Fast News and Human Fealty

     

            Humans are slaves to information. Just as we must eat, we cannot help but filter everything in the world through the information-loving organ between our ears. And just as there are many different flavor palettes, there are equally numerous information palettes in our environment for us to sample. There is every flavor of movie, subtle notes of conversation, and carefully curated textures to every news article. Within themselves, each has similar common information structures which have all been commented on, spun out, and then pushed to the limits by creatives to be delivered back to us in continuation of the cycle of consumption and regurgitation. There is a problem however, because what our evolutionarily primitive palettes enjoy most are not the foods and information that are best for our species. And yet, we continually feed ourselves poor quality food and bad information. In this way, we have managed to - across sectors - undermine and cannibalize ourselves by leveraging our own basal desires for capital gain. I'm not making some anti-capitalist claim, but rather pointing out that the incentive is to leverage more and more in pursuit of more capital. At some point, overleveraged systems tend to break. So to reign ourselves in from our own undoing, we need to recognize that we are our own worst enemies and change the way our information systems are structured to prevent them from leading us off the cliff to ruin. 

            The now-terrible HBO series Westworld has taken the notion of information patterning underlying life and consciousness to the extreme. But initially, like any good mirror, it did a wonderful job displaying an essential human truth - that we are often unable to resist our primal urges, and in this way we often act at odds with how we would prefer to see ourselves in the mirror when left to our own devices. We assume the black hat for fun, just to see what it's like. We simply cannot help but fulfill our urges and curiosity. The same base appeal that both defines and undermines the value of a Michael Bay film is that which brought down what was otherwise an intelligently written show, (more explosions may attract eyeballs, but it does not make for "good" or substantive drama) and it is essentially that same base level attraction that has undermined our food and information sectors. 

            Where McDonalds can be discussed as a proverbial 'canary in the coal mine' for the corruption of food in America and around the world, we can see evidence of the steady disintegration of our information sector by noting the consumer driven changes that have occurred in various media outlets. Movie budgets have opted for action and explosions over engaging writing, remakes over originals, and seemingly endless cookie-cutter hero archetypes; The History Channel has shifted to hosting more conspiratorial and cryptozoological content; The Animal Planet promoting "Finding Bigfoot" (spoiler: they never do); Fox News peddling conspiracy theories; Social Media commodifying social outrage and gamifying socialization for revenue. All of these paint a picture of ultimate disintegration to the lowest common denominator. That might not necessarily be a problem if people weren't so powerfully attracted to these types of media. Unfortunately, we continually gravitate towards the worst options and realize all too late the cost of our bad investments. 

This basic pattern of information disintegration reveals a core tenet of humanity, that of human fealty - we often fail to make good choices because we are merely acting in service of our evolutionarily primitive desires. We cannot escape these urges but often associate guilt and glutton with our subservience to them (enter Religion stage right). This seems to be an emotional misattribution error – given that it is not necessarily our fault the urge exists - but it is also a valid response to a sense that we have been preyed upon by the environment around us, an environment of our own creation. Advertisements, food, technology, music, movies and all aspects of media all employ attention-seeking devices leveraged against our information loving minds. We cannot help but get sucked in. Knowing this, one would think that we could construct a more salubrious environment for ourselves to live in so that we don't become the lowest common denominator ourselves, but currently America seems to be leading the Western world of food and media in the opposite direction out of subservience to our insatiable basal desires for simple pleasures.

Desires for quick satisfaction and convenience must have first evolved to steer us towards rare nutrients, but with the advent of fast food our evolutionary settings were undermined. Soon, McDonalds became the norm and the expectation for consumers – this is the model that Americans preferred, which they have become stereotypes for today, and which now stretches around the world. This shift in modern American consumption did not occur on an island however. The highly efficient factory line food model inspired copycats of all sorts, including in news outlets and lately even in medicine. As the downsides of the fast food lifestyle have become more apparent and cemented themselves as a vestigial aspect of the American stereotype, we have seemingly neglected to notice all the repercussions of the convenience model as it has been applied to other areas of American life. Steadily, the desire for convenience in the form of  “Fast News” and “Fast Medicine” is corrupting America in the same way that "Fast Food" has corrupted the American diet and the health of all those that assume it. Since we have now borne witness to the deleterious human outcomes of America's Fast-Food model, it's apparent that American invention is not by nature the most salutary, and so with that we need to ask ourselves in what other ways might American invention be undermining society at large. 

            Just as food quality has fallen and choices expanded, our mainstream and social media has become similarly diverse but undermined by the lowest common denominator  – anger and outrage, mixed with shock and awe, with a pinch of humor and just a dash of usefulness, repetitively proves all too delicious for us to resist. Those flavors trigger some evolutionarily sensitive loci that pull us in and keep us engaged. Over the years the flavors have been tuned-up and titrated appropriately to keep us coming back for more. Tech companies have magnified the basal effects with AI and parasitically integrated themselves into our lives in ways that serve their interests but crucially do not provide us the healthiest interpretation or commentary on the world. The perpetually moving cycle of stories fed to a public with waning attention spans only further worsens the problem. Over time, in lieu of better options, a sense of complacency has set in. Fast-News consumed through 150 characters and absorbed passively through "doom-scrolling" is now the norm. It increasingly feels like we are imperiling ourselves, leading us into a death spiral that we are at odds to pull ourselves out from. We are like the proverbial obese American who knows his habits are bad but still continues to gorge themselves on fatty foods and sugary drinks because they satisfy our gluttony in the short term. We're caught in a vicious cycle, but where is it heading?

            In an age where the military has trouble recruiting fit, non-obese conscripts, and where obesity apparently doubles your risk factor for the SARS-COV-2 virus, it seems prescient to wonder about the consequences of developing a generation with low attention spans, narrow information bandwidth, and hypersensitive and partisan viewpoints. What failures are we setting ourselves up for in the future? Quite simply, if the root of this developing problem is our information and media structures, it is 1) In our nation's best interest to oversee our information and media structures, regardless of the source, and 2) To teach the public how to parse information critically and vet it for accuracy. This is a highly successful model (as are many of their models) in Finland, who has had to be on guard from Russian influence for decades. But for Americans, isolated in the new world, we have been strangely insulated from massive levels of foreign interference and as such have been culturally blissfully ignorant to the dark arts of external and internal misinformation campaigns - that is, until social media erased our geological and neurological boundaries. 

            In the same way that the overconsumption of fast food has led to a rise in obesity, we need to accept the idea that we are debilitating ourselves informationally and cognitively by gorging easily consumable satisfactory chucks of information in the form of "Fast News". Currently, within mainstream outlets, all subtlety seems lost and instead the sweet and salty notes are ramped up to 11 to get our attention and distract us from the fact that the meat of discussion is of poor quality. In turn, our poor quality information diets have subsequently debilitated the minds of Americans.  But even when we know this - even when we have seen the wizard behind the curtain - mere convenience keeps people coming back for more. Although we assume there is more to a story than a 30 second sound bite, we're already being force fed the next line of inquiry before fully digesting the first. The patterns that this recurrent stimulus must be engendering on our minds must be acknowledged as manipulative and harmful.

           Pursuant of a healthier information environment, maybe we need a recommended news pallette akin to the often scoffed at "Health Food Pyramid" put out by the FDA. Something where - daily or weekly - the best long-form conversations from multiple sides are compiled and then collated into some congruent rational national discourse that can be listened to in the gym or while making dinner. Would such a model offer the most healthy news consumption? Would it change consumer habits? Would it give mothers and fathers a sense they are doing right for their family? I'm pessimistic of my own idea.  But culturally at least, this might have the chance of putting everyone on equal footing informationally - something Tristan Harris has suggested is the quickest mechanism available to bring us back to a healthier state of being. In that way, a recommended "Healthy News Pyramid" might have the effect of centering conversation around a universal set of facts and talking points. Perhaps nobody will have the attention span or care at all, and will still prefer fast-news or even fake news. But just maybe, like a well prepared Kobe beef, after people experience it, everything else will taste sub par. 

            The meteoric rise in popularity of podcasts suggests there has been something akin to an information starvation happening in our media environment – where suddenly people are being given access to high quality discourse and they are ravenous. It remains to be seen if the success of podcasting can survive a promotion to the “mainstream” or if it’s current success is in part due to the incorruptible format that it is able to take while off center stage. Undoubtedly, there will always be a place in our hearts and minds for a guilty McDonalds burger, but we need to ensure more people are able to choose higher quality information in their daily diets - perhaps podcasts are that "Kobe Beef" of media. 

           It's no secret we are caught in a perpetual environment of distraction of our own building, and yet we are still happily parsatizing our own attention, and generally, that seems bad. So where's the alternative? Why isn't the market correcting itself? Why are we depriving ourselves of that Kobe Beef level information experience? Well, because reasoned information and level headed discussion is considered boring peas and carrots, and explosive language and fast paced content is more appealing to us on a primal level. And that appeal opens up opportunities for manipulation, which is as much a part of human nature as our desires for convenience. So, in some sense, we can't be blamed for creating this problem for ourselves, but we can be blamed for not doing anything to change it once that realization is made. But who should change it when the market fails? Luckily, a core mechanic of Democracy recognizes that people have a perverse tendency to take advantage of one another. Therefore, one goal of Democratic government is to limit the extent to which this undermining occurs. From this understanding, in the same way that our government makes health food recommendations, Democratic governments need to construct similarly regulated news and media recommendations. 

            "Why?! That seems unconstitutional!" some might say. Because unregulated, fast-food promotion and consumption has led to terrible health outcomes for people on Western diets around the world. Unregulated, tobacco corporations sold harmful products by catering to our basal desires and manipulating our nervous systems. Unregulated, Social Media has manipulated political outcomes around the world and cost people their lives. And unregulated, Social Media may yet cost us our Democracy. 

            We must acknowledge that the bad ideas and beliefs people hold in their minds are a direct result of poor quality information being created, amplified, and sold. Just as there are Food Deserts in low socioeconomic regions, there are people and places in the country disposed to poor quality information outlets. For the sake of Democracy - which can only flourish in the context of a well educated proletariat - in an aim to raise the standard of understanding, we need to make it a priority to provide accurate information and quality conversation to everyone by regulating the amount of misinformation that circulates and the manner it which it does so. This means reducing the amount of “Fast-News” that is consumed and amplifying legitimate journalism and accredited opinions over lesser outlets. Taking a play from the FDA handbook, this could take the form of fast-news warning labels (ie "the information provided here is for entertainment purposes only and should not be taken as factual", I'm looking at you Fox 'News') and/or health conscious information promotion ("Don't just scroll, read the whole!"). The latter idea is the approach that Twitter recently implemented with its use of a notification upon retweeting that encourages users to 'read the full story'.

            At base here, we are talking about tending to the garden of information that seeps into people’s minds. Without guidance, and given no better options, people will tend to make poor choices for themselves out of the desire for convenience (see the Obesity epidemic). All too often we are made slaves to our basal desires (see sugar, cigarettes, porn, conspiracy, racism), but we must promote the denial of gratuitous subservience to gluttony and convenience in recognition that a more accurate, well-rounded diet of information, is paramount to a healthy democratic society.

To point fingers at the most unhealthy media outlets - which have only gotten worse in the last 4 years - Fox News is our propagandistic equivalent of Russia Today in America, Breitbart is something not dissimilar, and OANN must be viewed as so flagrantly inadequate of the moniker “news” that it would be wholly satirical if it didn’t have the president’s ear. Although Fox News is labelled by the FCC as being for Entertainment only, they present themselves as legitimate and believe themselves to be real news all the same. Naturally, people assume it is news because of the name - in other markets, this is called false advertising.  Fox News may yet come back to reality, but the business models of the later two are completely unworthy of a place in any reasonable society. If we allow these sources of misinformation to be promoted and to undermine the cognition of the populace, we fall victim to our own primal urges, and we risk undermining the foundation of our Democracy at large. Free speech arguments fall flat when you acknowledge that people can be misled, and how free are you when you’re being manipulated to believe a falsehood? Framed this way, just as obesity caused by fast-food diets presents a risk to our national defense, misinformation channels are a threat to the very freedoms that the Western World holds dear. If we cannot disabuse ourselves of the reported 'value' of these “news” channels' claims to free speech, we must learn from Finland and ardently teach citizens to see through their lies and to limit consumption altogether. To the extent that we fail in this regard, we risk the longevity of our republic.

In summation, we need to come to terms with the idea that Fast Food is not the only deleterious sector of convenience that America has wrought upon itself and the world. We have also enabled a media environment that preys upon our basal desires and wants. Consequently, they rely on constant rage induction as a platform feature, and as such are inadequate. In their current form, these instruments are not conducive to healthy living individually, culturally, or democratically. They need reform and regulation. We also must recognize that with globalization comes global exposure to foreign interference. Luckily we have our Finnish neighbors to guide us to the light if we would only knock on their door to ask for their recipe for preserving Democratic sovereignty (a regional specialty). Lastly, we need to adopt a greater amount of empathy and compassion for people that have fallen to the 'likes' of misinformation, because on some level it is not their fault, they are victims of their own human fealty, as are each of us in some way. Only by accepting this can we hope to cultivate a healthier information environment for everyone to navigate, and avoid the pitfalls of widespread misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. Just as we encourage people to avoid an abundance of Fast Food in their diet out of a sense of mutual empathy and interdependence, we must also promote and enable the reduction in the consumption of "Fast-News" and all its consorts.