Mental Health & Information Jenga

Last weekend I posted a clip from the movie The Big Short on Facebook. In the scene, Ryan Gosling tries to explain to Steve Carell and his partners what was happening to America’s housing market, using Jenga. Mortgages were going bust because banks and rating agencies, in a rush to move units, overlooked reality: people were buying way more than they could afford. That debt was packaged and sold to people who were betting on the market to crash.

I have only a vague understanding of the math behind collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). As somebody who’s read the book and watched the movie a couple of times apiece, the most I can hope to understand is the symbology of the situation. The infrastructure of a hierarchical system crumbled because of a lack of accountability and naive trust that gatekeepers would act in the best interest of consumers and the general economy. The reality in the run-up to the housing collapse, however, was that institutions seemed only to care about moving units.

It was a get-rich-quick scheme that left big banks holding the bag by design. All the unpaid debt the banks were holding was used as leverage for a federal bailout, hence: too big to fail. I’ve seen similarities in other institutions for a number of years now since reading and watching The Big Short. A precedent has been set that leaves little incentive to correct problems because, at the end of the day, if an institution has its tentacles in enough places, there could be even less incentive to destroy it. (Example: public transportation. It's an underfunded necessity that has little reason to improve because people are going to use it anyway, and it would be very tricky for a politician to win re-election on a platform that calls for public transit to fail).

This is how I feel about the News. There are institutions that have an enormous reach that exist to inform the most number of people. There’s a hierarchy of general importance we use when trying to get a pulse on the world. Consumers only have so much time in their days to focus on the news, so algorithms do a lot of the digging for us. Now think of all the ways one reasonably consumes news. There’s social media, influencers, advertisers, marketing campaigns, search engines, keywords, friends, followers, brands, video, infographics, etc., all connected by the internet, the ground floor for information. Using all that, we build our own Jenga towers to give ourselves structure.

But what happens when the rate of consumption becomes overwhelming and it gets more complicated and time-consuming to decipher authenticity from stagecraft, news from propaganda, and market research from advertising? Suddenly, those tranches of information that make up our general worldview become less sturdy. What if it turns out that our information towers are strongly supported by filler? If those tranches of information filler give out, you’re looking at a mental health crisis.