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(PhilRice) who made PhilRice world-renown, who asked me if I could write about Dar just as I had written about
him (‘Management: Relating Is Everything. Or, The Wizard Of Rice Who Cultivated Minds,’ 2006 July 31,
americanchronicle.com). I said I couldn’t possibly write about him until we met and I could ask pertinent questions,
meaning size him up. And so we did, and so I did. And so I wrote, a little tentatively, about sweet sorghum and
ICRISAT (‘The Yankee Dawdle. On Discovery Sorghum, The Great Climate Crop,’ 2007 February 4,
americanchronicle.com), then mostly about William Dar himself (‘An Inconvenient Truth: William Dar, The Filipino
As Global Manager,’ 2007 February 26, americanchronicle.com). The rest is his story.
I wrote the first essay mentioning ICRISAT, ‘The Yankee Dawdle’ without thinking of writing a book. Nonetheless,
once I started reading on ICRISAT, I became more and more interested and had more and more ideas what to write
and how to write. The rest of the story is this book.
As it happened, in Serendipity I had invented a new genre of writing science for the masses. Yes, a happy
accident is that this book introduces formally to the universe of popular science a new genre of science writing; I
call it infocracy, and I am my first infocrat.
On October 21, Sunday Manila time, I discovered that I’m not the first to call himself an infocrat. There was
K Shakti Prakash who called himself an infocrat on 2006 January 11 (infocrats.blogspot.com); the Medical Libraries
Association of the US in an annual meeting had it as a spoof of a title, ‘MLA Infocrat of the Year’ in March 1995 yet
(listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu); W Hugh Chatfield in 2002 called the information worker an infocrat (urbanmarket.com).
Most interestingly, Jaffer Ali in 1999 derided the infocrat who, he says, ‘believes in information uber alles’ (over
everything); what Ali was doing was ‘rescuing the Internet from infocrats,’ those who are ‘notoriously devoid of a
transactional sales imagination,’ that which he explains this way:
It is what comes to the heart of most sales. To complete a sale, one needs to discover what makes a potential consumer
tick. One needs to find compelling, emotionally charged methods of communicating.
Now that I’ve found you, Jaffer, I now would like to paraphrase and expand you and the infocrat:
Infocracy is something that comes to the heart of science writing. To complete an information transaction, one needs to
discover what makes a potential reader read the message and react positively to it. One needs to find compelling,
emotionally & intellectually charged methods of communicating.
Science writing belongs to the people, like democracy, unlike technocracy. Democracy is government of the
people, for the people, by the people; technocracy is government by the technicians or knowledge managers. In
an entirely different perspective, infocracy is non-government science writing that speaks the language of the
knowledge users (consumers), not the language of the knowledge gatekeepers, which you find spoken everywhere
in the Internet. By theory, an infocrat is a science writer who engages as well as enthuses, enthralls, encourages,
eventually enables. A welcome writer is one who amuses besides. If you don’t care about language, or if you do
the exact opposite of an infocrat, you are a newscrat, he who is interested only in speaking in the language of the
tribe. I’m more interested in the language of the mind.
Introduction