I published a book at the end of September, focused on all the ways that corporations have hijacked our information ecosystem. The book closes with a plan for cleaning up information pollution, which I’ve excerpted below, because a big part of it is something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about in the wake of the U.S. midterm elections: Those of us who want to see equality and climate action and real democracy in our lifetimes really need to stop limiting our thinking by what’s supposedly “politically achievable.” Did anti-abortion activists let that stop their decades-long push to overturn Roe v. Wade? They did not. Have you ever heard someone from The Heritage Foundation or any other Project 2025 member org talk about what’s politically achievable? Not in my lifetime.
The midterms had me thinking of this not because I have been swept up in blue wave euphoria, but because a few of the things I mentioned in the book, that I’ve been told over and over again were unattainable were just made eminently more so overnight.
Exhibit A: Montana, still a red state, voted to ban dark money in politics. The state dealt with a flood of money from Koch-backed organizations like Americans For Prosperity a decade or so ago and did not care for billionaires tampering with their elections. The state ban is obviously important for Montana, but it also sets up a real legal challenge to Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court ruling that effectively made dollars speech and opened up the floodgates to dark money in U.S. politics. Repealing Citizens United is one of the steps I outlined as necessary to restore the information ecosystem, and literally everyone told me it was ridiculous to even think about.
Exhibit B: We could end the Electoral College. A couple years ago I remember seeing a rash of low-quality rightwing documentaries about how great the electoral college is and wondering why the heck folks felt the need to defend it all of a sudden. Well, if you don’t already know about it, allow me to introduce you to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement introduced in 2006 between various U.S. states to award all their electoral votes to whichever candidate won the popular vote. Eighteen states, representing 222 electoral votes, have signed on since 2006. They need 48 more votes to get to the 270 that would give the compact legal force, and with Democrats taking control of state houses in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada—61 electoral votes between them—it’s looking more possible than ever.
There are more, but suffice it to say: stop censoring your dreams, people! We can’t make systemic change and build new things if folks are too scared to talk about what’s actually necessary, not just what’s possible.
With that, an excerpt from my book! You can buy the whole thing here.
Brought to You By, Ch. 10, “Restoration
This is an abridged excerpt, edited for length and clarity.
The process for restoring an ecosystem is methodical and straightforward. First, assess and diagnose: Identify the cause of the degradation, map it to figure out a baseline, and engage stakeholders to understand their needs. That is the first step in any ecosystem restoration plan, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of it when it comes to the information ecosystem.
Most people I speak with think disinformation begins and ends with Trump or Facebook or TikTok or Twitter; they have no idea how far information pollution has spread or how far back it goes. I hope that this book, others like it, and an increasing number of studies and articles will go a long way toward mapping the problem and figuring out a baseline. The next step? Define what “restoration” means in the context of whatever ecosystem you’re looking at. Then remove or reduce stressors; you want to stop the drivers of degradation before you start restoring and rebuilding. I think about this framework a lot in the context of climate change as well, and how inane it is that there is so much money and thought going into various “solutions” while all the things that drive emissions up are continuing to proliferate. We are just pouring more and more water into a bucket full of holes.
The disinformation issue is similar: We’ve barely even diagnosed the problem, and already so many people are jumping to solutions, whether it be this or that regulation or finding, as the Democrats in the U.S. have proposed, a “Joe Rogan of the left,” never mind figuring out why millions of people opt to get their information from a failed comedian turned MMA announcer in the first place. We have a preoccupation in the Global North, and particularly in the U.S., with jumping to solutions as quickly as possible, and a real discomfort with sitting in the unknown, confronting a problem that is messy and sprawling and doesn’t have a simple or painless solution.
It won’t be easy. When it comes to repairing the information ecosystem, what we’re really talking about is repairing democracy, restoring the public’s faith in experts, building a shared reality that bridges the gap between our disparate “deep stories” and the world around us. The reality we’re all living in now is a shattered one, filled with cognitive dissonance and half-truths, beset on all sides by charlatans and gaslighters. Nobody likes it, but the only way out is to take that first step, then the next one, and the next.
We cannot hope to restore democracy and address the multitude of complex issues currently facing the world without also restoring our information ecosystem. Failure to do so will almost certainly end in less freedom for all. In fact, researchers who study autocracy and authoritarianism are beginning to coalesce around this idea as well. In a 2019 paper, Sergei Guriev at Sciences Po in France and Daniel Treisman at UCLA coined the term “informational autocracy” to describe what they pinpoint as the modern version of autocracy.
“A few old school tyrants remain—in North Korea and Syria, for instance,” they write. “Yet . . . the balance has shifted in recent decades. A new form of autocracy has emerged that is better adapted to a world of open borders, international media, and knowledge- based economies. These new authoritarians are not completely nonviolent.
Amid civil wars and ethnic revolts, they use brutal force, and they sometimes target journalists to censor their revelations. But when they do repress, they try to conceal their involvement or camouflage its purpose—for instance, by prosecuting dissidents not for their politics but on fabricated charges of tax evasion or fraud. Where the old dictators sought to rouse the public with rhetoric of enemies and threats, many new ones mimic the language of democratic leaders. They boast of good economic performance and public service provision. How do such non-ideological, softer autocrats manage to hold onto power without using the methods of their predecessors? . . . Their secret lies in the control of information. Instead of isolating their countries, imposing ideologies, or terrorizing citizens, such leaders achieve many of the same ends by manipulating public opinion.”
Guriev and Treisman argue that autocrats can be stopped only by growing what they call “the informed elite,” which includes independent media that can break through censorship and propaganda, to the point where you have a large enough group of citizens who see clearly the autocrat’s incompetence that “bribing or silencing it costs so much that the population’s living standard suffers noticeably, revealing the leader’s incompetence [to the rest of the public]. In such cases, informational autocracy cannot be sustained; democracy is the only possibility.”
The bad news for democracy is that the tech elites have distinct autocratic tendencies and have effectively built a parallel media system that is entirely deregulated; they’re hell-bent on keeping it that way, and it is currently stomping all over traditional information channels. The good news is we do actually know how to inform the public and protect the information ecosystem; it doesn’t require a lot of new ideas or technology. Not unlike climate change, we know what to do; it’s just a matter of building the political will to do it and getting around a massive industry that wants to obstruct that work. In fact, a lot of what’s required to fix things is literally to restore the information ecosystem, to reinstate the guardrails that corporations have fought to dismantle. From the way information is created (research) to the way it is shaped (PR, law) and disseminated (media, management consultancies, tech, PR again), and the money behind it all, we must reunite around a shared sense of the value of not necessarily truth and knowledge itself but the pursuit of truth and knowledge. Any decent scientist, or journalist for that matter, will tell you that knowledge is built by being open to new information, ideas, and perspectives, and you can’t do that if you think every opinion you have is objective truth. We don’t all have to agree on what to do with the information, but we should be able to agree that quality, vetted information has value, that it is fundamental to a functional democracy….
Several years ago, I asked Ben Franta, the legal scholar whose work on weaponizing economics first put that issue on my radar, what he thought could be done to stop companies from lying to the public. It came up because I was annoyed at how often I’d heard climate activists say the way to rein in Big Oil was through the same sort of litigation that was brought against Big Tobacco. It’s a pet peeve of mine because Big Tobacco is still around, and they’d recently used their science denial playbook again to lie about the health impacts of vaping. They’d also exported most of their disinformation tactics to other countries to increase the sale of cigarettes there to offset decreasing sales in the U.S. Yes, they had had to pay out money, and yes, their primary product got massively regulated and they lost business, but they were still rolling in money and lying their asses off, so was it really that much of a win?
It seemed to me that the core issue—that they’d knowingly misled the public and caused great harm—had not really been addressed at all, and that we needed some sort of accountability on that front. Franta mused about something he called “information receivership.” In the same way that if you are repeatedly getting into debt and defaulting on that debt, at a certain point your company might go into receivership and have an external accountant overseeing everything, he proposed that maybe companies that have been caught lying over and over to the public should not just get unfettered access to the public anymore, maybe they should have to run their ads by someone. It was an interesting idea, although one that I could immediately see free speech pushback on.
But here’s the thing: I’m tired of being allowed to think and talk about these issues— from information integrity to climate change— only in the realm of what we’re told is “politically possible.” I’m tired of the Overton window only ever opening to the right. I want an unfettered conversation about what a healthy information ecosystem focused on the free speech of individuals, not companies, would look like, and I’m tired of feeling scared to say what I really think on that front.
So here we go, deep breath, my information utopia looks like this: mandatory civics classes in kindergarten through twelfth grade to underscore the value of democracy and the importance of reliable information to it; mandatory media literacy classes K–12 and in every public university; reverse Citizens United and Bellotti (we’re talking utopia, people); required funding transparency and conflict-of-interest disclosures on all university research; get rid of think tanks (yeah, I said it, and yes, on both sides of the aisle); increase public funding for university research to reduce dependence on private funding; cap on tax write-offs for donations; clear labeling of web content, not just around possible disinformation but around opinion versus reporting, advertising versus editorial; public funding for media; and information receivership for companies caught red-handed lying to the public. Bullies have cowed the press for too long and convinced the public that it’s naive or stupid to talk about what they actually want instead of the limited reality we’ve been told is “politically achievable.” It’s the ultimate censorship, really, censoring our dreams, limiting our imaginations. [Atlas Network founder] Antony Fisher never would have stood for it, and why should we?
The impact isn’t just a limiting of our thoughts but a limiting of our democracy and, hell, our lives. The very real consequences of a polluted information ecosystem are millions of people dying from preventable illness, or because they didn’t evacuate in time or didn’t trust emergency workers. It’s workers dying in a mining accident because the company was allowed to lie its way out of regulation. It’s preventable famines, floods, and pandemics. It’s kids having the same health risks as adult smokers because they’ve been exposed to air pollution that companies swear is no big deal, and because rather than protect the public as it’s supposed to, the Supreme Court has prioritized protecting the rights of companies to lie.
These are not victimless crimes, and at this point we’ve moved past ideology and into the realm of morality. In one of his most famous poems, John Keats wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” It’s a lovely, romantic sentiment. But truth isn’t just beauty, it’s survival. It’s necessity. It is the path to freedom, and the foundation of any functional democracy.
| Today on The Spill |
| DeSmog investigations editor Matthew Green interviews Amy about her new book. Then Drilled senior editor and investigative reporter Alleen Brown speaks with NDN Collective founder and CEO Nick Tilsen about how he and his organization have repeatedly found themselves in the crosshairs of President Trump’s crackdown on the environmental movement. |
| Coming Soon on Drilled |
| Starting next week we’re launching a new project spearheaded by Drilled global climate justice reporter Nina Lakhani. By 2050, one in eight people are projected to be displaced by climate change. In Displaced, Nina takes us to communities across Latin America that are already facing that issue today. Stories from Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia shows us just how complex the problem is, and why we need to be mapping out solutions today (or really yesterday). The first print story is coming next week, with the podcast season launching the following week. Don’t miss it! |
This Week’s Climate Must-reads |
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| [News] “America Finally Has the Votes to End the Electoral College,” Mother Jones A deep dive on the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and how Democrats might make it a reality. Bonus: Check out the terrific 2019 documentary “Dark Money” (no, not the book) for more on how the Kochs pissed off Montanans. |
| [News] “What a historic blue wave means for climate action” Grist The great team at Grist breaks down what exactly the midterm elections might mean for U.S. climate policy. |
| [News] “Is Australia’s ABC Asking the Wrong Questions on Climate?” Drilled Lyndal Rowlands digs into why the ABC’s recent “Keep Asking” campaign highlighted a misleading question about the cost of energy transition. |
| [Investigation] “How a Secret Vote by U.N. Scientists Legitimized Carbon Capture and Skewed Decades of Climate Policy,” ProPublica and Drilled The latest installment of our series with ProPublica digs into fossil fuel money in academia and its impact on climate research. |
| [News] “90 Million Displaced People At Risk from Climate Threats, UN Refugee Agency Says,” CNBC Africa Nearly three-quarters of the world’s forcibly displaced people are living in countries that are exposed to severe climate-related risks, according to a report by UNHCR, published ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference in Antalya, Turkey. |
| [News] “European Nations Signal Support for Fossil Fuels Roadmap, Says COP30 President,” Climate Home News André Corrêa do Lago told Climate Home News that it’s up to other nations to decide how the fossil fuel and deforestation roadmaps, developed as a goal of last year’s COP in Brazil, are used |
