D.C. Insider: There's a Shadow Govt. Running the Country, and It's Not Up for Re-Election

[snot]

108. K&R'd – terrific article!

The infowar is in essence a class war over knowledge as a form of wealth.
As a corollary, information is a commodity for which there are markets that are (absent effective regulation) manipulable.

Greater transparency maximizes efficiency and profits for a group as a whole, but individuals within the group profit most when they're not transparent while others in the group are.

So long as a system as a whole remains mostly transparent, it's a more-than-zero-sum game (i.e., the whole can become greater than the sum of its parts, because the whole pie grows). But where transparency has sufficiently deteriorated, the competition among "players" devolves into a race to see who can loot the most the fastest, even if valuable resources (including personnel) are wasted in the process.

(The transparency I mean here is, of course, that of our leaders in relation to their citizens, not vice versa.)