Why I still use the world book encyclopedia
When I need to get an answer without all the spin, I do not turn to Google or Wikipedia, I turn to the 1992 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia.
You remember those, don’t you?
It is strange I turn to that to avoid spin, because the answers found there were once considered the most shallow, status quo answers imaginable.
As such, they were once the epitome of a certain kind of spin: pro status quo indoctrination. That is how far we have fallen.
These days, the major search engines have that encyclopedia beat as a far better way to find spin.
The World Book Encyclopedia is meant for fourth graders. So it makes sense the entries are bland and status quo, because, well, you don’t feed controversy to fourth graders . . . or at least in 1992 you didn’t.
For my purposes, these shortcomings do not matter, though.
When you just need to get your feet wet on a topic, it does the job, and 85% of my early research on any topic is just getting my feet wet.
Don’t get me wrong — I am not turning to The World Book Encyclopedia for every last answer. That would not be what that tool is good for. I am turning to it for primarily one reason — I know that it has not changed since 1992.
Permanence is an antidote during this truth-of-the-month-club era we live in. The Bible is far more permanent when it comes to finding an antidote for the tumult caused by these truth-of-the-month ways of viewing the world, but it is refreshing what a difference even just the 30 years of stability offered by the 1992 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia makes.
In contrast to that, we have the World Wide Web, which in some ways embodies the memory hole, written about by George Orwell in his novel 1984: here today, gone tomorrow. That which is inconvenient to the official narrative is easily disappeared. Search engines — our gateways to the internet — help to control what information users are allowed to access.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
If you have not had a look yet at my latest report on which search engines to use and which not to, you can get it here, just type in your email there, even if you are already on the list and it will be automatically zoomed right over to you. Hint: Duck Duck Go is one example of a search engine that provides heavily censored results. If you think otherwise, it would be a good report to have a quick look at.
And I do mean quick — On the very first page of the report, I list which 2 search engines did best in our tests and which 11 search engines did the worst.
Back in spring 2020, it was clear to me that we were being lied to with the cooperation of the major search engines. My team and I got to work to figure out which of the search engines were complicit in the lies. The answers we found and the experiences we encountered were shocking and they are shared in the report.
But we came to a very promising conclusion.
Yes, censorship is much worse than most of us realized, but the tools to get around that censorship exist and are within easy reach of each one of us.
So, no matter how much a Big Tech oligarch wants to silence one of our voices, perhaps even yours, there is little he can do to actually accomplish that as long as you refuse to comply.
The power is in your hands.
That is the promising conclusion I hope to leave you with.
The only question, then, is whether you will embrace it. Will you choose to take the extra effort of avoiding the censors in your own life?
Allan Stevo