Part 11 (1/2)

Political Infoveganism.

The rule at most dinner parties is that there are three things you don't discuss: sports, religion, and politics. I can understand the first two-no sporting event is useful without an intense rivalry, one that's built intentionally to cross the wall of logic and rational behavior and into something more akin to faux-tribal loyalties. And religion is a deeply personal belief that's usually nonpliable. It's likely too difficult to get a Muslim and a Christian to agree on the stature of Jesus Christ or Muhammed.

Politics are different. The greatest political ideas have come from the constant search for synthesis and pragmatism, and the foundation of democracy is constant public partic.i.p.ation. Policy is something we should talk about at the dinner table; it's vital to our civic health that we do. Democracy cannot survive without the synthesis of ideas from its citizens.

Yet the reason we don't is because we risk relations.h.i.+ps when we do. It is because of the fear of the Uncle Warren situation: that the conversation will devolve from ideas to attacks, name-calling, and finally to division. It's not worth the risk. Bringing up politics always ends up with alienation.

The source of our problem with political dialog has its roots in our information diets. Frequently, mainstream national political news is worthless-at best it glosses over the issues that governments are trying to deal with, and at worst represents sensationalized opinion. From Dylan Ratigan to Bill O'Reilly to Wolf Blitzer, paid political operatives and pundits gloss over the facts in order to keep you watching. As someone who has worked inside D.C.'s machinery for a decade, I have learned that the media cla.s.s around the United States Federal Government and national news has little interest in providing you with the public service of informing you. They are interested in selling advertis.e.m.e.nts.

Our political information diets are the worst of them all-they're misinformed, they offer little to no knowledge about the actual procedures of Was.h.i.+ngton, and deliver to us the news we want to hear, not the news we should hear. As a result, we grow more attached to the teams of our choosing-the reds vs. the blues, rather than finding the great synthesis of ideas.

Political news does us no good unless it is potentially actionable via our votes or our activism. To make sense of politics, we need to delve underneath what our news outlets are telling us and into the data that makes politics tick. Thanks to the work of organizations like the Center for Responsive Politics, the Partic.i.p.atory Politics Foundation, and my former employer the Sunlight Foundation, we can start having a direct relations.h.i.+p with what's really happening in the White House and on Capitol Hill.

A healthy information diet always starts locally-and your political information should be no different. The goings-on of your state representatives and city and county governments, along with your school boards and other local government offices are the best, healthiest forms of content for political news, and should be consumed over the national or global news.

OpenGovernment.org, a project of the Partic.i.p.atory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation, is attempting to build user-friendly websites that allow you to see every vote cast on every bill by every elected state representative and senator in every state. It's a huge undertaking, and if you're in one of the states they're covering, then you can take advantage of a great user interface and user-focused thought that goes into the project.

At the local level, the National Inst.i.tute for Money in State Politics tracks non-federal races: your governors and state representatives. With its website followthemoney.org, you can type in the name of a politician and see who is funding his campaign. At the federal level, the Center for Responsive Politics' opensecrets.org does the same thing.

At the federal level, OpenCongress.org, also a project of the Partic.i.p.atory Politics Foundation, gives you unprecedented access to what's going on in the United States Senate and House of Representatives. Just like OpenGovernment.org, you can find your politicians, look up their votes on bills, and even contact them to tell them how you feel about issues.

To see what influences our politicians, it's good to take a look at the industries and donors giving to their campaigns. While the connection between money and politics isn't direct and uniform, money at the very least buys access, and at its worst buys votes. In either case, it is good to take a look at what kinds of people you're a.s.sociating with by supporting a particular candidate or campaign.

On television, C-SPAN does a better service of covering the news than FOX, MSNBC, or the major networks. It provides an advertis.e.m.e.nt and a.n.a.lysis free way for you to see what's going on and to see what candidates are saying directly.

For activists, it may seem nice to subscribe to political emails too, to get the latest on the campaigns and issues that you support, but most of the time, these too quickly turn into advertis.e.m.e.nts. Sign up to get updates from Newt Gingrich, for instance, through HumanEvents.com, and you'll soon start getting emails asking you to buy gold, advertisments for books to read, and recommendations on penny stocks.

Finally, to keep your inbox from filling up with political advertis.e.m.e.nts, avoid signing pet.i.tions 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 pet.i.tions and the software that runs it, I can a.s.sure you that the online pet.i.tions 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, bypa.s.s 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 showmans.h.i.+p 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 partisans.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.s of people that had a better relations.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.s, it was the backbone of civilization.

Through the development of the printing press, and a global push for basic literacy, the scribe cla.s.s became obsolete. Knowing how to read and write wasn't a trade secret for a professional cla.s.s-it was a necessary a.s.set 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 relations.h.i.+p with G.o.d. Once the Bible could be purchased by the middle cla.s.s, 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 munic.i.p.alities 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 most, 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, s.p.a.ce 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 relations.h.i.+p to her product is different: it takes time and maintenance to have the desired effect.