Topic: Information Access

Linguist and activist Noam Chomsky stated in an interview with Russell Brand that the United States is currently living under a "totalitarian culture" worse than the Soviet Union before Gorbachev. Chomsky argued that the banning of Russian media like RT and the marginalization of journalists like Chris Hedges have severely restricted Americans' access to adversarial information. He noted that even in post-Stalinist Russia, citizens could often access foreign broadcasts that are now blocked in the West.

Cliff Stoll posits that search engines and high-resolution screens are "killing curiosity" by providing facile, immediate answers to every question. He argues that the joy of discovery and experimentation is lost when a computer provides a perfect explanation for why the sky is blue or how flowers grow. Stoll suggests that if one wanted to eliminate curiosity in a child, the best method would be to give them a machine that answers everything correctly without effort.