Knowledge: Law And Order

Last weekend I saw Constant Gardener, a movie about a British diplomat for Africa who found out that his wife’s murder was related to a deep scandal. His wife found that an international drug company, aside from charging Africa with sky-high price (10-20 times the regular US price), have also been testing their premature drugs on the disposable African.

I am not very much familiar with stories about Africa, poverty, or global health, but I have come across with some other sources that relate a little to the subject. Once there was an episode of West Wing, where Toby Ziegler, White House director of communication, mediated a meeting between the Prime Minister of Kenya and several CEOs of multinational drug companies about the possiblity of free distribution of drugs to the Kenyan[1]. There was Jeffrey Sach’s End Of Poverty I read a few months ago, in which is everything you need to know about how and why Western civilization prospers, African suffers, and Asian climbs higher. There was also TIME’s global health cover story around the second week of December last year. So in the middle of watching Constant, I got kind of jumpy and almost shouted “Hey, I know a little something about what they’re talking about!”

There was a little of good sting saying that. It’s one of those days when my non-discriminative reading habit paid off. I’m practically a sting addict, and proud of it. I don’t understand how anyone can ever get enough of such aha! experiences. I personally always think that the amount of knowledge I want to have is: one more, please. But there has always been some price to pay for both the knowledge and the sting.


The Order
Knowledge is a curious thing. It does not quite follow mathmetical equations. Our total knowledge is much much more than the sum of its part. Just because you're now on chapter two of Malcom Gladwell’s Blink doesn’t make you twice as smarter than those still on chapter one. I don’t know how the formula works exactly, but I think the value of each knowledge we get the later equals the previous ones multiplied by some higher and higher number. Otherwise, we won’t get that accumulatively excited about them.

But most of these knowledge, though available, are scattered in pieces. That makes the chance on getting stung is even slimmer. We’d be extremely lucky if just one thousandth of all the knowledge in the world are available in some organized fashion. Thank God for schools! They are places where every information are already taxonomized. They are the perfect sources of ready-to-take-out information –intellectual version of instant foods (at least compared to the ones in the open world). If we’re lucky enough to go to kindergarten and all the way through graduate school, we get approximately 24,180 hour worth of organized inputs. Supposing we have a 75 years of life expectancies, our schoolyears, the period of well-organized-and-defragmented-information-acquisition, is still worth only 3.7 percent of our lifespan. Only 3.7 percent worth of potentially (and only potentially) inspirational period. That makes me wonder whether we are that luckier compare to those whose formal educational opportunities have been deprived.

That leaves us with the remaing of 96.3 percent lifespan of knowledge browsing. That is, if we browse. Even if we do, gathering is only half the process, much like food gathering is only halfway before actualing eating them (mostly there’s cooking involved). Knowing all the series of knowledge does not make us understand them. Aha experiences only emerge after a concious act of regrouping previously collected information. With all those knowledge that we gather in random sequence, I can only imagine how much time our brain should stay in alert mode. If I want more of those Constant-excitement I should keep my sensory machines standby 24/7.

Thus, bless the soul of everyone who dedicates their time to put as much knowledge as they can in a more friendly and useable order. And extra-bless those souls who are brave enough to offer their lives compiling pieces of stories into encyclopedias. Back in college, my philosophy professor taught me me that the attempt of classifiying knowledge has started at least since the era of ancient Greek by Aristotle. And It turned out that those encyclopedial professions has been a vocational choice since at least the 13th century in France. I guess I have to to work harder on my prayer if I genuinely want them all blessed.

The Law
There are several particular people whom I pay the most respects in the knowledge sharing business. There’s the Google people –Larry Page and Sergey Brin. One of their new mission is to index all the books that are no longer published. If this duo succeed, just type Plato’s Republic on Google homepage and you will get the complete content of the book –for free. Page and Brin are currently court-battling several publishing companies simultaneously for copyright issue. But I’m sure the whole open source community are on their side.

Moreover, I presume Lawrence Lessig, professor of Stanford Law School, a law expert and founder of Center of Internet and Society has their backs, too. In 2004 Lessig wrote a book entitled Free Culture: How Big Media Use Technology And The Law To Lock Down Culture And Control Creativity. He argued that intellectual property rights protect publishers a lot more that it do the creators themselves (authors, composers, etc). Publishers’ legal rights impose long-term disadvantages for both their clients and the consumers. According to these publishers, Page and Brin have no business distributing any of "their" books. But Page and Brin are doing authors a great favor. Any author will choose getting their books distributed for free over not getting distributed at all. Knowledge always belong to public. Putting inspirations into confinement will only slow down other people’s creativity and finally kill culture. It is why Lessig and Google are on the same page. I don’t really understand the whole court room situation, but rumour has it that Page and Brin are on their way to a sunny future.

If there is one more person whom I think will share the same chapter in history books with Lessig, Page, and Brin, that will be James Wales (which brings us back to encyclopedia topic). In March 2000, Wales started an online encyclopedia called Wikipedia. His ingenious idea is to make an unstoppably limitless collective intelligence possible. His version of online encyclopedia is one with which people can have access to put in, edit, and discuss entries collaboratively. Today, it is the encyclopedia with the most entries –approximately 880,000 entries in English language alone (compare to Brittanica’s 120,000)– and gets 2 billion page visits each day. Wikipedia is now facing a credibility issue due to an inaccurate political entry found last month, but media are optimist that this is a loophole Wikipedia can patch without much sweats. It is as if for the first time in history, David’s chances on beating Goliath are looking convingly good.

Wikipedia is Wales’ instrument to his final dream –a free, limitless, organized knowledge for people in poor countries. For that, he needs to find strategies to get those people the necessary computer units and internet connection, also for free. And supports come from all over the world (for further information, visit www.wikipedia.org because you can support them, too).

The idea of knowledge for everyone may be a perfect case of utopia. But it’s nice to know that there are great people trying to make sure that the Constant sting I mentioned goes epidemic. A good kind of epidemic, for once in history.


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[1] Toby’s assignment was to convince the drug companies to benefit the giant-companies-with-giant-hearts reputation by providing Kenya with required amount of medicine not for the fifty percent discount price, nor the regular US price, but for free (and yes, the meeting went earned successfully)