dating and relationships is the best arena to test people on their true judgemental attitude, and it's fine to be like that because pre-judging people may save us a ton of hassle down the road. We are naturally judgemental.
So we are seeing words like misinformation crop up that are entirely ambiguous and can mean one of many things. This post could be misinformation for all we know, who judges what is good and bad information? You? Me? Some faceless arbitrar of knowledge? Who is this arbitrar? Is it mainstream media?
It's silly, because we're all a bit unknowing when it comes to the world. Who knows what's going on behind closed doors. The fundamental premise of free speech is that we throw ideas out there into the main public thought and they are either rejected or accepted.
But I do think we're going through a change now. And that is we never really had free speech previously. We had our TVs that would tell us what to think, and then we would parrot it off to our friends and neighbours and that would be the thought of mainstream.
And because the internet has essentially freed the controls of information, which was previously going to be used as a tool against us, I don't think the powers that be understood what can of worms they were opening as to how far they were freeing up public consensus.
And that's why we have things around like the term, "misinformation" -- and it's because you dared to speak sense in a world that's supposed to make no sense.
It'll be the same with cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin will set us free.