the internet.md

I've been thinking about the internet.

Outline

the internet is subtley diffused in our lives, making countless different things incredibly accessible at a moment's impulse
there are structures in place to support and incentive to capture and monetize our attention
thinking is hard, requiring time and quiet, but content consumption interferes with it
once other people get involved, the emotional/mental shortcuts we experience on a personal level start to turn into polarization, echo chambers and misinformation

Discrete and Manageable -> Dispersed and Unwieldy

TODO: maybe half this length?

I used to think about the internet as a place that I went. I'd "plug in" in a very discrete way, maybe putting in a CD or starting a modem and then, more seamlessly, simply sitting in front of our 1 household computer, which was always connected. It felt pretty analogous to IRL. I'd type in an address and I'd go to that website, which would send me some small amount of content. I'd check my mail. It was magical, chaotic and disturbing (see: The Chapelle Show Season X, Episode Y), but it still seemed like a pretty discrete and manageable bubble that I could hop in and out of.

(forgive me as I glaze over an already hazy history of the internet from my perspective. Not being particuarly cutting-edge, I was probably in the middle of the curve for getting access to certain things. The description also really starts up in my formative years, which are my core memories I guess.)

We transitioned from this relatively disconnected and discrete internet usage to the point we're at now where connectivity is the expectation* and the internet is deeply embedded into as many things as we can think of (smart tech baby). Along the way we saw some of the groundwork of what was to come:

msn messenger created a second social world outside of school
online games and forums showed us things we'd never seen
porn (if you could find a site that didn't give you a virus or a screen full of pop-ups) started your sex education well before school*
*any outtages are simply unacceptable and if I walk into a coffee shop without WIFI I think I've stumbled into the wrong neighbourhood. That makes me think, though, that there's gonna be a coffee shop soon that actually has a gimmick where they somehow cut off the internet of all who enter it. A kewl edgy return to the "good ol' days"
*(trigger warning: graphic sexual description) think of how much random sexual content you were exposed to before ever actually learning what sex was. Since perverse and fucked up things naturally make the rounds quickly, I probably saw a bukakke or horse-human sex by grade 7, well before I saw a video of a loving couple having a positive sexual experience (if I've ever seen that in porn).

From there we got progressive improvements with still roughly the same discrete delivery mechanism:

search engines got a lot better (enter Google)
more elaborate social spaces (e.g. myspace, asian avenue)
forums and content sites became more active and robust
all sorts of online gaming

These were the forerunners of where we are today. A fast acceleration in internet speed, internet access and the underlying technologies that help us create and distribute digital environments have taken this original phenomenon and changed its nature entirely. The last and maybe most important piece, that was likely conspicuously absent, is:

drum roll pleeeeaaaase

the smart phone.

The internet was a place that we had to choose and put effort to go to and sometimes even then we'd just be unable to access it. It was filled with some pretty strange stuff, sure, but it was easy to identify what you were doing at any given moment (e.g. reading an article, on a forum browsing a discussion, playing games etc).

The internet is now so subtley spread out into our daily lives that it's difficult to avoid even if we tried and even then sometimes we're forced to access it (e.g. cloud subscriptions, forced updates, streaming). It's filled with even stranger stuff and now you can switch from laughing at jokes, to watching interview snippets, to getting a global news update all with a couple clicks, a single swipe or even coexisting on the same screen. Bo Burnham's "Welcome to the Internet" is a great rundown of this.

Not only are we on the internet a lot more, we're ever-so effortlessly able to consume content of countless different subjects and formats. It's all accelerating and we're not keeping up.

Can We? Should We?

Note: to simplify, this section is mostly referring to "consumer content" and personal technology usage when speaking of the internet, while ignoring industrial/academic use.

We're in a pretty awesome spot. We've made tons of incredible developments and built amazing things with technology. The quality of, and access to, shows, movies, music, learning resources and any of the billion other kinds of content is astounding. Without being too much of a doomsayer, I'll ask "at what cost?" Driven by understandable incentives, we asked the "can we?" for the internet and got a resounding "fuck yeah we can!". When trying to ask the "should we?", we were promptly smothered with ad revenue, ecommerce sales and stock options.

I hope this to be just a healthy dose of reflection and "what're the pitfalls?" of these amazing things we've built. That being said, here are the four horsemen of the internet apocalypse:

hyper-accessible digital interfaces and nearly zero time-to-act on impulses
digital advertising ecosystem & the user-generated content that supports it, which allow companies to focus on monetizing of attention vs actually creating tools to enable us
tech monopolies that underpin all the software environments that we inhabit AND the physical infrastructure required by so many other software endeavours
general disregard for privacy

Each of these is a pretty deep subject unto itself, but I think just being aware of them and some of their high-level interactions is helpful. For more, check out The Center for Humane Technology

Introducing the main players in this ever-evolving drama of the online world:

Amazon: Amazon marketplace, Amazon Web Services, Ring, Alexa
Meta: Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Occulus
Alphabet: Google services, Android (& play store), YouTube, Waze
Apple: phones & pcs (& app store)
Microsoft: Windows, Github

Supporting cast:

Twitter
Reddit
TikTok
Netflix
Uber

The incentive structures and feedback loops of the digital economy boil down to a very simple process of exploiting peoples' impulses to:

get people to buy things
get peoples' attention and serve them an ad for (1)
get people to create content that can be leveraged for (2)
mine enough data about people to create accurate enough profiles to further (2) and (3)
sell data from (4) to facillitate a wide variety of other endeavours

This basic setup of the "attention economy" aims at short resonant content (i.e. dopamine release) to support the above. We've got lots of great things, but they have some significant drawbacks, both at a personal and societal scale, which were particularly exposed since roooouuuughlyyyyy March 2020.

Let's focus on a common phenomenon at the personal scale and then how that transitions into broader social mechanics.

Mental Cohesion & Infinite Content

Some useful terminology:

mental context - all the details you hold in your head at any given moment. When doing a particular task, it's all the "moving parts" and inputs that you have to keep track of to think about that task. It can be tough to build it up and often gets lost quickly.
thought work - the act of actively thinking about a subject. Spending time so that you can achieve depth of thought and focus in order to understand something better. Since there's so much going on in the world, it's useful to seek out summaries from people who do put in the work.
context switching - the act of cycling through various mental contexts, either on purpose or because of a disruption. Picture writing an email and then getting an urgen email notification which you read, respond to and then go back to writing that original email. Generally, it takes some time to "get back into" the original email. What was that thing you were about to write?

The interplay of these three things is important to a common pattern I experience with the internet. To get good thought work done you need to build out a rich mental context with all sorts of relevant information, which baseline just requires time and focus. This can get disrupted by context switching too much so that the process becomes disjointed or completely derailed.

The above would be difficult enough with the kind of access we have to content. The access combined with certain mechanisms of content delivery and styles of content compound this effect. Two of these concepts that come to mind are:

emotional triggers - The basic idea is that we have these very predictable reactions when we see things and with that reaction we're much more likely to engage with the content (click, share, like, comment and lastly read). The first term I ever heard was "click bait" and then more recently "outrage bait": intriguing short-form "listicles" (Top 10 Things You Should NEVER Do At a Party!) and inflamatory quick-cut videos (Andrew Tate Tells the TRUTH That No Woman Wants to Hear! - DESTROYS Limp-Dick Feminist).
content suggestion "algorithms" - the ability to identify the subject matter or style of content that you are most likely to engage with (e.g. the "because you liked XYZ" on Netflix). They're quite good at identifying related content based on associations (i.e. users who watched X, also watched Y) and the datasets are quite large (i.e. all users on that platform).

Content suggestion can be SO COOL when it's combined with useful inputs like your taste in music or movies, but ABSOLUTELY HORRID when combined with emotional triggers. One second you're casually scrolling tiktok and the next you're falling down a rabbit hole of "edgy red pill alpha anti-PC hustler" content. Instead of going to a tea party and playing croquette with flamingos, you're signing up for Hustler's University and posting affiliate links on your RateTate69 tiktok account.

TODO: stick figure image

The combination of the above interactions is: our ability to perform meaningful "thought work" is constantly disrupted by well-designed content suggestion algorithms that often use emotional triggers to pull us in. The resulting context switching stops us from processing important information and, further, leaves tons of unprocessed content (that we don't even care about rattling) around in our brains.

A couple examples:

finishing one question on an assignment, then alt-tabbing to look at a meme (some unrelated joke about a current political issue), finishing another question, then picking up your phone to check a message (a request to hang out later in the week) and finally back to the assignment
reading a group chat, while browsing tiktok/reddit/youtube/instagram/twitter feeds, periodically checking your email then opening uber eats to see the promo they sent you. All of this while watching a tv show on Netflix in the background, which you will later refer to as "okaaay, but just not that engaging, yknow?"

We're just not going "deep enough" into most things. This would actually be a totally fine (and normal/common/healthy?) way of dealing with the compounding amount of things that humanity is producing right now, except that as it scale upward to the level of communities, societies and countries we've encountered some incredibly troublesome side-effects.

Distorted Collective Imagination

This is where we're at:

deeply embedded and accessible digital world that is difficult to avoid
an economy designed around monetizing attention
powerful techniques to keep our attention, which prey upon our emotions and disrupt our ability to think

These things pose challenges for any individual, but once we add social elements into the mix it starts to get a lot more complicated.

These two quotes resonate with me on this:

when you read, another person is thinking for you

your first thought is rarely interesting

TODO: highlight passive vs active belief When they're combined, they highlight the issues we've seen with our collective distribution and processing of information. We don't often even get to our first thought on things, let alone dig deeper. So, we're left with the thoughts of whoever is producing the content we consume. Again, this is a normal part of filtering noise, but it starts to break down when:

we don't acknowledge the incomplete understanding
we promote the incomplete understanding

We over-react, over-share and under-think. We read fake outrageous comments and get pushed further into our echo chambers. We get pulled into online interactions that are so detached from reality as to be meaningless, except they eventually do trickle over into real life if everyone believes in this imaginary battle they've been following online.

Our collective imagination gets so distorted that it's hard to keep track of the important aspects of any issue. These two ideas combine together to illustrate the difficulty:

Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it

You can't use reason to get yourself out of a position you didn't use reason to get into

It takes a genuinely large amount of work to disprove things and those things are extremely easy to just lie about. Further, if those things strike some emotional chords with people, especially when they don't realize it, then you probably will never be able to talk them out of it.

Summary

Imagine a drake meme where the left column is the "nuh uh" and the right column is the "uh huh":

Healthier, but slow & hard	Less healthy, but fast & easy
consistent thought work	hot takes & "gotchas"
being humble in the face of difficult subjects and ideas	feeling smart while never growing
thinking through middle-grounds, dealing with a "grey" reality and implementation issues	dying on hills, binary possibilities, simple theoretical answers
working together	pwning each other
getting results	optics and feeling satisfied

~Tyty