Welcome to the Vast Rational Conspiracy
Part of the reason people have poor food diets is that the food that’s cheap tends to be the food that’s the worst for us. Thus, there’s a strong relationship between poverty and obesity in the United States; it turns out that our poorest counties are also our most obese. But there is a way to change that.
As a result of consumers demanding healthier food, and a public concern about obesity, Walmart is attempting to cut up to 25% of the salt, fat, and sugar from its foods in order to combat obesity. Because of demand, Walmart is now the single largest provider of local, organic foods to the market. The result: the entire food industry is changing and following suit so its foods can be sold in Walmart stores.
It’s not just taxes and smoking bans on cigarettes that drive down the number of smokers in the United States. There’s also social consequence to smoking. Now, smoking isn’t just something that causes cancer: for many, it’s something that’s socially unacceptable—a cultural faux pas. The smokers have been dismissed to our back alleys, behind the buildings. More and more, they’re forced to hide their habit, which in turn creates fewer smokers.
We can do the same with our information providers, but only if we show consumer demand for high quality, source- and fact-driven information. The market will move, but only if we show that there’s a positive economic outcome from doing so. If we start to change our information consumption habits, the whole market will change to follow suit. If Fox and MSNBC are no longer rewarded for being affirmation distributers, and their ratings start to change as a result, it will have consequences not just for the information dieters, but also for the public en mass.
An information diet isn’t just something that’s good for you. An appropriate diet is a social cause that yields a better ecology of mind—one that’s more immune to contempt and hate, and to the tragic consequences of what those emotions beget.
If we begin to demand an end to factory-farmed content, and instead demonstrate a willingness to pay for more content like investigative journalism and a strong, independent public press, we’ll not only force the market to follow our lead, we’ll build a better, stronger, and healthier democracy. The high-end consumer can drag the market along with it.
If we make a healthy information diet as normal and obvious as something like a healthy food diet, then those that aren’t consuming healthily will begin to feel social pressure. Nobody wants to be ignorant or even have the appearance of ignorance. The social consequences of being seen as ignorant are far more significant than the social consequences of smoking or obesity.
With another divisive election around the corner, I’d like the consequence of you reading this book to not only be your going on an information diet, but also to your starting or joining a local campaign for information dieting with three goals in mind:
To increase the digital literacy of our communities with the skills I outlined in Chapter 7: the ability to search, process, filter, and share.
To encourage the consumption of local information that’s low on our metaphorical trophic pyramid.
To economically reward good information providers, and to provide economic consequence for those who provide affirmation over information.
This kind of campaign mustn’t revolve around a particular person or personality, but instead be driven from the ground up. As much as I’d like to use the political skills I’ve learned in the past 10 years to drive a traditional campaign, doing so would go against the principles of the book. Instead, a campaign like this has to be driven at both the geographically and socially local levels: neighborhood by neighborhood and network by network.
Conspiracy in Six Easy Steps
Share this book. If we’re going to do this right, then we need more people to know what a healthy information diet looks like. After you’re done with this book, share it with a friend—or, if you’re feeling generous (to both the friend and your humble author), buy them their own copy. The principles of digital literacy, humor, attention fitness, and a healthy information diet need to spread if we’re going to succeed.
Organize. There may be an infodiet group in your area. Check out http://informationdiet.com/local to see if one exists near you. If not, start a Google Discussion group at http://groups.google.com. Name it something that’s easily discoverable by people in your community: “InformationDiet Austin” or “InformationDiet East Bay.” If you send me a link to your group via Twitter (I’m @cjoh), I’ll make sure to link to it on http://informationdiet.com/local for other people to find.
Focus and be civil. In your group, keep the focus on the mission: digital literacy, local information, and changing the economics of your information providers. Your group should practice healthy information diets during your discussions; it’s useful to be somewhat strict moderators. Your discussion group should never degenerate into political discussions—that’s something that there are plenty of other venues for, and as a group, it’s better to steer those discussions to the places where they’d be more appropriate.
Meet. Like, face to face. Anonymity is useful when speaking truth to power and sparking revolutions, but isn’t particularly useful when trying to create civilized discourse. Use Meetup.com to find or host regular InfoDiet meetups in your area. Share them with me, too, on InformationDiet.com and via Twitter. I’ll make sure people know they’re happening, and I’ll try to attend as many as I can.
Learn. There’s more to this subject than the concepts in this book. If you’re looking for things to discuss in your local group, check out some of the great reports that the Knight Commission puts out on the future of information and the media, or read some of the many documents in the further reading and bibliography sections of this book. You can also tune in to the blog on InformationDiet.com as more is discovered in the worlds of neuroscience and cognitive psychology.
Act. The group isn’t meaningful unless it causes outcomes useful to its local community. To improve digital literacy in your community, start with kids. Find and fund nonprofits that help to teach these skills to children in local schools or in after-school programs. To get information from the bottom of the trophic pyramid of information, start advocating for your local government organizations (your county and city) to create online data catalogs and make public the data that you’re already paying for. The same goes for the media: start demanding that they offer source material rather than provide you with their analysis and perspective.
It’s also important to share what you’ve learned and how you’re causing change in your community, to help others that are starting groups in their local communities learn best practices. InformationDiet.com has lots of resources to help you, including a discussion board that you can use to connect with other groups across the globe.
The remainder of this book is a call to action for the vast rational conspiracy—ideas and observations that come from my time here in Washington, and my time working with and interviewing civic leaders across the country. It’s the empowered information diet: once you lose the fluff and start really seeing what’s going on, new priorities arise that require new tactics to accomplish.