The Information Diet Read online

  What’s worse is that Joe Public becomes unwittingly complicit in the crimes created by unethical people being transparent about their dishonesty. If a crime is committed with all the sunlight and electric lights in the world shone upon it, then the responsibility for catching that crime gets, in part, placed at the feet of the public. Transparency in a system lets the real enforcement officials off the hook.

  The legend[91] of Kitty Genovese is that she was stabbed to death in broad daylight in New York City, and not a single bystander called for help. The story itself is a bit of a myth (though no less tragic), but serves as an example of how sunlight, the electric light, and calls for help can’t stop a crime if a public is either failing to pay attention or unwilling to take a stand. Today, America is much like Ms. Genovese, bleeding to death on the sidewalk while the nation is distracted by partisan rhetoric.

  Take Recovery.gov, for example. The site was heralded by the Obama administration as an unparalleled view of a huge domestic spending package: the 2009, $787 billion American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. Its function? To combat waste, fraud, and abuse by the system—to ensure that the taxpayer’s money was spent wisely and prudently, free from fraud and profiteering.

  The Chairman of the Recovery Board, Earl Devaney, said upon the launch of the full Recovery.gov website on September 29th, 2009:

  “I believe that this historic level of transparency will help drive accountability in many new ways. While this Board and countless other federal, state and local oversight agencies will be looking for fraud and waste, every American citizen who clicks on this website has the potential to become what I’m calling a Citizen IG [inspector general]. That’s right—we need you to help us identify fraud, waste or mismanagement in your community.”

  To date, Recovery.gov lists one account of fraud: an incident in South Carolina that ended in the conviction of five people, and saved the taxpayer a paltry two million dollars. Did a “citizen IG” find and report this crime using Recovery.gov? No. It came from “on-site agency officials.”[92]

  With our political information, it’s the same thing. We can make all the lobbyist meetings, all the campaign contributions, all the electioneering, every vote, every committee hearing, and every cocktail party open and available, online and in real-time, and even hand deliver them to every person’s doorstep—we can even have a giant federal agency label all our info-nutritional information, carefully and ethically. But it’s likely to be about as effective as our nutritional labels.

  Like the calorie counts from food, transparency is ineffective at arming the masses unless there’s a strong will in the public to arm itself with the knowledge of how this information affects us, and how to effectively read the metaphorical labels. People will be no less obese—and no less ignorant—unless they have the will to consume less of the stuff that’s bad for them, and more of the stuff that’s good for them. While transparency can help the problem, it alone cannot fix it.

  Transparency’s Potential

  That’s not to say transparency is always a bad thing. Used in the right way, it is a vital weapon in our arsenal against corruption, just like the nutritional label is a vital tool in our arsenal for a healthy diet. One cannot make healthy food choices without knowing what’s in one’s food, just as one cannot make healthy electoral choices without knowing whom one is voting for, and what kind of influences one has around them.

  The other advantage of transparency is that it is, by itself, educational. Dissecting a car engine, and understanding its functions wholly, not only makes you a better mechanic, but is also likely to make you a better driver. Understanding the data that runs your company, and the factors that go into its success, makes you a better employee. And understanding the factors that go into the election of a candidate, and the motivations behind their votes, not only makes you a better citizen, but it also helps you understand government.

  The promise of transparency is powerful in the world of government. It begs us to imagine a world in which everyone can see how the government is being influenced—in which our government has little privacy; investigative reporting is made easier because the dots that need connecting come preconnected; and the Pentagon Papers of today divulge themselves, through the miracle of the latest technologies.

  But the truth is that citizen-focused transparency initiatives have a miserable track record of fighting corruption. And citizens have a miserable track record of using those initiatives to make rational decisions about the people they elect.

  Transparency isn’t a replacement for integrity and honesty; it’s an infrastructural tool that allows for those attributes to occur—but only if the public is willing act upon the information that they receive as a result of transparency in a conscious, deliberate way. We can’t let transparency be a tool for only the rich and well-educated to use to drive their decision-making. It must be woven into our civic fabric, and comprehensible by all.

  Bridging the Gap

  The answer is to take the problem into our own hands. If we want to maintain our democracy, we’ve got to solve government’s scalability problems, and the way that we solve them is by being active participants in our democracy not just on the second Tuesday of every other November, but on the other 364 days of the year. To solve the scalability problem, we must become active participants in our government.

  This doesn’t mean becoming a traditional activist. In my political career I’ve worked on a range of issues—from immigration, to healthcare, to more recently effective government and transparency. There are two big lessons I’ve learned.

  The first is that there’s a gigantic gap between the skills it takes to win an election and the skills it takes to govern a country. It turns out that electing people—the skills of people like David Axelrod and Karl Rove—are advanced, learned skills that require years of experience to get right.

  The skills that it takes to persuade you to vote for someone are entirely different skills than the skills it takes to run a country. Managing the world’s largest budget, determining how the government can buy things, figuring out how to take and use public comments—from the soldier in the army to the head of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget—they’re all skills that are necessary for the management of our government, and they’re not political skills, they’re governmental ones.

  Yet all of our activism pours into the former skill, and none to the latter. If we really want to fix our government, we’ve got to be participants in the way government works, not who it employs.

  The second lesson I learned is that many of the nonprofits and advocacy groups are more interested in staying relevant than solving problems. The motives of many advocacy organizations are not to solve the issues they’re working on, but rather to continue to raise money and make payroll. As a result, these advocacy groups tend to focus on larger problems that can go unsolved for years.

  While some of these organizations do important work—pushing the envelope to make the United States healthier, to make the environment cleaner and more sustainable, or to try and increase the effectiveness of education in the United States—there are smaller, non-partisan battles that could be won that could have long-standing benefits to the country.

  Presuming that our government isn’t going anywhere, what can we do to make it better?

  Since the “great experiment” started, America’s weakness, as de Tocqueville noted, was and still is the tyranny of the majority. My plea to you is to start sweating the small stuff at the expense of some of the big stuff. Washington isn’t the land of vast, radical changes, it’s a battleship waiting to be nudged in the right direction. Let the legions of information-obese fight on the front lines, and join me in nudging the small nuts and bolts that hold the ship together.

  If you’re worried about federal spending and the budget, don’t concern yourself over the debt-ceiling debate. Work to change procurement laws so that government can get access to the same things the private sector has without paying
an arm and a leg. We spend so much time figuring out what programs to spend money on, comparing their priorities to one another, and blanket cutting them when they’re deemed too luxurious. It’s the equivalent of trying to lose weight by cutting off your legs. Optimizing how government spends its money is at least as important as figuring out what our money gets spent on, and there are real, pragmatic solutions to getting there.

  If you’re interested in making government more accountable, work on making it so that the government’s listening tools and policies are modernized. Many government agencies have legal teams that feel as though social media is an appropriate place for its communications team to publish press releases, but not an appropriate place to solicit real comments for regulations. It’s mainly because of identity issues: the government wants a physical address, and doesn’t trust that a social media profile is fraud-proof. I’d suggest that it’s just as easy to lie about your address as it is a social media profile.

  Today, the feedback you give an agency through a website like Facebook or Twitter stops at the new media team inside the agency, and never gets involved in the regulatory process. If the Department of Energy is to publish press releases and invite people to interact with its communications department, it also needs to be able to legally take feedback for the regulations it proposes. It’s a simple, nonpartisan problem that could be fixed with a few hundred people demanding that the government use the Internet to be real, active participants with us.

  If you’re worried about Congress being manipulated by money, the United States House of Representatives started filing their campaign contributions electronically a decade ago, yet the United States Senate refuses to do so. Year after year a bill is proposed, and one way or another it ends up suffocating and dying by the end of the session. This results in a half-million dollar expense to the taxpayer as the Federal Election Commission takes nearly three months to type in, from the various campaigns’ paper reports, every campaign contribution that every Senate campaign receives. And as a result, we cannot see how a member of the United States Senate is being influenced by money until long after the time when the relevance of that information has passed.

  If you’re worried about prisons and civil rights, or making America innovative again, take note of the fact that our laws are generally distributed and archived by for-profit corporations, making it so that even access to the laws that we must follow are behind paywalls. Federally funded scientific research also sits in archives only available to those that agree to pay twice (once with their tax dollars, once for the access) for it.

  These are small, solvable problems that don’t require millions of dollars or people to fix: they require thousands of focused, smart people to push the right levers inside of the government.

  We can also improve our government without waiting on government to act. Organizations like PopVox.com, for instance, make it easier for people to translate what they want their representative to do into the language our representatives speak. There’s a whole world of technology out there waiting to be used to help members listen to their constituents, and it’s likely—now that much of our discussions about politics are public—that we don’t need government to act: we can build tools that listen to what people are already saying, make that information public, and question our elected officials when they’re voting against their constituencies.

  At the local level, there are thousands of opportunities and willing participants on the side of government. SeeClickFix.com, for instance, builds tools that integrate with various cities’ request hotlines so when a citizen spots a problem—say a pothole—they can easily report it back to the government. And more importantly, if they spot something they or a group of people can fix themselves—like picking up litter in a park—they can use the site to organize people to help pick up the litter.

  These are just examples of what I’d like to believe Governor Dean meant when he said, “You have the power.” We mustn’t rely on our government alone to solve our problems for us. We have the ability to do it for our neighbors, our communities, and our country as a whole.

  Every issue—healthcare, the environment, immigration, even defense—has hundreds of small, nonpolitical, operational problems waiting for a solution, and fixing these small things can have a huge impact compared to combatting a vague foreverwar on issues built to perpetuate the system of donor dollars, consultants, and lobbyists.

  The trick is the information diet: filtering out the nonsense meant to get us charged up on issues that will take years to solve, and becoming educated and smart about our government. If we want our government to change, we have to start taking responsibility for not just electing new people, or passing big policies, but sweating the small stuff too.

  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 participation. 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 relationships 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 class 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 advertisements.

  Our political information diets are the worst of them all—they’re misinformed, they offer little to no knowledge about the actual procedures of Washington, 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 Participatory Politics Foundation, and my former employer the Sunlight Foundation, we can start having a direct relationship 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 Participatory 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 i
n 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 Institute 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 Participatory 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 associating 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 advertisement and analysis 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 advertisements. 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.