Provenance is a term that describes a simple concept in complicated terms. Provenance is simply the origin of a piece of information – the provenance of a pencil is the pencil factory, the provenance of this article is the publication ‘Erasmus’ and myself, the author. 

Historically, humans have relied on a number of different sources of information. During the Middle Ages in Europe, information would come from individuals deemed trustworthy. Seniority, wealth, and religious affiliation all played a part. The reasons for this are entirely sensible. The Duke of Somesuch is likely wealthy enough to pay for accurate information, learned enough to read sources and scripture (and if it’s scripture you agree with, you know it’s true, especially if it’s divine), and honourable enough not to deceive you. The elder has spent her whole life foraging, and given her status as being alive, probably knows what she’s doing.

Medieval people would also get information from non-humans. Observing the behaviour of animals and birds tells you of the weather, and the weather is a reasonably good predictor of how much food you’re going to produce in the harvest. Some things we would recognise as superstition – a medieval person would likely blame bad weather on the sins of the community, and say that a good harvest is divine favour. Yet for the most part, a medieval person probably knew what they were doing when it came to staying alive and looking for natural cues of what would happen next. 

A resident of Medieval Europe would also look at architecture and art for information. A brilliant example of this is the Cathedral – Cathedrals are decorated and built in a specific manner to tell a specific story. A modern person sees stained glass. It looks cool to us but that’s about the extent of it. If you were to grab a medieval person, there’s a good chance they’d be able to point at any point of it and say – here is where God shows his strength, there is a certain Saint we find important, here is a Biblical story, that is David and there is Goliath, here is Jesus. Any given statue and how it is made would communicate a lot about the person it depicts and perhaps even a moral or religious lesson or a reminder of something important. While as a European I am very Eurocentric in this, one can see such phenomena elsewhere. The Aztecs had extensive visual depictions of religious concepts and even kept records via images. Design is everything, and has a lot of meaning to it. 

Most people until the 19^th and 20^th centuries are not literate – within any given region, you would find at most a third of men are literate (and that’s generous – note that women were far less likely to be literate because of a conscious decision of restricting their access to writing and reading). But they weren’t stupid. They got information from a huge variety of places. Someone today would be incapable of getting anywhere close to understanding nature and architecture as well as people of the past, simply because we have not grown up immersed in it. The modern person gets their information elsewhere.

And it seems that our sources of providence is narrowing significantly more. We have lost the ability to gain meaning from buildings – or even the ability to put meaning into them. A skyscraper, while impressive, does not tell a particularly complex story. I’m sure most of us have the experience of being in an art or language class and being shown symbolism, and practically everyone thinking it’s a bit of a stretch. The curtains are blue, because they’re blue – it doesn’t mean anything. Things only mean something if they explicitly say they mean something.

The age of print taught us to trust the written word more than the spoken one, and the advent of TV and Radio taught us to trust broadcasters. The broadcasters have a face, a name, and a reputation. It’s the British Broadcasting Corporation. You know where they’re based, you know who reports for them, and you can figure out their agenda. 

The internet changes this somewhat. Want to know what’s happening in New Jersey? Hop on a local forum and ask away. Don’t trust the news on what’s happening in London, or in Trieste, or in Cheyenne? You can check for yourself, as though by going onto a forum you can walk out onto the streets of a far away city from the comfort of your bedroom and see what’s really going on. 

But the internet has continued to grow. It is now so vast, that you are once again reliant on intermediaries. YouTube Channels, TikTok influences, Instagram posters, and so forth – all communicate via shortform formats. The structure of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and other social media formats, encourage you to consume many many small videos and posts, and agglomerate infromation and messages from an incomprehensible amount of sources. If I went on Instagram reels right now, I could watch 20 or 30 news related reels in under an hour. There is no focus or coherent narrative – in many ways, social media content makes you compelled to just keep going, not stick around in one place for too long. Here is where provenance dies.

There are very few individuals who are the source of news. Information on social media is a toxic glob of contradiction, paranoia, and discontent. Social Media, with its brief exposures to dozens of different sources, gradually impairs the regular user from being able to consume long-form content. After relapsing into social media, I find myself struggling to read a book, or watch a movie, or listen to a podcast. Social Media does not kill other sources of information, it makes the user incapable of consuming them. Cathedrals are not destroyed, you are simply blinded to their message. 

AI brings further changes. Any image online can be a deepfake, any piece of text written by a machine. You can never really tell anymore. Yet a generation of people have grown up with social media as a key source of information, one that has blinded them to other ones. 

All one can do is pick out bits of information – using AI for assignments means that you never really take ownership of your own work and creativity. Imagine you have used an AI to summarise all of your articles, to write all of your papers – all you do is prompt. Writing and art are the mirror image of the bind – when there are no mirrors, you cannot see yourself. Even the self becomes untrustworthy. Humans are robbed of their creativity, in a way, by their own laziness.

The children of tomorrow will grow up with this confusing mass of artificial information and, without sufficient parenting from parents, relatives, and friends, may be robbed of their ability to create and perceive information outside of the internet. Just as we can no longer interpret the architecture of a Cathedral nearly as flunelty as a Medieval person, those who grow up terminally online may be trapped unable to discern information outside of the digital ecosystem. Their connection to the world is robbed by algorithms that compel them to keep going, like a drug addiction.

What now? 

Well, I predict that the past will eventually return. One will no longer be able to trust the internet (really, I doubt we can trust it now) – and thus to find information about something like the Ukraine War or the Genocide in Palestine, you will need to contact real people. In order to connect with the world, it will be necessary to observe it. If information is censored online, it may be necessary to convey it in more permanent ways that are difficult if not impossible to censor – architecture, for example.

Nicholas Haque

our resident contrarian