The information we consume matters just as much as the food we put in our body. It affects our thinking, our behavior, how we understand our place in the world. And how we understand others.
Evan Williams
The meaning of the quote
On January 4, 2017, Evan Williams laid off a third of the staff at Medium, the writing platform he had launched 5 years earlier.
Medium had started selling ads to pay for its articles, and Williams decided he wanted out. In a blog post on Medium announcing the cuts, he explained that most of the articles and videos people see every day are paid for by companies with their own goals, so they’re built to catch your eye for a few seconds instead of leaving you better off.
In October 2017, he wrote the quote in the blog post Words still matter, which marked Medium’s 5th birthday and explained what the company meant by “words matter.”
Back in 2013, at the XOXO festival in Portland, he had told the audience:
“The Internet is simply a giant machine designed to give people what they want.”
He compared the internet to modern farming. Factory farms made calories cheap and easy to get, and many people who could eat whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, got sick. Apps now do the same with information by serving whatever is quickest to swallow and asks nothing of your brain.
Most people notice when a week of chips and soda catches up with them. Few notice when a week of outrage and gossip does, even though it shows up in their mood, their arguments and what they believe is going on in the world.
What you consume also shapes how you see other people. If your feed only shows you the angriest clips from people who vote or pray differently from you, you start to believe that’s who they all are. You’ve never met them, and you still feel sure you know them.
Action steps
A food diary shows people what they eat, and an information diary does the same for your mind.
- Keep an information diary for 1 day.
Write down everything you read, watch and listen to, and for how long. Count the 2-minute scrolls too. - Note how each one left you feeling.
Calmer and more curious, or tense and drained? That tells you which items were meals and which were junk. - Swap one junk source for a real meal.
Unfollow the account that always leaves you angry and give that time to a book chapter, a long article or a podcast you learn from. Moving the app off your home screen helps too. Monica Rosenberg’s advice for better attention is to change your environment instead of changing yourself. - Follow 1 thoughtful person you disagree with.
Pick someone who makes their case calmly. You don’t have to change your mind, but you’ll see that the people on the other side are more than the worst clips your feed showed you.
Williams walked away from ad money so Medium could reward writing that helps readers instead of writing that grabs them.
Your own choice is smaller, and you make it every time you unlock your phone.
About the author
Evan Williams was born in 1972 and grew up on a farm near Clarks, Nebraska. His high school had fewer than 60 students, and he didn’t see the ocean until he was 20.
Books showed him the world beyond the farm. He taught himself to juggle from a library book, and as a teenager a book on making money in real estate made him realize that years of someone else’s experience could fit in his hands.
In early 1993, at 20, he picked up the second issue of the magazine Wired and saw the internet as the future he had to be part of. By then he had dropped out of the University of Nebraska. He recorded a VHS tape in his basement explaining what the internet was and later admitted he spent 10 years hoping nobody would ever find it.
In 1999 he cofounded Pyra Labs with Meg Hourihan, and a side project they built turned into Blogger, one of the first tools that let anyone publish a blog. Then the dot-com crash hit. By January 2001 the money was gone, and after weeks of working without pay, the whole team walked out, his cofounder included.
Williams moved the servers into his apartment and kept Blogger running alone.
The site kept growing, and Google bought it in 2003.
His next startup, the podcasting company Odeo, flopped, but one of its engineers, Jack Dorsey, came up with an idea for short status updates. Williams, Dorsey and Biz Stone turned it into Twitter (now X) in 2006, and Williams later ran it as CEO.
In 2012 he launched Medium as a home for longer, slower writing.
You can find this quote in his blog post Words still matter, alongside his thoughts on what Medium was built to do.
Resources
- Words still matter (Article)
- A journey on the information highway (YouTube)
- The Information Diet (Book)
- Digital Minimalism (Book)
- How to take your attention back (Article)
- Evan Williams (Wikipedia)
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