The news is bad for you

When Aaron Swartz was 20 years old, he wrote about why he hated the news:

You’ll often hear TV critics say that CNN’s up-to-the-minute reporting is absurd. Instead of saying, “We have unconfirmed reports that—This just in! We now have confirmed reports that those unconfirmed reports have been denied. No, wait! There’s a new report denying the confirmation of the denial of the unconfirmed report.” and giving viewers whiplash, they suggest that the reporters simply wait until a story is confirmed before reporting it and do commentary in the meantime.

But if that’s true on a scale of minutes, why longer? Instead of watching hourly updates, why not read a daily paper? Instead of reading the back and forth of a daily, why not read a weekly review? Instead of a weekly review, why not read a monthly magazine? Instead of a monthly magazine, why not read an annual book?

With the time people waste reading a newspaper every day, they could have read an entire book about most subjects covered and thereby learned about it with far more detail and far more impact than the daily doses they get dribbled out by the paper. But people, of course, wouldn’t read a book about most subjects covered in the paper, because most of them are simply irrelevant.

But finally, I’d like to argue that following the news isn’t just a waste of time, it’s actively unhealthy. Edward Tufte notes that when he used to read the New York Times in the morning, it scrambled his brain with so many different topics that he couldn’t get any real intellectual work done the rest of the day.

Swartz just killed himself because the government was trying to put him in jail for 30 years due to some copyright violations which he may have had something to do with. He was 26.

I am ambivalent about his views on the news. I think the news can be important, but it is hard to say why, and he achieved more in his short life than I have in mine, so that by itself is a strong argument that he was on to something.

And yet, in the end, did Swartz liberate data from JSTOR? No. Did he change the copyright law? No. Did he increase the public’s access to knowledge? No. He suffered a kind of myopia: he felt that his individual acts could change the system, and he found out that the system was much larger and more powerful than he thought. In the English speaking countries, a very great poet once participated in a revolution which overthrew the government, the first of the modern revolutions, but which later was defeated, and most of the rebels hunted down and killed, so that later, when the poet considered their defeat, he decided to write of it, though he wrapped his thoughts into a story of the Bible:

But what power of mind,
Foreseeing or presaging, from the depth
Of knowledge past or present, could have feared
How such united force of gods, how such
As stood like these, could ever know repulse?

And ever since then, in the English speaking countries, nearly every generation of young reformer has had the same experience, of rebellion followed by surprise at the strength of the entrenched powers.

What is the value of the news? If anything, a sober reading of the news perhaps reveals the futility of individual action. Either you build a mass movement, or you have achieved nothing.