Finally, to keep your inbox from filling up with political advertisements, avoid signing petitions and signing up for regular campaign updates. As a cofounder of one of the larger firms on the left responsible for the drafting of these petitions and the software that runs it, I can assure you that the online petitions that you sign are not meant, primarily, to cause change. They’re meant to get your email address so that you can later be bombarded by emails asking for money.
Instead, keep your voice your own, and if there’s an issue that you care about, bypass the middlemen and speak directly to your representative through the official means given to you—via house.gov, senate.gov, or whitehouse.gov. Or if you want to be truly effective, meet with your representatives in person. Call their offices, ask to speak to their schedulers, and get yourself a meeting.
With business news, paying attention to your local businesses, reading the public filings of companies from the SEC is likely to give you more benefit than listening to Jim Cramer smash things on CNBC.
In sports, developing a mastery of the statistics we use to measure the performance of our athletes may provide you with more insight and more pleasure for the game than listening to the washed up pundits and armchair quarterbacks tell you what they think. And certainly watching the games themselves is far more important to understanding the game than listening to the pundits prattle on about it.
It turns out the more local your sports diet, the more rewarding it can be too. Although watching a local high school baseball game doesn’t often give us the athletic showmanship of professional sports, it trades that for being able to watch kids play for the sport of the game, rather than for the money.
The same can be said for any major section of your newspaper, or any topic you’re interested in. The pattern here is simple: seek to get information directly from sources, and when the information requires you to act, interact directly with those sources. An over-reliance on third party sources for information and action reduces your ability to know the truth about what’s happening, and dilutes your ability to cause change.
The thing that’s made what Alexis de Tocqueville called “The Great American Experiment,” as on page 135, work is our ability to be pragmatic. Unfortunately, the economics of our information production, and what we’re willing to consume, is destroying our very ability to be pragmatic—to look to solve solvable problems. We get caught up in big debates, and brush off the boring stuff for the wonks to deal with.
Going on a healthy information diet restores our ability to be pragmatic. Let’s take our country back, not from the right or from the left, but from the crazy partisanship of both sides. Let’s give it to the stewards that have made the country so great, the pragmatists—the ones who want to create a more perfect union. A country with measurable results and demonstrably good outcomes.
Without stealing too much from President Obama, I’d like to suggest that we are the wonks we’ve been waiting for.
Appendix A. A Special Note: Dear Programmer
“It circulates intelligence of a commercial, political, intellectual, and private nature, with incredible speed and regularity. It thus administers, in a very high degree, to the comfort, the interests, and the necessities of persons, in every rank and station of life. It brings the most distant places and persons, as it were, in contact with each other; and thus softens the anxieties, increases the enjoyments, and cheers the solitude of millions of hearts.”
—Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story in 1833 on the United States Post Office [93]
Six thousand years ago, there was a professional class of people that had a better relationship with information than everybody else. The professional scribe, armed with the ability to read and write, had a better ability to figure out the world than anybody else. Scribes became more than just stenographers for the courtrooms of power; they explored the sciences, becoming mathematicians, scientists, architects, and physicians. For millennia, the scribe wasn’t just a professional class, it was the backbone of civilization.
Through the development of the printing press, and a global push for basic literacy, the scribe class became obsolete. Knowing how to read and write wasn’t a trade secret for a professional class—it was a necessary asset for economic survival. Scribes went extinct, and were replaced in society by journalists, who had marginally better abilities to read and write, to preserve the link between the people and the truth.
But our romantic idea of the journalist speaking truth to power has now gone all but extinct. As our media companies have consolidated and sought shareholder returns over civic responsibility, there’s not much left for the investigative reporter; local newspapers just don’t have the budget for investigative reporting, and larger media companies are making too much money peddling affirmation over information.
The invention of the printing press brought with it the Protestant Reformation—a democratization of the people’s relationship with God. Once the Bible could be purchased by the middle class, every man, in the eyes of Martin Luther, could become his own priest. Today, the invention of the Internet has democratized information such that professional journalists alone cannot own the relationship with the facts anymore.
Today, programmers are the new scribes. Whether it is the developers at Google, determining which search results are accurate for a particular query; the developers at Microsoft, building the browser that most of us use; the developers at Apple, building the latest phones so that we can have a printing press in our pockets; or the developers at Facebook, figuring out which of our friends are the most relevant to us—the developers build the lenses that the rest of us look through to get our information.
This book’s agenda is to help people make more sense of the world around them by encouraging them to tune into the things that matter most and to tune out the things that make them sick. The ones who can link the public with the truth most effectively today aren’t journalists, they’re developers. As the digital divide continues to close, and as a generation of children grows up knowing how to use an iPad from the age of two, developers must take the mantle of scribe seriously and responsibly.
The opportunities for developers to make a difference are unparalleled. The self-driving cars being engineered at companies like Volkswagen and Google aren’t just novel inventions that allow us to watch movies on our way to work; they’re life-saving devices. The self-driving car promises a future in which drunk driving deaths no longer happen.
The World Bank has opened most of its data to the public, hoping that developers can find more effective ways for the organization to distribute financial and medicinal aid to developing nations.
Code for America is creating an army of developers to create technology that helps the government provide cheaper, more transparent, and more reliable services. In its first year, it managed to create new ways for civic leaders to work with one another in Philadelphia and Seattle, and provided more educational transparency to the city of Boston. Through its Civic Commons project, it’s helping municipalities work together to lower the costs of the software they procure by connecting the cities together to share.
Just after the devastating earthquakes in 2010, I hosted a “Hack for Haiti” event at the Sunlight Foundation. In just 48 hours, a small group of developers at a company in Washington called Intredia developed software that allowed relief workers on the ground to translate Creole into English without the need for an Internet connection.
Most developers haven’t taken this new responsibility to heart. A half-century ago, the brightest minds of the generation were working on putting a man on the moon. Today, the 20-something research scientist and data team lead for Facebook, Jeff Hammerbacher, put it best: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”[94]
If you’re a developer, you can do more than this: you can solve problems. With the right data, and working with the right people, you can find efficient ways to connect vaccines with the people who need them the m
ost, and prevent them from being wasted on the people who need them the least. You can find ways to close the gap between the reality-based community, and the folks stuck in epistemic loops, by linking them more closely to the levers of power in their community.
My plea to you is that you take your role in society seriously. Find an issue you care about: the environment, cancer, space exploration, education, rewiring communities, pet adoption—anything—and dedicate some portion of your time to finding new ways to put your skills to use in that community.
You needn’t ask for permission to do this. Do not wait for a nonprofit or advocacy group to ask you donate your time. While it’s useful to partner with organizations, it’s likely that they’re more interested in your skills to help them fundraise than they are to solve problems. Instead, find ways to interview and understand experts in the field, and then invent new ways to solve problems big and small. The best ideas do not rely on a government’s or organization’s permission or compliance for implementation. The best ideas provide irrefutable insight and solve problems.
The lean startup world that many technology-focused people find themselves in usually starts with a business-oriented cofounder, and a technology-oriented cofounder. To make an interesting social contribution, try partnering up with a journalist. Cynicism aside, there are still a few good reporters working in the world, who know how to ask the right questions and get the most out of the data that you can process.
There are networks of journalists looking for developers across the country. Check out the organization Hacks/Hackers, which is attempting to do just that: link great developers with great investigative reporters to combine the best of both worlds. Watch the work of the Knight Foundation, too. They’re investing millions of dollars in reinventing media for the digital age.
Keep in mind that this isn’t a call for you to build apps for your favorite nonprofit. Unless you’re willing to support and maintain each application, and help constantly ensure its usage and adoption, you’re wasting your time. Your nonprofit likely doesn’t have the kind of resources or knowledge it takes to ensure success. Rather, it’s a call for you to solve problems using your skills.
Doctors Without Borders works because doctors can triage the ill, and put them on a course to getting better. They’re solving immediate problems, and when they leave, the doctors know they made a difference. A programmer’s relationship to her product is different: it takes time and maintenance to have the desired effect.
My other plea to you is that you take your role in society responsibly. Just as responsible journalists have a code of ethics, so should you. It should never be your goal to analyze data to make a point, but rather to analyze it to tell the truth. As we’ve discovered in this book, we all come with our own biases—some we don’t even know we have. But you must try as hard as you can to not let your own agenda supersede the truth.
The CEO of my publisher, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, has a guiding principle that I think applies here: work on stuff that matters. Please, don’t let your entire career be about figuring out new ways to deliver advertisements. Even if it pays the bills, find an additional outlet to use your skills to make a difference.
The greatest scribes have always done so, whether it was Imhotep and the construction of the Pyramid of Djoser, Martin Luther and his 95 Theses, or Google’s self-driving car, our information technology is powerful stuff. You can do amazing things if you, as O’Reilly says, take the long view, and create more value than you capture.
You can even run for Congress. While many sneer at the idea of the nerdy caricatures of developers that they know, the fact is that software engineers are often great communicators. And while cynical developers may be repulsed at the idea of working for such an organization, there’s so much value they can add.
Developers are great at using technology to connect directly with people in ways that others cannot, and at helping constituents connect with one another. With a developer who understands the guts of the Web in a leadership spot inside Congress, Congress could start communicating more effectively online. And as this developer became more successful, the rest of Congress may very well follow suit.
The government’s problems are becoming increasingly technical—or the problems we’re facing have technology tied to them in some way. For instance, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 isn’t just a 1000+ page bill that’s now a law, it’s also a technical specification for Recovery.gov—and it’s written by people who don’t know how to write specifications. Worse, unlike a poorly informed client or boss, if you don’t adhere to this client’s wishes, you don’t just lose money—you may be breaking the law. Thus, Recovery.gov was built to spec, but hasn’t been particularly effective at bringing people into the process.
It’s every crooked consultant’s dream to have a client who views what they sell as a form of mysticism, and that’s precisely what’s happening around our muncipal, state, and federal governments. A few developers in Congress could reign in the spending and help their peer representatives appropriate taxpayer funds. Today, there is exactly one developer who has written software professionally who has also been elected to Congress: Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisana. If a revitalization of government technology is going to happen smartly and wisely, we need some developers inside Congress to help lead the way.
Of course, you don’t have to (and probably shouldn’t) start in federal politics. Join your local civic association first, and find new ways to help your local community. You’ll discover plenty of opportunity and many open arms there. But again, don’t wait for someone’s permission, unless it absolutely requires their adoption and sponsorship in order to work.
Finally, for those of you who aren’t engineers, know that the most vital thing after basic literacy for the education of yourself and your children is digital literacy and STEM education: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. History shows us that perhaps a century from now saying “I’m not an Internet person” may be much like saying “I don’t know how to read.” Organizations like CodeNow are helping transform our concepts of literacy by making sure computer science education is accessible to everyone who wants it, and is constantly looking for volunteer engineers who can help teach classes. While it’s not the key to solving all of our problems and differences, those skills, combined with the ability to communicate, give us the greatest ability to see the truth.
Appendix B. Further Reading
People
The concept of an information diet is a relatively new one, and the thoughts and ideas in this book come from research and interviews with scores of people. In addition to pointing you towards the research papers and books I’ve read and recommend to further your study, it’s also important to follow the people who are leading this field, who are studying how the mind works, the economics of information, and the ever-changing face of our news media.
As much of our scientific research still sits behind paywalls, interacting directly with the scientists who use social media has an added payoff: you’ll gain exposure to their work without having to subscribe to the various scientific publication services. In the spirit of infoveganism, I advise you to connect directly with these researchers and scientists.
Matt Cutts
Matt Cutts is the head of the web-spam team at Google, the person with the job of managing Panda, and maintaining Google’s delicate search relationship with content farms. He’s been called “Google’s Greenspan.”
http://twitter.com/mattcutts
http://mattcutts.com
Marco Iacaboni
Dr. Iacaboni’s insight on the consequences of neuroplasticity and how we affect each other is tremendously important to follow.
http://twitter.com/marcoiacoboni
http://iacoboni.bmap.ucla.edu/
Ryota Kanai
Dr. Kanai’s research links our brain’s structure to our political affiliations. His continued interests are around our perception of time, the neuroscience
behind our attention, and distractibility.
http://twitter.com/kanair
http://www.icn.ucl.ac.uk/Research-Groups/awareness-group/group-members/MemberDetails.php?Title=Dr&FirstName=Ryota&LastName=Kanai
Brendan Nyhan
Dr. Nyhan’s work on measuring the effectiveness of messaging on the public and the outcomes of our information consumption is leading the field. Read his papers and engage with him online. He’s responsive and smart.
http://twitter.com/BrendanNyhan
http://www.brendan-nyhan.com
Robert Proctor
Robert Proctor invented the term agnotology, and was the inspiration for Chapter 7.
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/proctor.html
Julian Sanchez
Julian Sanchez is the person who brought the idea of epistemic closure into the modern political dialog. He’s a writer for Reason magazine and the CATO institute.
http://twitter.com/normative
Linda Stone
Linda Stone’s research on conscious computing, email apnea, and our attention spans is amazing to watch. Follow her work at:
https://twitter.com/LindaStone
http://lindastone.net
John Tierney
John Tierney is a science columnist for the New York Times and, along with Roy Baumeister, is the author of Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.
http://twitter.com/JohnTierneyNYT
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/columns/johntierney/index.html
Jeff Jarvis
The Information Diet Page 12
