The Information Diet Part 1

The Information Diet.

Clay A. Johnson.

Dedication.

To my dad, Ray Johnson. When he and my mom dropped me off for college, he told me that there were three lessons he'd learned from many decades of practicing psychiatry: Don't jump in anybody else's drama.

Always believe in yourself.

Don't believe everything you think.

Talk about a healthy information diet.

Preface.

The things we know about food have a lot to teach us about how to have a healthy relations.h.i.+p with information. It turns out that foods that are bad for us have a.n.a.logues in the world of information. In the world of agriculture, we now have factory farms churning out junk food; and in the world of media, we now have content farms churning out junk information. Consuming whole foods that come from the ground tends to be good for you, and consuming news from close to its source tends to inform you the most.

That's what this book is about. My hope is that by reading it, you will gain the knowledge and incentive to transform your relations.h.i.+p with information and have a healthier lifestyle as a result. You'll have more time to spend with your loved ones, be more effective at work, and be a more empowered citizen in your community.

For me, this book isn't just a book-it's a mission. Information overconsumption is a serious health problem for the American electorate, and we can see it from the halls of Congress to the tents of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Tea Party. In any democratic nation with the freedom of speech, information can never be as strongly regulated by the public as our food, water, and air. Yet information is just as vital to our survival as the other three things we consume. That's why personal responsibility in an age of mostly free information is vital to individual and social health. If we want our communities and our democracies to thrive, we need a healthier information diet.

Acknowledgments.

I'd first like to thank my incredible wife, Rosalyn Lemieux. She's been a valuable sounding board for this book, helped me clarify some of my own ideas, and probably read more drafts than anybody. And she was a good sport in allowing me to expose Zombie Roz and Email Roz.

Both my parents, Joy and Ray Johnson, are remarkable, and their input into this book, over more than three decades, should not go unnoticed either.

My editors, Julie Steele and Meghan Blanchette, are also magnificent. They've made this book not a weird rambling of strange ideas, but a cogent story. When I first started the journey of writing this book, I thought about self-publis.h.i.+ng, but the value of strong, smart editors still justifies the existence of publishers.

Rebecca Bell was also instrumental in the writing of this book by allowing me to use her wonderful home off the coast of Georgia to escape the distractions of high bandwidth and focus entirely on writing. I could not have done it without that amazing gift.

My network of colleagues, friends, and family has been indispensable throughout the creation of this book: Jen Pahlka, Carl Malamud, Howard Rheingold, Anil Dash, Andy Baio, Noreen Neilsen, Karl Frisch, Eric Burns, Jake Brewer, Mary Katharine Ham, Michael Ba.s.sik, Tom Hughes-Croucher, Pete Skomoroch, Jane McGonigal, Jim Gilliam, Josh Hendler, Cammie Croft, Steve Geer, Tom Steinberg, Mario Flores, Cindy Mottershead, Maggie McEnerny, Todd Kamin, and Cheryl Contee-thank you so much for sitting and listening to me describe my book and pus.h.i.+ng me when I needed it. Without you all, this book would not have happened.

The countless people I interviewed on and off the record-thank you. You know who you are. Linda Stone, you are a national treasure. Anybody who has read anything in this book and gotten anything out of it ought to listen to what she has to say.

The people who helped me edit this book were saviors. Eric Newton took the time to send me amazing feedback and provide me more historical context than I could ever ask for. Quinn Norton's brutal honesty helped sharpen my focus and my argument, and without Clay s.h.i.+rky and Gina Trapani's encouragement, this book probably would have never seen the light of day.

Finally, a tip of the hat ought to go to Tim O'Reilly for giving me a platform to share this with you. He's a mentor and a friend who does not get enough credit for injecting his community with the right kinds of values. Thank you, Tim.

Part I. Introduction.

"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth."

-Steve Jobs[1]

When I saw the cardboard sign-which displayed what had to be the craziest seven words I'd seen in a long time-I knew I had to quit my job.

I was working for the Sunlight Foundation, a government transparency operation in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. The premise of the organization was simple: if we give people access to government data, they will demand better government, they will vote differently, and the quality of politicians getting elected will improve. But these seven words, held above the head of what looked to be a 40-something male in front of the White House, broke my heart and made me realize how futile that mission was by itself.

The sign said: "Keep your government hands off my Medicare."

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'd spent the past 10 years in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., trying to make a difference. Lots of folks said that my call to politics was like a call to the priesthood: that I was meant for it. It started in 2000, when I did get a call, but it wasn't from G.o.d or even from Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.-it was from my mother.

She told me the doctors had found a lump in her breast, and that the diagnosis was breast cancer. Because my father had retired, my mother was ineligible for Medicare and was independently insured; her monthly insurance premiums were going to go from $300 a month to $3,000 a month. My father would have to come out of retirement to work as a psychiatrist for the state of Georgia so that my mother could undergo therapy and have affordable access to healthcare.

I, the bright-eyed twenty-something, thought I'd do something about it, and a couple of years and a war in Iraq later, I found myself driving up to Burlington, Vermont, to work for Governor Howard Dean. I'd never voted before, but Dean was a medical doctor, and had made reasonable moves on healthcare in his home state. He was the only person running for president who seemed like he could get my mother's health insurance premiums down, and make it so my dad could retire again.

That started my career in politics. After the Dean Campaign ended, I was still convinced that electing Democrats would help get my mom's health insurance premium down, so I went on to cofound a company called Blue State Digital with three of my friends from the Dean Campaign. Our plan was to take the lessons and technology we'd learned and turn them into a business that would help the Democrats raise money and win votes over the Internet. My naive belief at the time was that if we could simply elect more Democrats to Congress and to the White House, then my mom's health insurance problem would get fixed.

The story is almost a cliche from there. The company was very successful. I was making far more money than I'd ever made before. But it became obvious (about four years later) that I wasn't solving the problem that I'd set out to solve. After electing a majority of Democrats to the House in 2006 and still seeing no movement on healthcare, I decided that electing Democrats to fix the problem wasn't doing a whole lot of good. There must have been some other impediment I needed to address.

Lobbyists! Of course, it was the lobbyists-those dark evil characters in the backs of high-end, smoke-filled cigar bars in Was.h.i.+ngton, bribing our members of Congress to vote against the will of the American people. Surely it was them.

I left the company after watching Barack Obama, soon to become the nation's best-known client of Blue State Digital, win the Iowa Caucuses in the winter of 2008. My new job at the Sunlight Foundation was directing a squad of technologists. Our mission was to liberate and a.n.a.lyze government data, and to make it easier for people to make more informed decisions about elections. If we could show America with hard facts that their Congress was being bought off, surely that would spur them to action.

After two years on the job at Sunlight-a full eight years since my mom was diagnosed and two radical mastectomies later-I watched the newly-elected President Barack Obama bring up healthcare. It should have been a great moment, the realization of my hopes for nearly a decade. Instead, I watched the nation go into a bitter and angry debate about the role of our government. Ironically, this was about the same time that my mom became eligible for Medicare.

The news media was saturated with every kind of graph and chart about our healthcare costs, wait times, the efficiency of government, how Canada does it, how old people handle healthcare, and what kinds of medicines would and would not be available to Americans should we pa.s.s some form of healthcare overhaul. At Sunlight, we did our best to stick to the facts. We built "Sunlight Live," which allowed people to watch the healthcare debates online; next to each member of Congress when they spoke appeared the amount of money they had received from the healthcare industry.

During that long, bitter, and angry debate, I took a stroll down to the White House. And that's when I saw that sign, those jarring seven words, held high: "Keep your government hands off my Medicare."

It's amazing how the little things can give you perspective. But then I spoke to this protestor about his sign. He seemed rather well educated-sure, he was angry, but he was not dumb, just concerned about the amount of money being spent by the current administration. He talked to me about topics that I, as a professional in Was.h.i.+ngton for 10 years, hadn't really thought about since my political science cla.s.ses in college. This man did not suffer from a lack of information. Yet he had failed to consider the irony of holding a sign above his head asking government to keep its hands off a government-run program. To him, it made perfect sense.

Then something else happened. I live near Walter Reed Hospital, a hospital that treats injured veterans. On my jogs around my block, Marines-likely injured from our military operations-often breeze by me with one leg and one prosthetic. Although it certainly wounds my self-esteem as a runner, it's a miracle. Yet at the front of the gates to the hospital on Georgia Avenue one evening, I spotted another sign: "Enlist Here To Die for Halliburton."

I imagined that sign-maker, Halliburton Woman, to be the polar opposite of Medicare Man. But equally wrong. I mean, even on the surface: n.o.body enlists for the United States Army at the Army hospital.

How could it be possible that educated, intelligent people have somehow become capable of believing in a distorted reality? At that moment, an idea popped into my head. What if a person's native or learned abilities to process information sensibly could be warped by feeding junk into the mental machine? As we say in technology: garbage in, garbage out.

We know we're products of the food we eat. Why wouldn't we also be products of the information we consume?

In the case of the activists-one against Obama's healthcare plan, the other against our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq-these people certainly seemed informed. But it's as though they had caught some kind of disease that made it so they couldn't think clearly.

If unhealthy information consumption creates bad information habits the way unhealthy eating creates food addictions, then what good is transparency? I left the Sunlight Foundation. Transparency wasn't the universal answer I was looking for. You cannot simply flood the market with broccoli and hope that people stop eating french fries. If large numbers of people only seek out information that confirms their beliefs, then flooding the market with data from and about the government will really not work as well as the theorists predict; the data ends up being twisted by the left- and right-wing noise machines, and turned into more fodder to keep America spinning.

Today, you're likely to spend upwards of 11 hours per day consuming information-reading books like this, checking out your friends' Facebook pages, reading the newspaper, watching television, listening to the radio or your portable music player. For many of us who work in front of a computer all day, it's even more: we spend all day reading and writing in front of a screen.

The sheer amount of information available to us is mind-boggling. According to storage company EMC, there are presently 800,000 petabytes (each petabyte representing one million gigabytes) in the storage universe. And according to the University of California in San Diego, American homes consume nearly 3.6 zettabytes (one million petabytes are in one zettabyte) of information per day. It's expected to grow, too: EMC expects a 44-fold increase in data storage by 2020.

So we've come up with this term to deal with it: information overload. (If you search for "information overload" on Amazon.com, you'll get 9,093 results-roughly eight and a half times more than the number of results that a search for "irony" returns.) For a new professional cla.s.s, achieving "inbox zero" (dealing with every email inside of your inbox) is akin to running a 10k or getting a promotion at work. We've also developed a near bogey man type of mythology around our information abundance. In 2011, Nicholas Carr was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Shallows: How the Internet Is Rewiring Our Brains (W.W. Norton).

Using Google's n-gram viewer-a service Google provides that allows you to count how many times a phrase appears in its giant corpus of books over 150 years-you can see that the term information overload became popular just after 1960, and surged 50% by 1980 and and again by 2000.

The concept of information overload doesn't work, however, because as much as we'd like to equate our brains with iPods or hard drives, human beings are biological creatures, not mechanical ones. Our brains are as finite in capacity as our waistlines. While people may eat themselves into a heart attack, they don't actually die of overconsumption: we don't see many people taking their last bite at a fried chicken restaurant, overstepping their maximum capacity, and exploding. n.o.body has a maximum amount of storage for fat, and it's unlikely that we have a maximum capacity for knowledge.

Yet we seem to want to solve the problem mechanically. Turn it the other way around and you see how absurd it is. Trying to deal with our relations.h.i.+p with information as though we are somehow digital machines is like trying to upgrade our computers by sitting them in fertilizer. We're looking at the problem through the wrong lens.

Instead of the lens of efficiency and productivity, maybe we should start looking at this through the lens we use to view everything else we biologically consume: health.

What if we started managing our information consumption like we managed our food consumption? The world of food consumption and the world of information consumption aren't that far apart: both the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience show us that information can have physiological effects on our bodies, as well as fairly severe and uncontrollable consequences on our decision-making capability.

When viewed through this lens, the information abundance problem appears more dire. Coping with the problem isn't a matter of getting things done anymore; it's a matter of health and survival. Information and power are inherently related. Our ability to process and communicate information is as much an evolutionary advantage as our opposable thumbs.

There are kinds of food we're hard wired to love. Salt, sugars, and fats. Food that, over the course of the history of our species, has helped us get through some long winters, and plow through some extreme migrations. There are also certain kinds of information we're hard wired to love: affirmation is something we all enjoy receiving, and the confirmation of our beliefs helps us form stronger communities. The spread of fear and its companion, hate, are clearly survival instincts, but more benign acts like gossip also help us spread the word about things that could be a danger to us.

In the world of food, we've seen ma.s.sive efficiencies leveraged by ma.s.sive corporations that have driven the cost of a calorie down so low that now obesity is more of a threat than famine. Those same kinds of efficiencies are now transforming our information supply: we've learned how to produce and distribute information in a nearly free manner.

The parallels between what's happened to our food and what's happened to our information are striking. Driven by a desire for more profits, and a desire to feed more people, manufacturers figured out how to make food really cheap; and the stuff that's the worst for us tends to be the cheapest to make. As a result, a healthy diet-knowing what to consume and what to avoid-has gone from being a luxury to mandatory for our longevity.

Just as food companies learned that if they want to sell a lot of cheap calories, they should pack them with salt, fat, and sugar-the stuff that people crave-media companies learned that affirmation sells a lot better than information. Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they're right?

Because of the inherent social nature of information, the consequences of these new efficiencies are far more dramatic than even the consequence of physical obesity. Our information habits go beyond affecting the individual. They have serious social consequences.

Much as a poor diet gives us a variety of diseases, poor information diets give us new forms of ignorance-ignorance that comes not from a lack of information, but from overconsumption of it, and sicknesses and delusions that don't affect the underinformed but the hyperinformed and the well educated.

Driven by a desire for more profits, and for wider audiences, our media companies look to produce information as cheaply as possible. As a result, they provide affirmation and sensationalism over balanced information. And in return, we need to start formulating an information diet-what to consume and what to avoid-in this new world of information abundance.

The first step is realizing that there is a choice involved. As much as our televisions, radios, and movie theaters would have us believe otherwise, information consumption is as active an experience as eating, and in order for us to live healthy lives, we must move our information consumption habits from the pa.s.sive background of channel surfing into the foreground of conscious selection.

The first part of this book is intended to give you a good idea of how we got to where we are-to explore the economics of information, and the biological consequences of our information consumption.

The second part of the book is an attempt to design an information diet-describing the healthy habits of a good information consumer, and providing pointers on how to consume that information.

The third part of this book is a call to action: if our information consumption has a social consequence, then it's not only about ourselves, but also about ethics. Just as the food we eat has an ethical consequence, so do the choices we make around information. In order to create better access to information, better quality sources, and healthier lifestyles, suppliers must change. And suppliers will only change with proven demand. If things are to truly change, then we've got to break the insidious cycle that we ordinary people create with our demand, and media companies create with more supply.

This book is also the outcome of my experience as a political operative and transparency advocate in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. It discusses politics, and while I do draw from my experiences as a consultant to Democratic campaigns and causes, I attempt to be even-handed with my discussion. My goal is not to convince you to be a liberal, or a conservative, but rather to close the gap between you and your government by giving you some insight about what is really going on in Was.h.i.+ngton.

Like any good diet, the information diet works best if you think about it not as denying yourself information, but as consuming more of the right stuff and developing healthy habits. The result I wish for you is just what you'd expect from any kind of balanced diet: a healthier and happier lifestyle.

The more I researched the parallels between our food consumption and our information consumption, the more strongly I came to believe that this isn't just a fancy metaphor. It's real. Conscious consumption of information is possible. We can (and some already do) pay as much attention to the information we put into our heads as we do to the food we put into our bodies. Much like a healthy food diet, a healthy information diet has consequences that not only can reduce stress but also may help us live longer, happier lives.

[1] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs.html.

Chapter 1. Lessons from Obesity.

"What we know about diets hasn't changed. It still makes sense to eat lots of fruits and vegetables, balance calories from other foods, and keep calories under control. That, however, does not make front-page news."

-Marion Nestle, Food Activist[2]

William Banting learned the hard way that you are what you eat, and as a result, he invented what we know today as the modern diet.

An undertaker from Great Britain, Banting found himself suffering from "failing sight and hearing, an umbilical rupture requiring a truss, and bandages for weak knees and ankles." He reported not being able to walk down stairs without help, or to touch his toes. He went to see many doctors for his various conditions but claimed that, "not one of them pointed out the real cause of my sufferings, nor proposed any effectual remedy." The real cause of Banting's suffering wasn't that he couldn't walk down stairs, it was that he was obese.

After he started losing his hearing, he finally sought specialized medical attention and found himself in the care of "the celebrated aurist" Dr. William Harvey. The physician put him on a diet inspired by a lecture he'd heard about treating diabetes: five to six ounces of meat or fish three times a day, accompanied by stale toast with cooked fruit. Beer, potatoes, milk, and sweets were not allowed. Alcohol was, though: four to five gla.s.ses of wine a day, a gla.s.s of brandy in the evening, and sometimes even a wake-up c.o.c.ktail in the morning were called for.

Banting reported losing 13 inches off his waist and 50 pounds of weight over the course of a couple of years. It was only then that Banting realized that he had been treating symptoms, not the root cause. Once he fixed his diet, his other problems went away. He could walk down the stairs again.

We've known that obesity is bad for a very long time. In the fourth century BCE, Hippocrates, called the father of medicine by Western scholars, wrote, "Corpulence is not only a disease itself, but the harbinger of others." And the Bible is filled with warnings about overconsumption. Proverbs 23:2021 says, "Be not among winebibbers; among riotous eaters of flesh: For the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty: and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags."

However, for thousands of years, obesity was usually a disease affecting only the most affluent. Food-especially the delicious, calorie-dense stuff-was simply too expensive for the average person to obtain. Few could afford to be fat, and thus being so was often considered a way to display one's prosperity.

Then a great technological s.h.i.+ft happened, much like the one that we faced in the second half of the twentieth century. New technology and new techniques increased our food supply. The steam engine, crop rotation, and the iron plow revolutionized agriculture in Europe between the 17th and 19th centuries, alongside a variety of sociopolitical changes, including the rise of the merchant cla.s.s. The food supply became more abundant, and access to it improved. Obesity was no longer just for a fortunate few.

It was in this context that Banting decided to share his results with the world. In 1863, he published Europe's first modern diet book, Letter on Corpulence, and sold an astounding 63,000 copies for a s.h.i.+lling each. It was the first diet craze of the West (called, appropriately, banting), and thousands were inspired to lose weight with his diet. The book also had global reach. It was translated into multiple languages and according to Banting, achieved good sales in France, Germany, and the United States.

The medical community treated it as old news. Their critique wasn't an a.s.sault on the idea, but they questioned why Banting's letter was so popular in the first place. Similar works had been published prior to his, but they were written by physicians, for physicians. Letter on Corpulence was written by a suffering person, for suffering people. His message resonated. People were ready to hear it. And Banting provided it in a form they could understand.

In the fourth edition of his letter, Banting spends upwards of seven pages defending himself against a medical fraternity that disputed his story, claiming that he must not have sought the attention of particularly good doctors if it took him that long to get well, or worse, that Banting's recommendation of four meals a day would cause more corpulence. His response: "My unpretending letter on Corpulence has at least brought all these facts to the surface for public examination, and they have thereby had already a great share of attention, and will doubtless receive much more until the system is thoroughly understood and properly appreciated by every thinking man and woman in the civilized world."

A Modern Epidemic.