Alicia Wanless

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.

Alicia Wanless, Director at Carnegie Endowment, discusses information ecology and 19th-century naturalism at Verify 2024 with the Lawfare Podcast. They explore the intricacies of the information environment, parallels between ecological and information ecosystems, interdisciplinary collaboration in understanding the information environment, consistent measurements, data privacy, challenges in understanding pesticide impact on bird eggs, and the concept of information ecology and naturalism.

Alicia Wanless is one of the pioneers of the idea of information ecology, the notion that we should think about information and disinformation as part of a complex ecosystem, the management of which she analogizes to environmental policy. Wanless has been complaining for several years that the war on “disinformation” skates over important question: What are the collateral effects of anti-disinformation policies? How do interventions against information pollution operate in the real world? In her conversation with Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare’s editor in chief and this week’s Chatter guest host, Wanless talks about how she became interested in information management, what’s wrong with the discussion of disinformation, what a more environmentalist approach to information spaces might look like, and what a useful research agenda for the nascent field would focus on. Among the works mentioned in this episode:Wanless’s latest essay on Lawfare: “There’s No Getting Ahead of Disinformation Without Moving Past It.”The book Network PropagandaChatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.