How Reading Books Instead Of News Made Me A Better Citizen

from the consuming-information dept

As the 2020 presidential race kicks into high-gear, I find myself telling friends about an important lesson I learned last time primary season rolled around. During the run-up to the 2016 election, as now, vitriol filled the headlines. Rather than well-informed, reading the internet often left me feeling emotionally exhausted, powerless, and alone. So many stories were urgent but not important, and certainly not actionable.

Frustrated, I decided to run an experiment. I read and engaged with dramatically less news, and spent that time reading books instead. I read ancient philosophy, fantastical adventures, historical biographies, scientific treatises, globetrotting thrillers, and mind-bending stories of magical realism. I followed my enthusiasm and read what I loved, challenging myself to think more deeply and broadly in the process.

After a few months, my life and outlook had changed completely. Reading was no longer an exercise in rubbernecking and literature armed me to face the challenges of the present with fresh eyes, seek out other points of view, and put the political turmoil into perspective. Taking ownership of my media diet turned the stories I read into sources of strength, fuel to fire my own personal and public life. My wife and I volunteered to host a Ugandan refugee in our home for nine months. I helped design a game that illustrated emerging vulnerabilities in American democracy. I co-created an internet public art project that raised money for ProPublica.

We are what we pay attention to. The stories we read don't just inform, entertain, or inspire, they shape our identities, become a part of us. These stories have consequences. The Allies were inspired to defeat the Nazis by stories of resisting oppression, protecting freedom, and ending humanitarian disaster. The Nazis were themselves inspired by stories of racial superiority, national dominance, and the return to a mythical past. Humans are capable of transcendence and unspeakable horror when we convince ourselves of the righteousness of our cause.

So I expanded my experiment into a novel that quickly grew into a trilogy. Bandwidth explores what happens when someone hijacks our attention in order to transform us into the person they want us to be. Borderless examines the rise of tech platforms and the decline of nation-states. Breach extrapolates what might come next and how to build new institutions for the internet age. My hope is that the Analog Series inspires readers to reassess their own most deeply held beliefs with candor, kindness, and healthy skepticism.

As candidates and special interest groups ruthlessly vie for your attention across the vast datascapes of the internet like gladiators in a digital Colosseum, remember that seizing control of your media diet is the first step toward acting with intention to realize your version of a better future.

***

Eliot Peper is the author of Breach, Borderless, Bandwidth, Cumulus, True Blue, Neon Fever Dream, and the Uncommon Series. His writing has appeared in the Verge, Tor.com, Harvard Business Review, VICE, OneZero, TechCrunch, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and he has given talks at Google, Comic Con, Future in Review, and SXSW.

Filed Under: election, information overload, news, news consumption

Snowden Docs Show GCHQ, MI5 To Be All Haystack, No Needle

from the collections-so-bulky-they're-practically-immobile dept

"Collect it all," they said. "You can't find needles without haystacks," they proclaimed. "The more you know," they rainbowed. All well and good, except the NSA, GCHQ, et al. appear to have far more in common with the protagonists of "Hoarding: Buried Alive" than with effective, finely-tuned terrorism-fighting machines.

New documents from the Snowden stash show the UK's intelligence agencies love piling data on top of data, but seemingly have no idea how to utilize this massive haul.

MI5 “can currently collect (whether itself or through partners …) significantly more than it is able to exploit fully,” the report warned. “This creates a real risk of ‘intelligence failure’ i.e. from the Service being unable to access potentially life-saving intelligence from data that it has already collected.”

A followup report from a month later echoed these concerns:

“There is an imbalance between collection and exploitation capabilities, resulting in a failure to make effective use of some of the intelligence collected today,” the report noted. “With the exception of the highest priority investigations, a lack of staff and tools means that investigators are presented with raw and unfiltered DIGINT data. Frequently, this material is not fully assessed because of the significant time required to review it.”

This isn't just an MI5 problem. And it's not just a bulk surveillance problem. GCHQ uses the same "data broker" -- a program called PRESTON, run by the National Technical Assistance Center, which is supposed to act as a go-between for intelligence agencies in order to prevent the siloing of data. But it doesn't work. It has prevented agencies from walling each other off, but the info firehose is still too much for agencies to handle -- even with more-targeted surveillance.

Targeted collections fare little better than the bulk collections, in terms of needle location. The following chart shows how much data goes unutilized in cases where suspects are known and targeted with individualized warrants.

From the 2009 report detailing these problems:

[I]n one six-month period, the PRESTON program had intercepted more than 5 million communications. Remarkably, 97 percent of the calls, messages, and data it had collected were found to have been “not viewed” by the authorities.

Despite this failure to fully use the collections they already have, UK intelligence agencies are asking the government to give them more, supposedly to capture the "growing range of services available to internet users." But they've already shown they can't handle the data they already collect. Piling more hay on the stacks is only going to allow more "needles" to escape the attention of analysts. One solution would be to throw more people at the problem, but even this might cause its own issues, as every intelligence agency is increasingly wary of becoming the temporary home of the next Snowden. Vetting procedures have ramped up and security clearances have been scaled back.

More judicious collections are a better answer, but intelligence agencies -- just like many of the internet users they track -- apparently suffer from Fear of Missing Out. But an examination of their current collections/analysis shows they're "missing out" already, and expanded powers/collections would do nothing to better secure the nation. In fact, these reports show the more they collect, the less they know.

Filed Under: gchq, haystacks, information overload, mass surveillance, mi5, needles, surveillance

The Repeated Failure Of The US And UK Governments' 'Add More Hay' Approach To Surveillance

from the sipping-from-a-firehose dept

Recently we wrote about a UK Parliamentary report absolving the UK spy agencies of any responsibility for the failure to stop the killing of a British soldier last year. Significantly, one explanation given for the fact that the UK's MI5 undervalued the threat, despite investigating the men responsible several times, was that it has several thousand suspects under surveillance at any one time, and so it was beyond its capabilities to follow all leads thoroughly.

Of course, that is a consequence of the "needle in a haystack" approach that the US and UK agencies have adopted: collect as much information as possible in the hope that somehow it will be possible to sift through all the irrelevant hay to find the needle. But as an important piece by Coleen Rowley in the Guardian points out, this is not the first time that a "failure to connect the dots" from information to hand resulted in missed opportunities to stop attacks:

as an FBI whistleblower and witness for several US official inquiries into 9/11 intelligence failures, I fear that terrorists will succeed in carrying out future attacks -- not despite the massive collect-it-all, dragnet approach to intelligence implemented since 9/11, but because of it. This approach has made terrorist activity more difficult to spot and prevent.

She reminds us:

The common refrain back then was that, pre 9/11, intelligence had been flowing so fast and furiously, it was like a fire hose, "and you can’t get a sip from a fire hose". Intelligence such as the Phoenix memo -- which warned in July 2001 that terrorist suspects had been in flight schools and urgently requested further investigation -- went unread.

She details other instances of recent intelligence failures where having too much information meant that key leads were buried, and opportunities to stop attacks lost. In other words, US and UK agencies have over ten years of bad experiences with the "collect it all" and "needle in a haystack" approach to intelligence gathering, and yet it remains their principal response to successive attacks and continuing failures. Rowley concludes:

After Edward Snowden described just how massive and irrelevant the US and UK monitoring had become, people started to grasp the significance of the saying: "If you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, how does it help to add hay?"

Of course, she's not the first person to make this observation -- for example, Techdirt pointed this out over a year ago. But as someone who has worked for the FBI, and been privy to many secret details of surveillance operations, Rowley speaks with a special authority. Her article in the Guardian is well-worth reading -- especially by all those who continue to advocate the disproportionate and ineffective "add more hay" approach to keeping the public safe.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: gchq, haystacks, information overload, needles, nsa, surveillance

DailyDirt: Adapting To A TL;DR Future

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

With the ever growing amount of content to read/watch/hear, humans are going to need to figure out much more efficient ways to consume information. Speed reading will only get us so far, and then we're going to have to rely on ways to filter out irrelevant stuff so we can focus more on just the things that we really need to see. Here are just a few early attempts to get computers to help us out with information overload.

• Clipped is a software tool that tries to extract key bits of information from long pieces of text. Tanay Tandon, a 15yo kid, created it and also filed a patent for his algorithm.... [url]
• TLDR is a browser plug-in that tries to create short summaries for articles. These algorithms aren't perfect, but then again, neither is human comprehension. [url]
• Another teenager wrote news-summarizing software and raised $1 million for it. It was originally called Trimmit, but now it's Summly -- and 16yo Nick D'Alosio is looking for some "serious scientists" to help him improve his algorithms with that VC funding. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: algorithms, automation, information overload, software, summaries, td;dr

Forget Information Overload: What If The Real Problem Is Information Underload

from the shift-your-perspective dept

For years, I've definitely been a believer in the idea that there's information overload today. After all, there are so many new sources of information out there that of course one of the problems many people believe they face is that they simply can't keep up. However, I may need to seriously rethink that concept after reading this article, pointed out by Clay Shirky and written by Mike O'Malley, which suggests we've got the problem backwards. The issue today isn't information overload, but information underload. Here's the basic example, arguing that people in the past had to know a hell of a lot more than we do today:

Here's an image of pastoral life, taken early in the twentieth century in North Dakota. Rustic simplicity, except that the farmer in charge has labor management problems--who are these workers, how is he compensating them? He has to manage the horses--how is their health? Do they need feeding and watering? He's got to get the harvested wheat stored properly: he's checking the weather all the time--just imagine how much information is involved, in an age before reliable forecasts, in guessing the weather! He's scanning the crop itself, to see how much he lost to insects or disease. He's got a good idea of crop prices in Chicago and whether they're trending up or down. The scene was information-dense, and if you click on the image, you can see how the original title frames the scene.

The modern farmer climbs into the air conditioned cab of a combine harvester, and turns on the radio. The radio fills the attention spaces left by, say, reading the weather signs or managing the workers or the animals.

Now, I would imagine that many modern farmers would take issue with some aspect of this simplification. There is still plenty of information that the modern farmer needs to be aware of, but it is a different level and a different type of information. But, to a certain extent, that is O'Malley's point. The "information overload" we face today is of a very different nature than the information overload of the past, and that is that today's information overload is often filling areas that are less about necessities:

So what appears to us as "too much information" could just be the freedom from necessity. I don't have to worry about finding and cutting and storing fire­wood: I don't even have to manage a coal furnace. That attention has been freed up for other things. What we see as "too much information" is probably something more like "a surplus of free attention."

As a historian, I no longer have to spend hours scanning texts to find the smaller sets of information I need. They pop up quickly when I deal with digitized texts, and the search process is streamlined and automated much in the way a gas burner streamlines and automates a wood stove.

In the end, he suggests that our attention is pretty much constant, and if it's not engaged in one thing (e.g., trying to predict the weather), it'll get engaged in something else (e.g., reading up on some blog rant). It's just the nature of the way that we work -- but it's not an indication that we're actually dealing with information overload. I'm not sure I totally agree, but it is a different way of looking at the questions surrounding how we deal with the amount of information presented to us at any given time.

Filed Under: attention, information overload, underload

Technology To Rescue You From... Technology?

from the the-cause-and-the-solution-to-all-our-problems dept

There's a great Homer Simpson quote in an old episode: "Here's to alcohol: the cause of, and answer to, all of life's problems." Perhaps the same thing can be said for technology. Just last week we were writing about people having to force themselves to get away from technology for a day, and then the NY Times pops up with an article about how various technology companies are all working on plans to create technologies that help us better get away from overwhelming technology. It's no secret that you can get sucked in, so it's nice to see tech companies recognizing that now that they've enabled the massive fire hose of information flow to exist, the next priority might be to find an appropriate filter for it.

Filed Under: filters, information overload, technology