Information pollution, poisoning, and hygiene

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Abstract representations of information pollution, poison, and hygiene. Image by the author, 2025.

People are information beings. Our civilization is created from shared information with practical application — part know-how, part doing.

Culture is shared information shortcuts. Society is shared cross-cultural information to find overall balance. Science is information built for understanding more broadly and/or robustly than our raw physical senses support. Libraries are a compilation of information. Floral, fauna, minerals — all these and more are physical nodes that have geological location (more information!) and an ability to touch, move. We describe it all with language, which is information. All of what we describe — including things that are more meaningful as numbers — is information. We live in an information rich environment before we ever touched a computer, long before Turing existed. Whatever nominalist presence you think something has, it’s richer in information.

So when we work off of bad information, it has potentially vast repercussions.

Bad information comes from mistakes and lies, and produces information pollution or information poison.

Misalign understanding to reality, and an experiment doesn’t work as intended. Misalign understanding to reality at scale, and the mistakes compound until they oscillate and fall apart — like what’s happening with climate change now.

We have simplified what is in fact complex; in the process, we’re disabling information — and thus information beings, aka people.

Information pollution

We, as a species, despite the overwhelming amount of information at our fingertips, do not actually have a deep and pervasive bead on reality.

In other words, we barely understand each other. We understand flora and fauna in our environment even less, let alone flora and fauna in environments we can’t easily visit (e.g., water). We can only barely forecast the weather, and have only recently developed a stable model for the planetary systems we need to support life. We grasped the concept of the planet as a globe about a cosmic second ago.

How the solar system we live in, the weather and geologic systems on the sun and other planets, the interstitial space and physics of how the solar system and its subsystems remain a composite whole are mostly concepts filled with hypothesis and fledgling theories.

Beyond our solar system is galaxies and universes, and beyond that…

…get my drift?

Our understanding is incredibly nascent. We think we understand a whole bunch, but we’re really still simply exploring our little nest, and confabulating a whole bunch in the process because we have a very narrow information set. Every single one of us has information crutches; some of us understand theirs more than others, some of the crutches are more or less complex/simple/elegant. Some of the people and crutches are entirely dependent on the pain and suffering of others.

The focus here is that we are exploring, and however much information it feels like we have now is minuscule against the backdrop of the entirety of reality. We are trying to make sense of our surroundings, and the best case scenario is that we do it in a way that is set up like experiments. Where it causes pain and distress, we try (at least in theory — there is fuckuppery going on) to bubble it up so the system can be shifted.

Information areas where some people benefit doesn’t mean that we don’t have enough information yet to know how it works. Distress and pain indicate bad information, period — no caveats. Partial benefit indicates a few can siphon and transform the pain of many.

The pain and distress might not be deeply understood until our information set expands — which it will, because of where we currently exist in space and time. We may never be able to call our thinking done, no matter how many of us already try to stick a pin in how many information points. Those pins are crutches.

Applied information pollution stresses people and our entire ecosphere. It is misunderstanding that is demanding adaptation beyond a system’s tolerance.

Information pollution is acknowledging bee hive collapse, and then trying to figure it out.

It’s acknowledging that, genetically, we are not all cookie cutters. Then trying to build a society that is more inclusive of our everything, if only because time will continue moving forward, and evolution — even of humanity — will happen in time.

It is the decimal point that’s off by one place, skewing an entire calculation. In information pollution, we acknowledge it looks off and spend the time to hunt down the issue. The next step is late, but as close to correct as we currently understand.

As long as we continue to fix information at the point of stress and nascent pain, we’re dealing with information pollution.

Information poison

We, as a species, have a facet of usury. Sometimes, like with workers earning a fair wage, it overall functions. Sometimes, like when expectations of social standards (having shelter and food, a car, a cell phone, internet access — or be “left behind”) being leveraged to crumble our financial fairness, it creates information pollution.

I don’t actually think we have to be usurious. It’s just embedded deeply in our dominant cultural expectations.

We have bad actors (dark triad: psychotic, Machiavellian, narcissistic) who live for usury, and in their perfect world the information manipulation at the root of their behavior becomes the status quo.

It’s bloodless control, so they can manipulate those not directly affected. If outsiders can trust that there’s no real harm done (see no blood! no blood, no harm!), the psychological/emotional/financial, etc., abuse can continue.

It’s convoluted, so it’s easy to lose the threads of logic. It helps outsiders decide it’s too complicated, and let the parties figure it out themselves.

It usually includes lies, so bad actors can hook into emotions, cognitive biases, etc., to gear the resulting ideas, behaviors, and actions to support the world of their imagination and to their benefit.

The universality of usury and its deepening skew towards information pollution and poison might mean that bad actors have significantly taken over system functions.

When information is so bad that individual minds are traumatized to the point of non-agency, that’s information poison.

When information is so bad that species go extinct as a byproduct of human practice out of alignment with reality, that’s information poison.

When information is so bad that we get tribalistic insistence that there is only one way to fix an agreed issue, and no amount of horrible outcomes in experimentation can sway that insistence, that’s information poison.

When people actually have their information so dissonant with reality that they have psychotic breaks, that’s information poison.

If we are allowing bad information to create ongoing dissonance to the point of collapse, we’re beyond pollution and dealing with information poison.

Information hygiene

The only way to shift information pollution or fix information poison is to clean up the information being used. We do that with information hygiene, and it’s part information formulation and part information structure. It’s entire purpose is to understand what data / information / structure / interpretation is garbage, and what data / information / structure / interpretation is still useful.

There’s three aspects: information check mechanisms, human behavior, and time. The current mechanisms are triangulation, critical thinking, and scientific methodology. The underlying behaviors are our entire cognitive model, which are most easily swayed by emotion, misplaced trust, and what’s in/out of perception. And time is a factor to place us in what we’ve figured out. We didn’t always believe that bacteria caused infection; we will have equally bad information today that most of our future will look at and wonder how we survived. As those future people will have mistakes that a far-future people will barely believe, and so on.

When behaviors are being aggressively manipulated AND garbage-in/out mechanisms are targeted through propaganda to be mistrusted, we are in trouble.

We’re in big trouble.

The information structure is the history we’ve documented to be able to go back and check how we got to this point in time, aka epistemology. It is, simply, the ability to see what data was included (transparency), follow it through the formulations (traceability), have it work out the same again (replicability) so we can understand if there might be currently unknown contextual shifts that impacted function and/or interpretation if it fails later, and understanding who — with a sense of their cognition and behavior — might have wittingly or unwittingly shifted the interpretation (accountability).

Transparency. Traceability. Replicability. Accountability.

Or:

Not in a black box.
Seriously, not in a black box.
Able to get the same answer over and over again, and when it doesn’t replicate have the history to trace back and figure out what might have been different.
Attribution, citations, touchpoints, and change permissions.

GenAI can do none of this.

In terms of information hygiene mechanisms, genAI at best garbles it. In terms of human cognitive behavior, GenAI is geared specifically to try to emulate language (people-focused information transfer) and spark cognitive behaviors used to sway people (emotions, trust, cognitive biases).

GenAI is the ultimate information poison, because the intended way to use it is to trust it. For GenAI to be the magical tool its hype proclaims, you have to trust it. Trust is where the time savings comes in. Trust is its map to efficiency. If someone has personal information hygiene, they’ll take the source material, and what genAI spits out, and works to backtrace the logic and test it to find the inevitable mistakes. It doesn’t save them any time. GenAI isn’t replicable, so you have to pick the right moment to use it, or be comfortable with information poison. You can’t fix what you can’t analyze, so it’s not producing information pollution.

Leveraging information hygiene is not how companies are using genAI; it would be a compounding of expense if they were. Leveraging information hygiene is not how a chunk of individuals are using genAI, or we wouldn’t be inundate with AI slop.

With its lack of information hygiene, genAI is trying to gain our trust without being trustworthy.
With its intent to replace people without a plan for what happens to those people, and without being able to function within the parameters of information hygiene, as a product genAI seems geared to crumble society.
With its enablement of our liars and bad actors, it seems to want us to ultimately trust no one.

From an information poison/hygiene point of view, genAI seems intent on breaking information, collapsing society, and sowing distrust in our interpersonal relationships.

Additionally, our government is deleting data that would enable our future information checks, and they are deleting accessibility to health and environmental data in terms of the world stage.

We’re in big trouble, but we lose only if we give up and give in.

How we build for information hygiene

We focus on the framework and the structure. We dig into the information and use all of our information hygiene tools, which means we have to support human behavior.

We need:

Humanism, because humans need to perceive and use the information. We really need humanism, because if we continue building on foundations of poisoned information, humans die.
Triangulation, because we’re dismissing voices we need to hear, and being overwhelmed by loud poisoned-info voices that refuse to hear anyone else. Understanding that the full spectrum of inclusion and hearing are impacting information helps us ask more useful questions. Triangulation doesn’t mean automatic inclusion, but is intended to be the first test for including quiet voices and excluding poisoned information.
Critical thinking, because the information needs to hang together. If it doesn’t make sense, no one would — or should — trust it.
Scientific methodology, because of our space and time within our understanding of the cosmos. We don’t always understand the contextual implications of our thinking, methodology, and testing. By using scientific methodology, we’re enabling others to test our ideas, with their own contextual implications. It helps to bubble up unknowns.
Transparency around the decisions that impact us all, because we need to fix the things that don’t work. That, by the way, is not forfeiting individual privacy, because we need to be humanist. We have bad actors. They are a deep puzzle, and they harm others especially when individual data is too transparent.
Traceability of the data and information, because it’s not the datapoint itself that is the issue, but how datapoints interact in a system. The connectome is our current information brain-bender, but it is incredibly important.
Replicability because our information and understanding are so incredibly nascent. We built an entire industry out of information replicability, and it is nowhere near a point of non-fuckuppery. It’s significantly contributing to fuckuppery in its current form even before we get to genAI.
Accountability because people use information, and information is built by people, and is at least a partial reflection of their own information hygiene and cognitive behavior.

At the two extremes of information hygiene are domain mapping, and individual information hygiene.

Big picture information building

We start understanding the big picture with domain mapping. This is where our big structures — business, software ecologies, sectors, our government — comes in to play. We currently mostly deal with them by the seat of our pants; mostly ad hoc within a defined scope, not understanding (in some cases willfully) the connectome and implications, and assuming what is working in one spot can’t possibly harm through system stresses. The systems are complex but explicable — until they are stuck in a genAI black box. Where we use those black boxes not only can compromise our privacy, but always compromises our information. We just don’t know where.

Domain mapping feels big and scary and beyond our ability. It is big, but it isn’t scary to everyone, and it’s absolutely within our ability. Humans conceptualized the domains, we can map them.

Individual information hygiene building

Just like every single one of us have moments of utter brilliance, every single one of us have moments of utter laziness and dumbassery. It’s entirely likely that for some people, that’s the initiating urge to use genAI. I believe that our social pressures contributed more.

We, as a society, fell for the idea that it was really cool to work such long and hard hours that we had to give up our social lives.
We, as a society, fell for the idea that you’ve got to fake it until you make it.
We, as a society, fell for the idea that people who had oodles of money were brilliant — never, ever, usurious.
We, as a society, decided that people who could never have enough, would suddenly learn what ‘enough’ was and share with the rest of us after all.
We, as a society, are in the process of accepting the idea that the very things we needed to survive (like clean air and water) should be allowed to have anything happen to it in the name of progress, and could and should be controlled and brought to profit (aka free market capitalism).
We, as a society, fell for the information manipulation of a smart man who took umbrage that how he understood the world wasn’t being properly respected. Instead of rethinking his answer, he decided the stupid hoards needed to be brought to heel, and laid out the Powell Memo.
We, as a society, never really believed everyone deserved health. Told and treated for so many generations that our sickness, pain, and earlier death was a cheaper cost of business and progress than healthcare, a little bit went a long way. Even in the face of studies that proved the opposite, the belief stuck — because it was also class differentiation and a sign of privilege.

None of these combined to give the average person time and energy to think. Unless you made a concerted effort, or were somehow inclined to curiosity despite everything in your environment, or took an interest in a certain information trove and found the joy of learning, people fell under spells of polluted and poisoned information.

Think about that. Time, natural wide-ranging curiosity, or interest. Time was and is a premium. Natural wide-ranging curiosity isn’t actually all that common. Interest needs a spark, and can be easily snuffed by a lack of time.

Information in every other facet is easier to just find someone you like, and trust, and fold their passed-along information into your framework. How we get to trust can be very easily manipulated with our hierarchical society and social media. Skew one person high enough in a hierarchical organization, and they’ll put policies in place that support lies and smother good information hygiene. Find one well connected, trusted person without good information hygiene, and they’ll bring a whole slew of people with them.

We were set up to fail, over and over and over again, going back generations.

The astonishment isn’t that so many people fell for it. The astonishment is that we have enough people who equated information hygiene with survival that we still have a fighting chance.

We still have a fighting chance

Our nodes of fighting chances

The fight for information doesn’t have to be outright, bombs-falling, blood-steeped war. The biggest glitch for avoiding blood-steeped war is the recent funding of ICE and US military. The nodes for information-focused fighting chances are:

Businesses that want their work to function, and to really fix what doesn’t function rather than try to fake it, apply optics, and/or constrain pathways to fit only the business’ what and how.
People in our government who actually want society to function, for people to live and thrive and build. Laws are in place to support this — it was the founding principal, after all. If enough of the Legislative and Judicial branches step up and focus on good information hygiene more than their fear and lenses, we can start the reset before the next election. Show that the will of the people is behind it, and it’s more cowardly to capitulate to the few near at hand than the many everywhere.
Organizations that are working towards a ‘more perfect union’ that includes an ever-expanding band of people, until someday it literally includes everyone conceptually. The faster “everyone” comes, the happier our overall society will be. And, yeah, the bad actors will hate it, be deeply unhappy, and probably very loud about it. That’s part of the puzzle.
Scientific understanding that brings our perception — through senses, sensors, logic, and math — ever closer to reality, and keeps expanding the edges of our universe.
Individuals who learn how to spot the garbage coming in, so they don’t pass it along; who learn their own cognitive patterns, and try to make up for the parts that consistently tend to trip them up; and who just freaking care about people.

These are the hopeful nodes. These are the entities that give us a fighting chance.

Businesses, government, organizations, and sciences can all benefit from domain mapping. Individuals can and should start with information hygiene.

Those entities that want domain mapping: I can be hired. Very public, passion-lead projects that leveraged domain mapping are:

When an information architect goes searching for a health answer

This is a story* of how people lost ownership of their data to corporations

For individuals who want to start understanding information hygiene, I wrote what I understand: Movements

Information pollution, poisoning, and hygiene was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.