They're about the market economy. In cyberspace, where the prevailing political philosophy seems to be libertarian, the notion of a vast bazaar of information is populist. Agent software, in comparison, weights any and every opinion equally. Which is part of what disturbs Dr. Gigliotti. And a great deal of what's on the Web has to do with information, which is confused with knowledge, which is confused with wisdom.
Wisdom can understand knowledge and decipher information.
We're allowing a very random, nonexperiential machine to say what we should like. As the debate proceeds, Kitty Florey writes novels by night and enters data by day, her office shelves crowded with the London Review of Books, the Threepenny Review and a cheese sandwich on whole wheat. A few carrels over works Molly Siemers, the genre-fiction editor. As an English major at Vassar, Ms. Siemers wrote a thesis on the author Djuna Barnes' refusal to be categorized for her blackness or lesbianism. On occasion, Ms. Florey and Ms. Siemers have paused in their categorizing duties to determine which books carried the most cross-references.