Simple Prosperity

by David Wann

  Information can be like a 911 call that gets an immediate response. For example, Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) data, mandated by federal law, first came out in 1990, listing the dirtiest companies by volume of waste. This data informs citizens precisely what is coming out of the smokestacks in their towns and empowers them to hold companies and local governments accountable for toxic chemicals. The TRI regulations are not about permissible limits or penalties, just information. Within a few years of the data’s release, emissions dropped 40 percent. One chemical company that found itself on the Top Ten Polluters list reduced its emissions by 90 percent, just to “get off that damn list.”

  Another example of the leveraging power of listed information involved philanthropic contributions. CNN owner Ted Turner suggested in an interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd that someone create a ranking of philanthropic gifts to stimulate competition among the superrich. The online magazine Slate responded with an annual list, and contributions soared as America’s wealthiest donors tried to climb higher on the list. Turner followed up as well, pledging a whopping $1 billion to bail out the United Nations in 1999.

  What Are Brains For?

  Many religiously devout humans believe the brain’s highest purpose is to serve God, whereas scientifically inclined people often believe its purpose is to understand how life works and ensure its continuity. In my opinion, these two mind-sets are simply different ways of saying the same thing. Both acknowledge that there’s a right way to live; that when we distract our awesome brainpower with material wealth alone, we neglect loftier, more spiritual values. In the quest to refocus our collective mind and help heal the wounds our way of life has created, we’ll need to make use of every available brain. In the world of computer technology, many individual computers are linked together to create a “supercomputer”; that’s also the most powerful form of human intelligence.

  As I began to research and write this chapter, several questions came up:

  • How can we differentiate between quality information and money-chatter that has little nutritional value?

  • What do we need to know to help our culture and economy mature?

  • How can information substitute for resource use, and reduce consumption?

  • How can we use the best and purest information to create and design products, art, services, tools, and technologies of great value—with a much wider purpose than profit alone?

  Our first priority is to exorcise an obsolete worldview from our shell-shocked brains so we can actively seek information we can use—along with a more responsible, compassionate ethic. In the current worldview, success means being “smart” enough to exploit the planet’s resources and collect stacks of paper money. The new worldview, already taking shape, is more mature: substituting brilliant design, curiosity, and creativity for resources and stuff. Einstein, no slouch in the brain department himself, had much to say about people who underutilize the equipment: “He who joyfully marches in the rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.”

  I believe it is critical that we each accept responsibility for the information that comes into our own heads, and also for what we do with it. If we absorb junk information by mistake, it can be quickly discarded, as in a game of gin rummy. But if it’s important or even critical information, we can’t just ignore it! For example, choosing to ignore and do nothing with information about climate change is like clipping the wires on a smoke alarm and going back to sleep while the house burns down.

  With luck and/or by the grace of God, we may be less ignorant than we appear. We’ll soon know if that’s true, since the biggest IQ test we’ve ever taken is happening right now. We need designs, policies and an unwavering ethic that quickly respond to challenges like climate change, population, economy, and shortfalls of water and oil, biodiversity, and human rights. We can handle these challenges, but there’s a glitch: Vested interest sources of information (what I call weapons of mass distraction) have tainted media, politics, scientific research, and educational institutions with pop information of questionable value. For example, TV and newspapers bend their content to the will of their sponsors and advertisers, compliantly using canned video news releases and corporate press releases rather than doing their own investigative reporting. Schools and universities accept funds from corporate and philanthropic donors, with strings attached: The funds must be used for specified (profitable) research and curricula. Some educational institutions actually ban textbooks that encourage holistic ways of thinking (see “Toxic Information Cleanup”). The Internet, potentially a bright light in the dissemination of knowledge, is currently a jungle of flashing, popping commercials, teeming with viruses and cultural excess—a bit like the tail-finned cars of the 1950s.

  Because both the story and mission of our culture are obsolete, information is flowing—often flooding—in the wrong direction, carrying some of our best minds with it. When the dominant story is, “must have more money,” brain surgeons opt to become plastic surgeons, and brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists go into advertising. Our most powerful device for telling the story of a cleaner, greener lifestyle and ethic may be the high art of filmmaking; but for the most part, movie producers follow the money, too, reprising existing scripts and formula plotlines that depict a seductively affluent lifestyle—unavailable to most, and impossible to maintain over the long haul.

  Then there are the ads, the sorry signature of our generation! As in the thought-provoking movie Minority Report, advertisements are in our faces no matter where we go: in school hallways and buses, doctor’s offices, hospitals, supermarket floors, elevators, ATMs … Ads now decorate fruit, T-shirts, garbage cans, bus stop benches, restroom walls, bald heads, eggs, golf balls, mountaintops, and just about everything and everyone else. And guess who’s paying for it all? You and me, to the tune of $600 or more per capita annually, payable at the cash register. (With lower levels of consumption, we’ll each subsidize less advertising.) The truth is, even our own mothers could be walking commercials: Undercover con artists are now paid to socialize with us as if they want to be our friends, sneaking consumer tips into casual conversations. Drug companies have also learned the value of personal persuasion, in the shape of sex appeal. They often hire cheerleaders right out of college to push prescription drugs to doctors, a job that dispenses salaries as high as six figures. The companies “don’t even ask what their majors are,” notes a cheerleading coach at the University of Kentucky. “Exaggerated motions, exaggerated smiles, exaggerated enthusiasm can get people to do what they want.” Even if the drugs don’t work.1

  American brains are trying, heroically, to process and make sense of all this information, but the question is, how much of it is even useful? For example, a child who’s adept at surfing TV channels or the Web may well encounter sharks. Recent studies have shown that the average age of first Internet exposure to pornography is 11, that four out of five children in the 12-17 age group have had multiple exposure to hard-core porn, and that one-fourth of all search engine requests are also for porn.2 Clearly, we have some work to do—not only tuning up the Web, but also tuning up our lives to include more rewarding activities. A few key policies can make us less vulnerable. For example, requiring that sex browsers pay for each Web page they visit—and then collecting part of that income as tax—would dramatically reduce underage visits to the virtual red-light districts.

  Still, despite the troubling liabilities of wide-open access, many people (including me) regard the Internet as the greatest communications innovation since the printing press. Between 1988 and 2006, Internet usage in the United States exploded from 60,000 to 207 million users—a stunning revolution in information access. I believe the genius of the Internet is that it gives us greater control, overall, of what goes in and comes out of our brain. Suddenly, freedom of expression is a much greater possibility. A whole new world of blogging, researching, a
nd sharing knowledge has opened up with tools like Wikipedia (created entirely by volunteers who contribute, update, and revise articles in a collaborative process), YouTube, MySpace, and many, many others. The Internet is not centralized and authoritative but rather interactive, participatory, and democratic. On the right brain-inspired Internet, we follow our curiosity to find out why carbon dioxide heats up the planet, or what exactly the president said or didn’t say in his latest speech. We can join the ranks of dissenters or supporters on politically active sites like MoveOn.org (see chapter 17 for more about this organization). With the right keywords, the Internet unlocks the context as well as the facts, offering choice, precision, and self-determined learning.

  Moldy Couch Potatoes or Spuds with Gusto?

  What about TV? Certainly, with cable, satellite, Netflix, TiVo, and all the other available options, the tube now offers more choice than it used to, but the medium is still passive, hypnotic, and overconsumed. As musician Jerry Garcia phrased it, tongue in cheek, “Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.” Who could deny that TV is a primary shaper of our current, high-consumption lifestyle? Says Jerry Mander, a senior fellow at Public Media Center, “It’s become the main thing people do. It’s replaced community life, family life, and culture. It has replaced the environment. In fact, it has become the environment that people interact with every day.”3 By the time the average American child has finished sixth grade, he or she will have witnessed 100,000 acts of televised violence, including 8,000 murders, and by the time that same student has completed high school, he or she will have absorbed 350,000 TV commercials that visually define the American lifestyle: working, driving, and spending (and sometimes mowing the lawn).4 Every year, our young, impressionable friend veges out for 1,500 hours in front of the tube compared with 900 hours spent at school. What was once an American malady has now infected the world: A 2004 French survey representing 2.5 billion people in seventy-two countries documented an average of 3.5 of TV hours watched every day.

  In an ad produced by the Canadian nonprofit Adbusters, we view-the-viewer from behind, sitting in a dark room, staring at the tube. “Your living room is the factory,” says the voiceover; “the product being manufactured is you.” In countless other rooms all over the country, other voices advertise Survivor or one of its primetime spin-offs. “They live, you watch!” exclaims a narrator in a taunting tone of voice. The implication, of course, is that ordinary viewers like you and me just aren’t up to the task of living; we’re barely hardy enough to be observers, slumping on the couch while video gladiators grapple for a million bucks in prize money. It appears we’ve been voted off the island of life without ever really giving ourselves a shot!

  “We live, you watch,” say the photogenic contestants. “We’re too dazed and confused to live, anyway,” respond the viewers, crunching handfuls of Cheetos.

  You may have noticed that news sound bites have become shorter—from half a minute in the 1950s to eight seconds now, on average—eliminating opportunities to explain the context and the process of an event. And as sound bites shrink, advertising expands. The annual “clutter” report of the Association of National Advertisers verifies that the standard network hour now contains up to twenty-one minutes of advertising in addition to all the product-placement ads embedded in the programs. “The more television people watch, the more they think all American households should have tennis courts, private planes, convertibles, car telephones, maids and swimming pools …” observes Harvard scholar Juliet Schor. Unfortunately, what we see is what we crave, even if we know it’s only an illusion. We think of television as entertainment but it’s also recruitment into the army of consumers. That’s why freethinker Dawn Griffin hasn’t owned a TV for twenty-five years—she wants to retain control of her own mind. When she goes into a house (or airport lounge, waiting room, convenience store, gym … ) where a TV is on, she feels irritated about how it dominates the room. “I get sucked into a trancelike state, and it’s hard to have a conversation, write or think, because I’m distracted by all the mind chatter.”

  Susse Wright, another TV-free survivor, came to the United States from Denmark, where her parents didn’t own a TV set. She hates TV news because it’s “dumbed down.” She says, “When I read the newspaper, I can scan for the stories I want to read. But with TV, you don’t have any choice. You sit in front of this flickering, noisy box, wasting time.” Is there life outside the box? Ask Susse when she’s kayaking, bird watching, or cross-country skiing. “In real life,” adds Dawn, “If someone is telling you a story, you have to create the related images in your own mind. You smell the flowers or feel the breeze, and you live the experience. With TV, you only experience chopped-up visual images.” In a spoof news article in The Onion newspaper, a coal miner trapped 340 feet underground has only one major regret—that he can’t see the coverage of his plight, “which, he assumes, is captivating the nation.”

  Of course, nothing captivated the nation like two events that worked so perfectly on television: the gruesome Kennedy assassination and the gruesome events of 9/11. Predictably, by about 9/21, America and the world were informed of countless ways to REALLY cripple the country: Here’s how easy it would be to contaminate California’s water supply, here’s how to blow up a nuclear plant, here’s the genetic blueprint of the Spanish flu virus that killed twenty-five million in 1918. Is that a good use of information, or just another fear-filled ploy to keep us watching? Local news reporters have increasingly been instructed to tease us with what lies ahead, after “the break.” The break consists of fun-loving, seemingly satisfied actors who not only hawk their client’s product but also attitudes, values, and situations in which every problem is happily solved by buying a product. When we return, at last, to the program, everything is mindlessly, laugh-trackingly silly. We assume that everything must be okay after all.

  Is TV all bad? Of course not, but like any potential addiction, its use should remain moderate. I like to watch a serial program or two a week, and I try to catch 60 Minutes, Frontline, and Nova when good shows are scheduled. (If I miss them, I can watch them now on Web archives.) One of my all-time favorite TV experiences was the late-1970s BBC series Life on Earth, which tracks the evolution of species from single-celled cyanophytes and primitive jellyfish through “The Compulsive Communicator,” the final program. (Let’s hope that’s not an omen.) I loved seeing the various life strategies and how they interrelate—so much that a few years ago, I checked out all thirteen hourlong programs from the library and watched the whole series again, over the weekend. Our fellow species are so playfully, colorfully, miraculously inventive!

  That Same Old Story

  At a movie recently, the audio levels of the previews were getting obnoxiously loud. I usually bring earplugs just in case, but I didn’t have them with me this time, and Kleenex plugs (Susan tells me I look like Eeyore) didn’t seem to be helping much, either. I got up to make a complaint, marching past what seemed like hundreds of theaters, to the now-idle ticket taker.

  “I’d like to speak with the manager, please,” I requested. “The sound level in theater 14 is REALLY LOUD.” He got on his intercom and called the manager. While waiting, I explained to the ticket taker that the sound seemed to be 100 decibels or more—it was making my head buzz. “We do get some complaints,” he acknowledged. I was determined not to seem like an “irate” customer but just a reasonable, good-natured guy, basing my argument on science.

  The manager listened to my complaint and told me that the levels were preset; there wasn’t much she could do. I held my ground, politely insisting that they were louder than usual, that I came to this movie theater often, and that maybe she could check them again? I almost wished the loosely stuffed Kleenex plugs were still dangling from my ears as proof that I was completely serious. But I did seem to be getting through to the human being in her, and before I left, she promised to turn the levels down just a bit. I walked back and took my seat, feeling a li
ttle heroic, like I’d made the world a tiny bit safer. I kicked back in the seat and enjoyed the movie, even though the sound still seemed loud throughout …

  After the movie, I followed up, asking—still politely—if she’d turned the sound down or not. She had indeed turned it down, but then had gotten another complaint that it was too soft, and turned it back up. Realizing the absurdity of the situation—that the other complainer’s hearing was probably already blown out—I blurted, “How much do movie companies pay you to maintain dangerous levels, especially for the previews? How many people do you think gradually lose their hearing at movies, these days? Why doesn’t anybody care about protecting our hearing?” My elevated sense of consumer outrage did yield two free tickets to any upcoming show, but that didn’t reduce my righteous indignation very much.

  Before going to bed, I harnessed Google’s awesome exploratory powers to find out how noisy movies actually are. I chuckled to myself when I came across a reference to typical audio levels for movie previews—right around 100 decibels, exactly as I had guessed. (I do have a master’s degree in environmental science, you know.) “It’s not your imagination,” Desmond Ryan of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, as if addressing me personally. “The decibel level in movie theatres is rising.” On another Web site, the Wall Street Journal reported that Batman and Robin peaked at 112 decibels in one monitored theater, while Contact measured 107 decibels at another—volumes equal to those produced by a jackhammer that never stops. And a U.S. EPA Web site added the kicker: exposure to sound above 84 decibels for an hour is dangerous. “Too late,” I said to myself, shaking my head—though I was still able to hear geese honking in a pond nearby. At last count, more than thirty million Americans have some kind of hearing loss from all causes—and clinical research suggests that daily noise may play a significant role in everything from sleep disorders and stress responses to high blood pressure and heart disease.