Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Michael Pollan*,* In Defense of Food
There’s such a thing as too much.
Humans behave strangely when we have too much money, power, choice or free time. When a resource becomes abundant, things get weird. That’s especially true if the resource used to be scarce. Our relationship to it changes, and we don’t navigate that change very well.
Take food for example. For most of human history, food was a scarce resource. Today though, in most parts of the world, food is abundant. Across Europe, North America and Oceania and more recently, large swathes of Asia and Latin America, spending on food is now only a small part of the average household budget, which means most people can afford to eat whenever they like.
Unfortunately though, while it’s become relatively less expensive, most of it is low quality. The results are well known. Sugar now kills more people than all forms of violence combined, there are more people on the planet who are obese than starving, and the global agricultural system that we’ve built to supply all that cheap food is slowly but inexorably destroying the conditions that allowed the human race to flourish in the first place.
Information has gone through a similar change. It used to be a scarce resource, but now it’s abundant. This has happened in one lifetime. I was born in 1983 and I remember learning to read as a kid, and being so excited about my new ability that I’d read everything in sight, the labels on cereal boxes, the street signs on a car trip. My appetite was insatiable, and there weren’t enough words in my environment to satisfy it.
That’s very different in 2019. The digital revolution made sure of that. Young boys today will never know the joy of having to read all their sister’s Sweet Valley High books when the library card runs out. There’s now so much content, so much information available, on so many different devices and channels, that the idea of running out seems ridiculous.
Still horrified at how much I know about what’s between the covers of these books…
There’s a real sense of motion sickness that accompanies this accelerated pace of change. The German sociologist, Hartmut Rosa, calculates that since pre-modern times, human movement has increased hundred-fold, communications by a factor of ten million, and information transmission by ten billion. The amount of raw, accessible information we have access to is orders of magnitude more than it was just a few years ago, never mind a generation ago. Yahoo has the historical financial statements of every public company in the United States; 20 years ago you had to ask each company to mail you hard copies. Twitter is less than 5,000 days old, but it spits out 200 billion tweets a year.
No wonder we’re suffering from whiplash.
As our access to information has exploded, our relationship to it has changed. When information was scarce, its value lay in its ability to influence action. Now that it’s lightweight and abundant, we act on less and less of it. As the ratio of action per incoming piece of information falls to zero, the new value of information is its immediate pleasure. It becomes increasingly indistinguishable from entertainment. That’s why most of the information available to us today is cheap and low quality; the equivalent of corn syrup, KFC and jelly babies. It temporarily satisfies our urges, but has little to no nutritional value. It’s engineered to be addictive, making humans unhealthy and corporations rich.
It’s also instantly accessible. Instead of having to drive to the shops, we can consume junk information at the touch of a button. Here in Australia, more than half the country get some of their news via social media, and 78% access news or newspaper websites on a regular basis. In the United States, half of adults get their news from television, and 68% get at least some of their news on social media.
That’s a problem, because we live in a supercharged attention economy that encourages car crash style reporting. Newsworthiness is determined by how unusual, scary or shocking the story is. As essayist Steve Salerno says:
By definition, what the news business really gives you, with its unending parade of ugliness, is unreality. What you see each night on TV or hear from those all-news radio stations is not, in fact, your world. It is a negative image of your world, in both the photographic and tonal senses.
It’s difficult to swim upstream against the market. A few years ago, a Russian news site called City Reporter decided to report only good news for an entire day. The site put positive news stories on all of its front pages and found silver linings in negative stories (“No disruption on the roads despite snow,” for example). The result was a unicorn orgasm of sunshine and rainbows — that absolutely no one wanted to read. According to its deputy editor, Viktoriya Nekrasovathe, the site lost two-thirds of its normal readership. “We looked for positives in the day’s news, and we think we found them. But it looks like almost nobody needed them.” The following day, the site returned to more reliable staples: car crashes and burst water pipes.
If it bleeds it leads isn’t an aphorism. It’s a business model that media organisations are stuck with. They want us to believe that consuming the news offers us a competitive advantage, but it does the exact opposite. Just like fast food, our brains and bodies aren’t rational enough to be exposed to the product they’re creating. We become prone to overconfidence, taking stupid risks and misjudging opportunities. Instead of making us better informed, junk information causes us to walk around with the wrong risk map in our heads. Terrorism becomes overrated. Chronic stress is underrated. Political horse-races and the culture wars make all the headlines. Fiscal irresponsibility is relegated to a small column on page 13. Firemen are celebrated. Nurses are ignored.