Why
The world is becoming opaque for businesses again at the very same time as the knowledge pool dries up.
Whereas openness was the master word of the post-Cold War generation, the world is now shutting in on itself. Newly emboldened autocracies clamp down on public information and free speech in all its forms, while a new spirit of protectionism and isolationism erodes the old international alliances and systems. Everywhere, new barriers are being built and old bridges drawn up.
Openness comes and goes, but the acquisition of knowledge at least used to just be a straight upward curve. But here is exactly the irony: just as this new pall of opacity descends across the world, a unique combination of pressures is suddenly hindering the very ways in which we acquire information, too: as online platforms of so-called democratisation atomise the landscape of knowledge, half-truths pollute the Internet and force information professionals to slash budgets, leaving important issues woefully underexplored and rendering real, substantive information scarcer and scarcer.
Side by side with demoralised journalists and investigators, too many academics also find themselves drowning under the misguided imperative of publish-or-perish and the edicts of university-affiliated political commissars, while information professionals in the business world are being thwarted ever more insistently by a coterie of pusillanimous corporate bureaucrats. A new intellectual climate, originally promoted by the high priests of Silicon Valley but now also espoused by an emerging class of politicians, even dedicates itself to the proposition that the truth doesn’t really matter anymore.
The consequences of this intellectual counter-revolution are as dramatic for business as they are for anywhere else. As international business activity continues to be a necessity, obtaining good intelligence about prospective or actual partners in increasingly opaque jurisdictions is more crucial and urgent than ever. Yet this intelligence has also never been harder to come by, drowned as it is in a white noise of piffle, jargon, triviality and outright disinformation.
The stark reality, however, is that business simply can’t afford the luxury of “post-truth”.
Code19 is dedicated to upholding real, nuanced and thoughtful business intelligence in a world that was always varied and complicated, but is now also contaminated by nonsense.
Code19 helps you decrypt the world.