The Gist Alicia Wanless — "The Ecology of Information"
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Oct 22, 2025 Join Alicia Wanless, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and author of The Information Animal, as she discusses the ecology of information. She reveals how disinformation is merely the latest pollutant in our information ecosystems. Wanless draws fascinating parallels between historical pamphlet floods from King Charles I and today's social media onslaught. She warns that suppression often backfires and underscores the challenges democracies face in regulating information. Plus, explore China's dominance in the rare-earths race and the environmental costs tied to it.
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Information Ecosystems Need Ecological Thinking
- Treat information environments like ecosystems and borrow methods from physical ecology to understand systemic causes.
- Simple experiments miss indirect, food-chain-like pathways that amplify effects across the system.
Indirect Pathways Produce Hidden Harms
- Lab tests that isolate one variable often fail to capture how information accumulates and transforms across channels.
- Like DDT, harms can appear only after materials move through complex chains, so causation is indirect.
Avoid Single-Cause Explanations
- Don't rush to isolate single causes; first build a systemic, thousand-mile view of the information ecosystem.
- Major problems rarely stem from one factor and may reflect multiple interacting causes.
