Introducing: Truth in Tension
Hyper-partisan media, big social platforms, and misinformation factories stole much of our access to balanced, objective information. I'd say it's about time we steal it back.
Welcome to Truth In Tension. A shiny new newsletter from the Founder & CEO of Turbine Labs.
For the last nine years, I’ve had a front row seat to the news and information challenges and frustrations felt by corporate executives, political candidates, policymakers, policy influencers, and education and nonprofit leaders. The concerns I hear every day might sound familiar to you, too: I’m buried in data and information. I don’t know where to get the best information quickly. I don’t know which sources to trust. There’s never enough time in the day to process all of it. I’m quitting social media. I’m taking a break from news.
There’s a reasonable explanation for why we feel this way:
The last decade was one of breathtaking innovation, experimentation, and change related to information access, distribution, and consumption. Nearly all the channels and platforms we use today did not exist or were not widely adopted 15 years ago. In 2007, Facebook was primarily targeting college students. Twitter was a quirky 140 character messaging service with just 50,000 weekly users. Google had gone public just 3 years prior. YouTube and Reddit were 2 years old. Instagram, Snap, and TikTok did not yet exist.
The early 2010’s also produced a substantial shift in how we access and interact with information. Apple’s iPhone, launched in 2007, completely shifted the application development paradigm and created a brand new canvas to build innovative apps. And in 2010, wireless carriers began rolling out their next generation networks, called 4G LTE, enabling access to high-speed voice and data services from almost anywhere.
This combination of innovative apps, powerful, large-screen devices, and reliable high-speed transmission networks created brand new market segments, trillions of dollars of market value, and massive societal change.
It also laid the groundwork for the information crisis we face today.
In 2014, I founded a software company called Turbine Labs to address information overload, trust, and access challenges. Our mission was (and is) to help decision-makers separate signal from noise, wheat from chaff, and objective facts from salacious drivel. Since our founding, we have produced and delivered tens of thousands of intelligence briefings for thousands of high-profile individuals and dozens of global organizations. I’ve seen the landscape change and the crisis evolve.
Now, in late 2022, we’re at a breaking point:
We interact with our smartphones 2,000 times per day, on average.
20 million reputable news articles are published daily, as well as millions more containing misinformation, disinformation, or other nefarious content and links.
Billions of social posts and videos are uploaded every day.
Hyper-targeted advertising follows us everywhere, often with frightening coincidence (and consequence).
Powerful algorithms select, editorialize, and amplify the content we consume, limiting choice, free expression, and diversity of thought.
Constant online surveillance of our behavior, interactions, and locations are packaged and sold to companies that use the data to further hone and grab our attention.
Think about it. We’re all just trying to find high-quality information to keep informed about topics that are important to us. Yet at work, at home, in public, and everywhere in between, the companies and organizations vying for our attention behave like a persistent cloud of gnats buzzing around our heads. You can run, stand still, close your eyes, whatever. But you can’t escape.
Luckily, you don’t have to escape. This new reality is manageable. We need to retrain our minds and adapt to this new environment. And we need to teach our colleagues, friends, families, and communities how to adapt as well.
My goal in writing Truth in Tension is to help you reduce information overload and media fatigue, establish appropriate guardrails, and build effective filters and processes to make information a valuable commodity again, rather than a liability. Most importantly, my goal is to bring back the love of discovery and knowledge I believe is inherent in all of us.
I look forward to your readership and your feedback.
We call this state of being “infobesity”. A term coined by Julia Hobsbawm in her book Simplicity Principle.