There is too much information. This, then, must mark the first time in human history this comment can be made to nods of agreement instead of incredulous guffaws.

Since the first appearance of information on cave walls in present-day France 70,000 years ago, through Summarian tablets, to Herodotus’ histories, to medieval Church confessions, to the CIA and the KGB, to motorcycle enthusiast clubs, to Total Information Awareness, information has been to power what the photon is to light.

Power is a relative measure: the average middle-class Coquitlam homeowner has more wealth and comfort than King Louis XV ever dreamed of (despite occasional stand-offs with bears in the driveway), but King Louis in his day was more powerful than anyone else around, and that’s because he had more information than anyone else around. Information has been power throughout human history because information has always been the most scarce of resources. It only works as a generator of power so long as a few people have much more of it than everyone else.

So what does it mean now for the forever uneven distribution of power to say that there is too much information? It isn’t a scarce resource anymore; a wired computer in a café with a choice selection of search engines, RSS feeds and email alerts gives the average minimum wage earner as much information, and as rapidly, as the putative most powerful person in the world, the US President (in general of course, notwithstanding the ape now pinned with that name tag).

When you’re feeling like a summer evening stroll up Commercial Drive, drop in to Abruzzo Café, 1321 Commercial Drive. It’s genuine coffee right in the middle of the stroll, open late every night.

Information is clearly not power anymore because that ape alone can make disastrous wars and economic calamity happen for little reason beyond whim, while the burger flipper—equally armed with volumes of information—can’t even make a bus show up on time for work. The hierarchy of power between president and burger flipper seems as stepped and locked as ever despite the flatness of information. If this hierarchy was first established and so long sustained by the uneven distribution of scarce information, it is certainly not anymore. Something very profound—something on the order of a 100,000 year cycle—has occurred. The source of power has shifted even if the distribution of power has not (yet).

Homo Sapiens Sapiens is who we have been for about 100,000 years, having evolved from another species called Homo Sapiens. We don’t appear physically different from Homo Sapiens, yet we’re undoubtedly a different species. We seem physically as adapted to conditions on Earth as we’re ever going to be and there won’t be another finger or a new fin that is going to confer any evolutionary advantage on any such mutated humans anymore. The transition from Homo Sapiens to Homo Sapiens Sapiens was achieved by an evolutionary leap not in physical form but in mental form, in the consciousness of those first mutants.

Advantages of the kind Charles Darwin meant when he wrote of a mutated form taking over a species and replacing it, is indistinguishable from power: more food, more mates, that is the stuff of power in every species of living thing. All evolutionary transformation occurs when power in a species is redistributed. Power is redistributed when the source of power in a species has shifted. Seeing became the source of power when eyes first evolved, displacing hearing as the source of power that reigned before eyes.

If we are present during a redistribution of power in our species resulting from a shifted source of power, it can only mean we are on the cusp of an evolutionary leap.

We won’t be changing our appearance—it won’t be an extra limb that will provide a new source of power, but rather a new level of consciousness. This new level of consciousness will have something to do with information—eyes replaced ears as the source of power because of their superior information-gathering quality—but it won’t be related to the volume of information as it has been for the 100,000-year career of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. The new species we are rapidly evolving into will gain—is gaining—power not by having access to more information, but by having superior ability to select, analyze and employ information—with the key, I believe, being the first: selecting information.

I suspect selection will be the key not because it is more important than analyzing and employing information—these two are obviously more important—but because a strong enough ability to analyze and employ information is already widespread and relatively easy to attain, whereas the effective selection of information befuddles most people who try, and escapes entirely those who don’t. It is the ability to effectively select information that is what is scarce, and so it will be information selection that will determine the new hierarchy of power.

It is in the selection of information where we will first see evidence of evolutionary advantage conferred upon a mutated consciousness, and it will be in a rare, superior ability to select information upon which the new hierarchy of power will be redistributed. In a world where there is too much information, where everybody has more information than they need for nearly free—selection will be the scarce power-determining skill.

Until recently, lines of inquiry were mostly determined by the paths laid out by the information that was available, much like water from a rare storm will follow pre-established dry river beds. This is most evident in historical inquiry: there are no major studies of Phoenician sexual mores not because Phoenicians didn’t have complicated sexual behaviors, but because there is no surviving information about it. Conversely, there is much more about French sexual mores, but again not because their sexual behaviors are more interesting, but rather they have left a lot more information behind about it.

This tendency of inquiry to follow the paths already inscribed by available information gives shape to all fields of thought. The big change going on now is, in a world where every direction of inquiry finds volumes of information related to it rapidly at hand, the path that inquiry will follow is no longer pre-determined.

It can, of course, and does, most often go nowhere in particular, like a fresh stream of water meandering in no particular direction toward no particular destination across a totally flat desert. This is the most common experience thus far for people hyperlinking between sites on the internet.

The other possibility is that the line of inquiry does go someplace particular, in a sense re-creating or mimicking the world of old that also featured lines of inquiry that followed particular paths. The big difference, and it’s a huge difference, is that now, the person making the line of inquiry is not constrained by pre-existing paths of information but rather is free to deliberately and willfully make their own path, information being evenly distributed in every direction throughout the landscape.

This indeed is the sign of evolutionary change: meandering wildly across the flat terrain of information stretching out in all directions is like a species with new eyes, using them to see but not yet using them to stalk, learn and capture. It wasn’t the eye that conferred the advantage per se, but the ability to use the eye to an advantageous and considered purpose that cemented that evolutionary leap. Just so, it is in the considered, willful selection of information in a total information landscape that will confer any new advantage, that will create an evolutionary leap, one defined as a new consciousness, a new species.

You can learn about anything you can imagine learning about. The puzzle now is, what will you choose to learn about, and why? And will you decide, or will you allow this to be decided for you? That promises to be the distinction between the old species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, and the new: Homo Sapiens Intentionalis.