There is no shortage of books arguing that the information environment is broken. This column is written on the working assumption of one specific book—Flooding the Space, out from Prometheus in November—that the breakage is engineered rather than incidental, and that the engineering has variables you can name. The book does the naming. The column does the showing: a case a week, twenty-four weeks, sourced at the foot. Before the case files start arriving in earnest, the method deserves a note of its own.
What the column is. A finite series. Twenty-four posts, on Tuesdays, running out to the book’s publication. Every post carries its format at the top—Field Note, Source Reading, Margin Note, Case File, or Correspondence—and its number in the series at the bottom. Nothing is padded to length; nothing is stretched to a schedule beyond the twenty-four. When the last one posts, the column ends.
What each post owes the reader. A dated byline, a specific claim or reading, and a Sources block at the foot with the primary material named: author, title, publisher, year, and, where the source lives online, a link. Where a piece leans on a secondary reading of a primary document, both are cited. Where a claim comes from a book chapter rather than an article, the chapter is named. The rule for keeping a source in that block is simple: it stays if removing it would have changed a claim in the piece above.
A source stays if removing it would have changed a claim in the piece above.
What the column is not. It is not a newsletter of hot takes. It is not a running commentary on the day’s news; the case files are chosen for demonstrative value, not for recency. It is not a preview of the book in the sneak-peek sense—the posts stand on their own reading, and none of them is a chapter extract.
The framework, in one line. The book proposes that the effect a flooded information environment has on a public can be read against seven variables—five that describe the attack surface (Volume, Frequency, Emotional charge, Coordination, Authority-mimicry) and two that describe the defense (Time-to-counter, Resilience). Their compact form is (V·F·E·C·A) / (T·R), the FTSeffect. The equation is a shorthand for a reading practice, not a physics; it earns its keep only if it lets you look at a live situation and say which lever is being pulled. Chapter 10 introduces the Entropy Engine, which the column will return to.
Corrections. If a claim in a future Note turns out to be wrong, the correction will appear here, dated and signed, with the original text preserved above it. That is the deal, and it applies retroactively to anything already posted.
Next week: V is for Volume — Brasília, January 8. The storming of the Praça dos Três Poderes as the cleanest single-event demonstration of the first variable in the equation.
— J.W.B.
Note 06 of 24