Carl Sunstein is guesting Laurence Lessig's Blog for the first week of Laurence's vacation with an interesting series of short items under the broad heading of "Information Aggregation" in which he has contrasted the ideas of Hayek (market) and Habermas (politics) about the road to consensus, while, of particular relevance here, noting that neither approach to consensus production is safe from runaway conditions.

Closer to home, the AFL's progressive policy of initially treating detection of "recreational" drugs as a health issue, especially with consideration to the social pressures on highly paid young sportsmen, has been rolled by the draconian rules of the World Anti Doping Agency—the current claimants to relevant consensus.

When I started out nearly two decades ago on a never close to completed project to write a monologue on "The Prospect Of An Informed Age", one of the planned chapters was to have been called "No Secrets" and assert there could be "no need for secrets". Optimistic as always, I was still ignoring early signs of the capture of long standing public processes for promoting socialisation by the methodologies of industrial production—methodologies whose over application has perverted much of the promise of civil society as it sucked billions onto the economic treadmill—a development which has at least had the side benefit of giving many participants some sense of self worth, in not exactly happiness.

So now we have to deal with a flood of worthy selves armed with media industry techniques for silencing dissent. If you don't agree with us you must be one of them. Sunstein notes that "because people care about their reputations, they may silence themselves even if they know something that is both important and true."