Let me unhide that assumption, by saying that I am a sometime-student of decision making literature (currently reading Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, which is absolutely fascinating), and I would never suggest that more information necessarily leads to better decisions.

In fact, one of the things that makes an expert expert is knowing what information to ignore, so a rising tide of information is almost certainly going to lead to bad decisions in just the way that desktop publishing tools led to party invites with nine different fonts. It will take a long time before we know how to ignore the bulk of this new information we’re getting.

There’s a larger point to make, though, about historical change: A change is revolutionary if the likelihood of it happening has nothing to do with whether it’s good nor not.

It’s easy to point out the ways in which the network is bad — everyone from Robert Putnam to Naomi Wolf to George Packer to that The Internet is Shit guy has described (correctly, it must be stipulated, often correctly) the ways in which more access to more media makes things worse.

Doesn’t matter. Does not matter. There is never going to be a moment where we as a society ask ourselves “Do we want this? Do we want the changes that the new tsunami of production and access and spread of information are going to bring about?”

As an illustration, one of my clients is a big library, so I spend a lot of time around librarians, and I have heard speech after speech where librarians tell one another how vital libraries are even in the age of Google.

These speeches are in a way rehearsals for the Big Moment, when society comes into their office and asks “Dear Librarians, tell us: should we keep on the seductively easy Path of Google, or should we come here and learn The Way of The Card Catalog?” And the librarians will tell society, in impassioned but carefully reasoned and ultimately convincing terms, why libraries are still vital institutions, and why getting your information without the help of Trained Professionals® is a bad bad idea.

And the one possibility these librarians who make rehearse this argument in their heads seem not to have considered is the obvious one, extrapolated from the present: this moment where they get to make their case will never come. One at a time, people will shift from one mode of thought to another, and eventually younger users won’t realize that there ever were two modes — you just google for the stuff you want. How else would you do it?

The librarians can point out (again correctly, let it be said) the ways in which this is inferior to the present system, but they will never get to make that speech, since no one will ever ask them to, anymore than anyone asked the linotype operators to point out the ways in which desktop publishing was inferior to type-setting (which, in the beginning, it was, in every aspect except convenience.)

The comparison with the Protestant Reformation was not to suggest that we are entering a bright new future — for a hundred years after it started, the Protestant Reformation broke more things than it fixed. It was to suggest that even though we can describe, correctly, the ways in which the loss of mediation will be bad for many of society’s core institutions, it’s happening anyway, and our telling ourselves it shouldn’t won’t change much.