A website has even been set up, churnalism.com, that allows you to paste in the copy of news articles to see how an article has been “churnalized”; how many times a press release has been copied and pasted across various sources in the UK.
The parallels between how our media has changed and how agriculture changed are obvious if you look closely: what happened to farmers is happening to journalists. What happened to our diets is happening to our news. And like with our food, there’s not much we can do about it; the draw of living with abundant supply is too strong, and too beneficial, to fight. Instead, we’ve got to understand how to cope in a world with different rules.
Chapter 4. We Are What We Seek
“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”
I hate to bring up partisan politics; it generally doesn’t do much good when one is trying to make any form of argument. But it turns out that if I look back at the times in my life when I have had a recognizably bad information diet, they’re the times when I’ve been knee-deep in politics. Working in politics is an amazing opportunity to try to affect change, sure. But it’s also a great way to pick up a disease called delusion.
In the summer of 2003, I packed my bags and headed up to New England to work as the lead programmer for the insurgent presidential candidate, Howard Dean. The staff was reasonably kind—mostly native Vermonters and interns at the time. They liked to pick on this poor Southerner, though; at one point, someone warned me that if I spent too much time outside with my eyes open in the winter, the fluid in my eyeballs would freeze over. I remember shutting my eyes hard and sprinting out across the ice to my car and grasping for the door handle blindly on several occasions. Yankees are tricky, I tell you what.
Cults, startups, Apple keynotes, and political campaigns all have one thing in common: a group of people with delusional loyalty to the mission they’re trying to accomplish. Those of us on the Dean campaign feasted on a diet consisting of the narrative that we would be the ones to remove the evil George W. Bush from office. I ended up gaining a lot from that campaign: about 32 pounds from the constant supply of campaign-contributed Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, and a healthy dose of crazy.
Each morning, the media miners—the folks in charge of watching all the cable news—would feed us clips that told us how well we were doing. The afternoon was filled with blog posts from across the Internet talking about how revolutionary our campaign was. Evenings were filled with watching the latest and greatest episodes of “The West Wing” starring President Bartlett—the fictional president that we assured ourselves was based on Howard Dean, despite producer and writer Aaron Sorkin donating twice as much money in 2004 to the presidential campaigns of Dick Gephardt, Wesley Clark, and John Edwards.
There was also constant speculation: Republican Strategist Karl Rove had said, gleefully, that Dean was the candidate he wanted to win the Democratic nomination. We were emboldened by his claim. They were afraid of us—Karl Rove never says what he means. He must be giving us his endorsement because he doesn’t want to face us! We’d try to find as many facts as we could to support this idea.
That CNN cut to Donald Rumsfeld instead of showing Howard Dean’s speech on tax policy? Certainly evidence that the White House was using whatever it could to keep us off the air. Obviously CNN, too, had become an instrument of this evil republican regime.
The week before the Iowa caucuses, I remember asking the campaign’s pollster, Paul Ford, by how much we were going to win Iowa. His response was: “We’re not. John Kerry is going to win it by 18 points.”
My jaw dropped. I wasn’t sad or disappointed. I was mad at Paul and a little disappointed in him. How could he be such a traitor? Hadn’t he seen the news? He clearly was incompetent. Any fool could see that we’d correctly leveraged the Internet in Iowa and this puppy was in the bag. Howard Dean would win Iowa and go on to beat George W. Bush.
But Paul was right and we were crazy. You know the rest of the story: Howard Dean lost the Iowa caucus by nearly 20 points, and would go on to give a concession speech with a yell that became his defining moment. Only the political intelligentsia would remember his use of the Web. The rest of the electorate remembers him for that terrible scream.
The morning after the caucuses, our Burlington, Vermont, offices were filled with more delusion. One of my colleagues ran up to me as I walked into the office and said, “Clay, did you see the Governor’s speech last night? It was awesome. He’s totally back. We’re going to win this thing.”
We redoubled our efforts—though Dean was down by double-digits in New Hampshire, we could make a comeback. Every primary and caucus after that, we convinced ourselves we still had it. As the weeks went by, as the sinking feeling got stronger that we would lose to John Kerry, we got hungrier and hungrier for any poll that would give us even a slim chance of winning.
If, a month later, you had polled the staff to ask who would win the Wisconsin primary—our line in the sand—we’d have told you it was Howard Dean. And we’d believe, out of desperation, anything that told us we were right.
We came in third.
Reality Dysmorphia
In eating disorder treatment centers, a physician will often ask the patient to draw an outline of her own body on a large chalkboard. Then, the doctor will ask the patient to place her back against the wall, and trace the actual outline of her body. For many patients, the outlines that they draw are quite exaggerated, sometimes twice as large as their actual bodies.
It’s a phenomenon called body dysmorphia: that someone’s self-image isn’t attached to reality. The phenomenon goes beyond the patients just thinking they’re a different shape than they really are, though: when the victims of this disorder look in the mirror, they’re literally seeing something different than what everybody else does.
During the Dean campaign, the delusion that resulted from my poor information diet was a cognitive version of this disease: reality dysmorphia. I haven’t met a single campaign operative here in Washington, D.C., on either side, that didn’t have at least a mild case of it.
This kind of delusion comes from psychological phenomena like heuristics, confirmation bias, and cognitive dissonance.
It turns out our brains are remarkable energy consumers. Though it typically represents only 2% of the human body’s weight, the brain consumes about 20% of the body’s energy resources.[40] As such, we’ve evolved—both for our brain’s energy consumption, and for our social survival—to use shortcuts in order to be able to handle more complex thoughts.
Think of a heuristic as a rule of thumb: a mental shortcut, or the thing you get once you burn your hand on a hot pan and learn that you shouldn’t touch hot pans anymore. You needn’t bother testing this hypothesis anymore; you know it. Heuristics are psychologically there so that you don’t have to think about them anymore, and you can spend your brain’s energy thinking about something else.
40
Clark, DD; Sokoloff L (1999). Siegel GJ, Agranoff BW, Albers RW, Fisher SK, Uhler Md. ed.