Crushed by Information

Some reflections on the experience of information overload, and some hints about what we can do about it

There is a most remarkable scene in Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil that serves as an eerie sort of metaphor for our information age. As I interpret it, the legendary Archibald Tuttle, played by Robert DeNiro, is literally overwhelmed and killed by information.

Here’s the scene:

At this point in the movie, it becomes clear that Tuttle wasn’t even real. He serves as the main character Sam Lowry’s alter ego. What Sam would like to do to buck the dystopian bureaucracy, Tuttle actually does. Thus, when Tuttle gets consumed by the flotsam and jetsam all around him in this scene, Sam watches and winces. Tuttle disappears forever beneath the crashing waves of information.

What makes the scene so enjoyable is that it is difficult at times not to feel like Tuttle, getting smashed by what can only be described as “stuff.” How often we are bombarded by stuff, stuff, stuff.

The scene itself is comical in a dark way because when you watch it, you can’t help but think: “Yes, that is exactly what it feels like to be crushed by information.” It sticks to your body, covers your eyes, brings you to your knees, and eventually makes you disappear.

As Walker Percy would say of Kafka’s fiction, the naming of the situation leads to its reversal. The articulation of a predicament confers a joyful release. This is why poets make poetry, novelists compose fiction, and screenwriters express their intuition of a societal problem through the extended metaphor of a film.

In this short little post, I want to keep the theme of information overload going, if only as a sort of cathartic exercise. If we want to avoid the fate of Tuttle, what can we do? And, more than that, do we have an obligation to protect the Tuttles in our midst?

Nobody posts warnings about the information rip currents all about us. But they’re there. They pull us out to sea. And what happens if we don’t even realize we’re being pulled away from the shore of focused attention, leisurely deliberation, and organized control over our inner lives?

Does all this sound too extreme? Does all this sound hyperbolic?

Allow me to continue.

Your Many Multiple Mailboxes with Many Millions of Meaningless Mailings

Without your consent and without your ever so desiring, some machine tied to some piece of software 500 miles away automatically prints an envelope containing a credit card for you to activate. You open your mailbox to find a half dozen of these things that you must either shred or throw away, presuming you don’t care if strangers dig through the trash to activate the card in your name. That would never happen. It couldn’t. Or could it? You look up whether it could and make five bookmarks that you’ll never ever return to.

Alongside these credit cards you find promotional mailers for a real estate agent, medical bills, and a handwritten letter from a Jehovah’s Witness. One letter is from a collection agency because you failed to even notice the one tiny bill floating in the midst of the last deluge.

It takes psychical energy to interpret these things and physical energy to actually shred them (again, if you so choose). If you’re like me, you’ve already investigated the many ways to destroy paper—whether by fire, water (turning it into pulp), or shredding it. If you’re like me, you’ve looked for the quickest, most efficient way to search through and if necessary destroy these things so that they don’t clutter your mind.

In one of the most recent pieces of mail I received, a 4+ page mailer from the local government informed me in hundreds of words and bureaucratic legalese that my property taxes were going up by something like $7 in the next year, and I could attend some meeting on XYZ to voice my concerns. When I first saw this set of papers, I got anxious. And then I read it. And then something like 10 or 15 minutes later, I had to laugh. 

If you’re like me, you don’t just have one mailbox. You have a mailbox at home. And you have a mailbox at work. You may even have interdepartmental mail at your work. And, of course, you have an email inbox. Or, if you’re like me, you have multiple inboxes. At least two. Probably more than two inboxes if you’ve created decoy email addresses to give to people and companies when you really don’t want to give them your email.

Question: What would denizens of the 19th century think about decoy mailboxes set up to capture mail you never wanted to look at?

Your inbox brims over with hundreds of unopened promotional materials. Why? You were coerced into giving your email while checking out. Somebody said, perhaps not in these words but almost certainly to the same effect, “Give us your email, or get out of here.” And so you did. Politely. And so did I. Politely. Or you gave them your decoy email address, you sly dog you.

Alternatively, somebody sold your email address on the black market to hundreds of vendors who now assault your attention with deals, deals, deals which you cannot possibly ever entertain, investigate, or research.

And then you have your texts, calls, and voicemails. You text people. Friends and family text you. Sometimes people text you to check your email. Sometimes they text you that a package or envelope is coming.

You get an automated text announcement from a local government agency that a hurricane is coming. Another text comes from a local political candidate urging you to get to the polls. Another text comes in that the previous hurricane warning was just a test. Another political candidate texts you to rebut the other political candidate. Your text inbox becomes an arena for a dispute. And there you are, a spectator. A Tuttle with paper on your face.

Buried in the many sedimented layers of your text messages, I’m sure you’ll find several dozen two-factor authentication codes that your bank, credit company, or mortgage lender sent you. If there was such a thing as the opposite of value, these things would have it. They are exemplars of entropy, tiny parts representing the whole of chaos and disorder. They are terrifying reminders of the fact that you cannot ever truly purge everything you need to purge in your digital milieu.

You man your social media like a frantic archer in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. You thought it’d be a good idea to open a Twitter, Instagram, Substack, and Facebook account. And now you have several different citadels to defend, to check upon, to nurse.

Let me pause.

In my mind, I think it is really hard for people today to make the imaginative leap into what it must have been like for people even fifty years ago not to have this insane amount of information to be constantly processing all the time.

We are bombarded with so much information that in reality, and I say this only somewhat in jest, at times it seems like the human body is going to give way.

In computer science (network security, in particular), a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) is what happens when a malicious actor uses a network of different machines to overwhelm one machine with so many requests that it literally can’t handle it. The victim machine cannot do its job like serve web pages or whatever else it was doing before it got attacked. I suppose my question is whether each one of us is actually under some sort of unintentional, entirely benevolent DDoS attack.

Does not the above description of the various channels of incoming information seem like a DDoS attack? Many computers attacking just one? I’m not saying this sort of DDoS that we’re suffering from is intentional. I’m not that paranoid. What I am wondering is what we’re supposed to do about it.   

If you overwhelm a computer with information, it will slow to an eventual halt. Or it will burn out, just like any other machine overwhelmed with input. It is not unremarkable to me that two of our primary metaphors for thinking about information overload today come from the breakdown of machines and computers: shutting down and burning out.

But is this the end of the article? Do we all suffer the fate of Tuttle? Should we all just pack it in? Is there a way out?

Is there some way of swimming parallel to the shore in this information riptide?

To Kondo or Not to Kondo, That is the Question

Photo of Marie Kondo by Diarmuid Greene | Wikimedia Commons

There are many ways of coping with information overload. Ironically, if I listed them all, I would overwhelm you.

In no particular order, here are some ways that we already use to sort information and focus our attention: algorithms, culture, context, stories, rhetoric, delegation, prioritization, to-do lists, calendars, the technology of writing, etc., etc., etc. Many people have written about this problem of information overload for decades: Edward T. Hall, Neil Postman, Richard Lanham, etc. etc. etc.

In recent memory, however, new techniques for surviving the swell of information have emerged. And if I had to guess, you’ve heard of at least a few of them.

My wife and I first listened to Marie Kondo’s audiobook on a cross-country road trip. If you don’t know Marie Kondo, she’s the Japanese minimalist cleaning and organizing guru who convinces you to throw away stuff you don’t need (not a bad idea) and to “tidy” your house. She’s like an information and stuff sorting coach.

Her decision-making calculus is radically simple. You have to hold a thing that you need to decide upon in your hands. You actually have to hold it. And then you have to ask yourself this question: Does it spark joy?

When my wife and I finished listening to this book, we were amazed. We threw away or gave away so much stuff that didn’t spark joy in our hearts. We were confident. And, reflecting now several years afterward, we have regretted many of our decisions on multiple occasions. My wife, on at least a weekly basis, reminds me of some poor decision we made giving away or throwing away this, that, or the other thing that we now need.

Still, Kondo’s ruthlessness (throw away manuals—you don’t need them; throw away papers if you can, you don’t need them, etc.) is a radical response to the information deluge described above.

If we go along with what the systems theorists tell us about requisite variety, a system needs to be as complex as the environment it is in. And thus, our responses are proportionate to whatever we’re responding to. And if we’re responding to an ocean of information, we can’t come at it with a bucket. We need to build boats or at least set up some rocks where the tide comes in to catch the breakers before they erode the beach. We need to be ruthless with information. Somebody put this on a t-shirt, please: “BE RUTHLESS WITH INFORMATION.” 

Kondo is not alone. You’ve got David Allen, famous for his Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. And you have Tiago Forte, who has written at least two books on managing the information explosion. And there’s Cal Newport, who talks about things like digital minimalism, time blocking, the consequences of context shifting, etc.

These immediately aforementioned figures present us with techniques for sorting, sifting, and filtering excess information. I don’t think all of what they have to say is unvaluable. In fact, I think there is real merit in investigating their works to think more deliberately about how we can contend with our contemporary predicament.

Am I My Brother’s Keeper?

And yet, what deserves additional consideration, I think, are the ethical dimensions at play when it comes to Tuttle’s demise. In other words, what are the ethics of information overload?

• Is it unethical to write a long email when a short one would do?

• Is it an injustice to present someone with information that they can neither act on nor reasonably want to act on?

• Are we our brother’s keeper, after all? Do we have an obligation to help others who are getting blasted by data?

Think of what would’ve happened if the crowd of indifferent observers had come to Tuttle’s rescue to pull the paper off his ankle or off his face. Think about how things may have played out differently if even Sam wouldn’t have stood back for so long and watched Tuttle get washed away.

Think of how delightful it would be if, instead of acting as diehard individualists about this whole thing, we got together every now and then to incinerate our junk mail together.

If it sounds outrageous, it is.

But is the current situation—with our many inboxes, email chains, and text threads—any less preposterous?

If even the thought of getting your whole community together to burn junk mail makes your heart fill with joy, what does that say about the situation as it stands?

I have no answers. Only questions and provocations.

Your day may be filled with information.

But may your day also be filled with a calm resolve that—even though you may feel overwhelmed—you’re not the only one trying to swim parallel to the shore.

Thanks for reading. Please like, subscribe, comment, and/or share this post with an organization that has recently spammed you. Here is me giving credit where credit is due: Richard Lanham talks a lot about “stuff” versus “fluff” and rhetoric as the economics of attention. Allen (mentioned above) makes the point that we just save things in our digital age without ever returning to them (like bookmarks).