Morland, P. (2015). Risk Wise: Nine Everyday Adventures. Profile Books.

p. 6 On knowledge fetishisation. Note he is writing in the period 1995-2000, before it became absolutely clear that this was vanishing and that it would become a fetish:

One purpose [for acquiring information[ is simply possession and the satisfaction it gives; witness the pride some people take in their phenomenal memory for trivia, their extensive libraries, their collections of compact disks, maps, or computer programs. Possessing information also confers prestige. Erudition and especially initiation into the esoteric knowledge of a small sect or secret society--Freemasons, cosmologists, and the like--have conferred prestige and awed the ignorant throughout history.