Part 1 (1/2)

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?