The Enlightenment championed the democratization of knowledge, emancipating society from the information monopoly of the clergy. This heralded a new era of freedom.
Yet, in our contemporary, information-saturated world, often basic knowledge (like a specific component’s dimensions or materiality) remains elusive. We’ve supplanted clerical gatekeepers (the human compendium) with intricate systems of knowledge (the digital table), bureaucratic formalities and complexities, and capitalist-driven reductive efficiency.
These layers obscure direct access to information, ironically mirroring the medieval period’s hierarchical information control. Our ‘hypermodern’ society re-enacts the constrained knowledge dissemination of the medieval.
{from Matthew Crawford}