Truth in the Infopolis
Two Presidential Actions and the Burning of the Theosophical Library (Eaton Fire)
Infophilia, a Positive Psychology of Information | January 25, 2025 | Vol. 3, Issue 4
Welcome to Infophilia, a weekly letter about the human love of information and connections. Whether you’re a returning reader or a new one, I’m grateful and glad to have you here. I’ve temporarily set aside my planned exploration of the Australian pioneer, Christine Bruce's seven faces of information literacy to address more urgent needs such as today’s topic. In the meantime, feel free to browse the Archive, Most Popular, AI, and Infophilic Info styles essays.
Cite this as: Coleman, Anita S. (2025, January 25). Truth in the infopolis: Two presidential actions and the burning of the Theosophical Library (Eaton Fire). Infophilia, a Positive Psychology of Information, 3 (3).
The Litropolis and the Infopolis
In the infopolis—a sprawling web of bits and baits—truth is as much a beacon as it is a battleground, where the pursuit of clarity often collides with the shadows of manipulation and distortion.
Welcome to the infopolis—a sprawling, interconnected web of information hubs where data, ideas, and stories collide and converge. As citizens of this global infopolis, our infophilic tendencies—an inherent love for information and connections—drive us to seek, share, and sometimes even distort the truth.
David Ulin’s concept of the litropolis—a term he coined to explain his teenage bookshelf arrangement—became his metaphor for LA as a city of the stories we inhabit. In a similar way, infopolis came together for me this week. In a world increasingly shaped by competing digital narratives, truth takes on new dimensions. In the infopolis—a sprawling web of bits and baits—truth is as much a beacon as it is a battleground, where the pursuit of accuracy and clarity often collides with the shadows of manipulation and distortion.
The Santa Ana winds returned this week, fueling yet another wildfire in Los Angeles. On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, it became clear that America is no longer merely a polarized nation. Americans are increasingly fragmented, living in vastly different realities. For some, the news from the White House inspires joy and hope; for others, they evoke fear, pain, and uncertainty.
No matter where you fall on this spectrum of emotion, it is undeniable that we are all now a part of a modern information war—one shaped by psychological operations that leverage social media, Artifical Intelligence (AI), neuroscience, and behavioral economics. These tools are wielded not just to inform or persuade but to overwhelm, manipulate, and ultimately control our behavior through ad-driven algorithms.
For those skeptical of terms like “information war,” it might all seem like an overblown reaction to fake news, propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation.
But as Orwell cautioned in 1946:
So long as I remain alive and well, I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.
I turn to two recent executive actions and the destruction of a historical landmark—the Theosophical Center Library in Pasadena—to explore how we grapple with the concepts of truth and memory in this infopolis, the digital world of stories we inhabit.