Transcription
The internet has given us access to more information than ever before. So why does it feel like it's making us stupider? Well, while the internet's impact on cognition is incredibly complex and not universally negative, I do think there are a number of things that the internet incentivizes which make it harder to think clearly and critically about the world around us. And this is just what I want to discuss today.
Before we get started, I just want to say that necessarily a lot of this is going to be speculative. So, just consider this my opinion rather than some kind of definitive conclusion. My name is Joe Folly and this is unsolicited advice.
One, the fruits of anger. One of the great psychological discoveries of the past 200 years or so is just how much our emotions and affect affect the way that we behave, interpret, and even just perceive the world around us. And in itself, this is not a bad thing at all. Indeed, if you believe many thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, without this affectual component to our thinking, we would basically be unable to act or direct our attention at all.
However, one of the marked negative effects of the internet on our thinking is that all of the incentives that are sort of controlling what is produced on the internet are aligned to keep us in certain heightened emotional states. And those heightened emotional states certainly can affect our ability to think clearly. The reason this happens is pretty straightforward, and I'm sure that you've heard the same story elsewhere. The metric for success on the internet, whether it's measured at the level of post or idea or person, is the amount of attention that that online thing gets. On YouTube, this is measured in the amount of time that someone spends watching a video. But elsewhere, it might just be measured in clicks or views or whether someone purchases a particular product. But the precondition to any and all of these outcomes is grabbing and holding your attention. And the best way to grab and hold someone's attention is to let their deep, powerful animal instincts know that it is important to one of their core needs. In other words, the best way to get someone's attention is to hit them with as strong an emotional state as possible.
The classic candidates for this emotional state are anger and fear, with the overall more effective and profitable one of these being anger. Both of these in one way or another let you know that you are learning about a threat at which point it is incredibly difficult to turn yourself away from said threat. And again, in itself, this is actually a great thing to have ingrained within us. Imagine if we'd been prone to mind-wandering when we spotted a saber-tooth tiger in the bushes.
However, these are not emotions that are well-suited to constantly be in in our current information environment. The algorithmically driven internet, in a lot of ways, looks to our animal brain, for one of a better word, like a huge array of saber-tooth tigers all vying for our attention. And since whatever attention you give to one source is attention not given to another, everyone is incentivized to create the biggest, scariest-looking tiger on the savannah or wherever saber-tooth tigers lived. Because if they don't do this, then they'll probably just be outcompeted by more attention-grabbing content.
And remember that almost everything you see on a platform like YouTube is algorithmically based on how other people have reacted to it. If they gave it their attention, then the platform is likely to then deliver it up to you. And if they didn't, then the platform won't. So, even if you personally are a blissed-out zen monk and aren't swayed by emotionally driven factors when you're watching or deciding what content to consume on the internet, you will still often find that the choices that are presented to you are still limited to the most emotionally laden content out there because that has survived the kind of algorithmic selection effect.
And when it comes to grabbing attention, anger really does work. Anger makes things more clickable and more sharable. One study found that anger was even more effective than other seemingly motivational emotions like anxiety at getting people to share information. And as the authors of that study put it, "even small effects may carry significant social implications in practice, especially for public health interventions, educational programs, and the persuasion effects of media exposure." In other words, small differences add up. And even if soliciting anger only gets you a small advantage compared with some other emotional states and some other content creators, at scale, that can translate into anger taking up an outsized significance in shaping the total set of content that we see, read, and process online.
So, not only do we end up with a skewed, anger-driven perception of the world that is shaped by this hostile interpretation of it, but anger itself interferes with our ability to think clearly. But of course, one area the internet has made much more difficult to navigate is the news feed, which is why I recommend today's sponsor, Ground News. Ground News is a website and app that gathers related articles from thousands of sources around the world in one place so you can compare how different sources cover the same story. Every story comes with a clear breakdown of the political bias, factuality, ownership, and headlines of the reporting sources with ratings backed by independent news monitoring organizations. Ground News are very kindly offering anyone who uses my link or scans my QR code 40% off their unlimited access Vantage plan as a special deal. So, I highly encourage you to snap this up. For example, let's see how left and right-wing sources differed in how they reported on a judge unsealing documents related to the charging and conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell. Whereas left-leaning coverage chose to frame this as a moral victory, some right-leaning sources were more skeptical, with one source focusing on a statement by a judge who warned that this reveal may be of little consequence. Even when sources agree on the facts, they often choose to frame them differently, which leaves different impressions on the reader, and Ground News gives you access to all of them. One of my favorite features for encouraging critical thinking is the blind spots feed, which highlights stories that are disproportionately covered by either the left or the right. It's so easy to get stuck in our own echo chambers, but this way we will learn about those stories that might pass us by in our own news feeds. Like a lot of people, I don't have a lot of time to keep up with the news and certainly not to examine every single source for bias or misinformation. So getting my Ground News roundup dropped in my inbox every day means that I can stay informed and learn which sources to trust and just generally make the world less of a bewildering mess. Ground News is giving my viewers 40% off their unlimited access Vantage plan. It's an invaluable tool in navigating our current chaotic information landscape and I'm confident that you'll find it helpful. But anyway, back to the video.
You probably already know this at some level, right? It's very difficult to think clearly when you're pissed off. But I don't think that we often appreciate just how much anger can mess with our ability to think. Just phenomenologically, we know how much being angry or scared or upset can cause our judgments to go astray. But this is backed up by empirical evidence as well. One key finding is that anger in particular diminishes our ability to take on other people's perspectives. As one paper by Yin and Schweitzer put it, "across our studies with different inductions of emotion and different measures of perspective taking, we establish that anger degrades perspective taking." This is probably a really good thing if we're dealing with genuine threats, right? You don't want to empathize with the saber-tooth tiger, but it's easy to see how it could impair our critical thinking skills.
Almost by definition, critical thinking does involve stepping outside your own particular perspective and pre-existing opinions and at least attempting to take up the position of another person so that you can somewhat separate yourself from your pre-existing biases. This doesn't mean that you'll end up agreeing with the perspective that you're temporarily taking, but without this ability, we will almost certainly just miss the mistakes in our own thinking and fail to critique our own perspectives. Unless we can answer this crucial question: "How could an otherwise sensible, sound, and intelligent person come to disagree with me about this issue?" I don't think we can really call what we're doing thinking critically. And anger disrupts this process in significant ways.
Yin and Schweitzer point out that we already know that failures in perspective-taking often cause heightened angry states and increased conflicts. So there is a danger that this becomes a downward spiral: that increased anger decreases our perspective-taking, and that lack of perspective-taking in turn leads us to be at least temporarily much more dogmatic and so likely to start conflicts with others, making them angry as well. And I'm sure that you've seen this play out online. It doesn't help that because anger and other motivating negative emotions get people to click on a piece of content, this encourages anyone looking to produce anything online to promote negativity wherever they can. Like, one of the hallmarks of YouTube is the response video, where someone reacts normally pretty negatively to what someone else has put out there. And like many, many of the things that we'll talk about in this video, this too is not an inherently bad thing. Criticism is good, but the incentive is to find something negative so that we can make something more clickable. And this encourages us to strawman the people that we're responding to. It's one of the reasons why I have made so few response videos on this channel. In fact, I have the first one in a long time coming up, and I've done something that I really hope to make mainstream, which is send the script to the person that I'm critiquing so that I can get feedback and ensure that I'm not misrepresenting them. This is pretty standard practice in academic circles. And I just really hope that I can promote it on YouTube because I think it is just really good practice. But that's more of an aside. The point is that having a series of incentives that's prod us into strawmanning people and interpreting them as uncharitably as possible is an absolute disaster for the quality of our thinking. It means that we will miss out on potentially good or great ideas because they're spun to us in the wrong way, and we will train ourselves out of what is normally considered one of the key epistemic virtues: the willingness to engage those we disagree with in absolute good faith.
Now, it's important for us not to get too dogmatic ourselves here. This is not to say that emotional states themselves are somehow antithetical to thinking. One of the key findings of the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio is that emotions actually do play a key role in our thinking. And if you were to be totally stripped of emotion, that would paralyze your cognitive and decision-making capacities. The old binary where we just have thinking on the one hand and feeling on the other does seem to me to be pretty untenable. However, to be constantly angry and scared is just not healthy for critical thinking. And the incentive structures of the internet make it almost inevitable that we will be in those emotional states more often, especially when we are consuming algorithmically driven content as we so often are online. Also, bear in mind this point about anger because later in the video we're going to discuss how the internet disrupts our ability to have productive conversations, and the default emotional state, for one of a better word, of the internet being angrier than in the offline world is going to be a really key part of that. Another thing that heightened anger does is increase our stress levels, which is also known to interfere with our cognitive ability if it becomes chronic, especially with regards to memory and attention span. However, as far as I can tell, at least the size and nature of the effect depends pretty heavily on the context of the stress. Nonetheless, this leads us nicely onto our next point.
Two, a short-form attitude. I've mentioned before the disastrous philosophical consequences of a shortened attention span, but I definitely think it bears briefly repeating here. A healthy attention span and healthy ability to focus is absolutely vital for clear thinking. We need it to learn. We need it for memory. We need it just to sustain the process of thinking and reflection. There's just very little good thinking that can be achieved without some kind of steady attention given for a medium to long period of time. You can test this yourself. Try to read a book, but set an alarm to go off every minute. Do a totally unrelated task for that minute and then go back to reading. I've done this myself and I found my thinking quickly became fragmented, unproductive, and just borderline pointless. I would have to reread the same paragraph over and over again. I would barely retain anything that went in. And maybe worst of all, it just made the process of reading much less enjoyable. I think we often skim over this ability of focus to make a difficult task or difficult learning compelling and at best happiness-inducing. We all know that distraction means that you get less done or learn less. And yeah, it does mean that you think less clearly, but it also crucially makes tasks less compelling and rewarding.
I think we recognize this at some level because there are countless videos on YouTube that promise things like they'll make studying as fun as scrolling by retraining your focus. It's a key part of the findings of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi that focusing on challenging, meaningful tasks for long periods allows us to enter a flow state. Again, people mainly emphasize that a flow state is really productive. It's really helpful for getting things done. But I think that's kind of tangential to the main point of them, at least for me, which is that flow states make life much more enjoyable and fulfilling. And a huge number of great thinkers and writers became great thinkers and writers because they found these activities compelling and fulfilling. And maybe they didn't always find them pleasant in our kind of straightforward, down-to-earth sense, but they seem to find them meaningful and motivating, and focus seemed to be a big part of that. I think of the example of the Austrian logician and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. While he was famously quite an agitated thinker, and it feels somewhat hasty to say that thinking made him happy, he did undeniably find it really compelling. And this was something that stuck with him throughout his life. When he was a young man, he once said to Bertrand Russell that one of the only things he found worthwhile was the prospect that he might write great works and the process of engaging with great works. For Russell's part, he sometimes said that engaging with mathematics was the only thing that staved off severe depression for him. One of my favorite thinkers, Frank Ramsey, evidently took immense pleasure in his thinking, devouring economics, math, and philosophy in huge volumes in his free time. This was clearly one of the most enjoyable and compelling parts of his life. I realize this is of course a very limited sample size, but it also holds true for almost every great thinker I've looked at. Their ability to sustain focus over long periods of time and thus find their work extremely compelling was both integral to how they managed to think such incredible things, but also to how enrapturing and potentially enjoyable they found thinking itself.
I know it's kind of a basic point, but it's worth emphasizing and re-emphasizing that focus and attention is so fundamental that it almost doesn't feel right to treat it merely as one cognitive skill amongst others. In many ways, it is kind of the cognitive skill upon which so many other cognitive skills rest. It doesn't matter how airtight you are as a logical thinker if you can't pay attention for long enough to process an argument properly. It doesn't matter if you're incredibly creative in theory if you can't sustain that creativity for long enough for it to blossom into something. And this makes the effect that the internet has had on our focus all the more worrying.
Before I talk about that, I do want to preempt a tempting but far too simplified conclusion: that the internet alone has robbed us of our focus and everything will be great if we just abandon the internet. As I argued in my longer video on focus, our declining focus and attention span is almost certainly the result of a huge range of factors, including changing diets, loss of sleep, increased levels of chronic stress, general mental health issues, and yes, the internet has also contributed to our declining focus, probably in quite a major way. I want to single out the internet here, partly because it's sort of the topic of the video, but also because it has incentivized the production and consumption of incredibly brief and short-form content over longer-form. And thus, I sort of think is slowly pushing the default mode of idea production to be shorter and briefer, as well as encouraging us to engage with ideas in shorter and briefer ways.
When I said short-form content there, most people would immediately leap to something like TikTok or YouTube Shorts, and that's a significant part of it. There's a reason why I haven't made YouTube Shorts in over a year, but it's not the only part. One of my favorite time sinks and places to spend my time is Substack. Please subscribe to my Substack. And on Substack, you can read articles and blog posts written by various people online, including yours truly. But one thing you'll immediately notice is that most articles which perform pretty well are under 2,000 words or just over 2,000 words. This is not inherently a bad thing, and it's a lot longer than quite a lot of ways of consuming information on the internet, but it's pretty brief as far as essays go. This is obviously much better than Shorts or TikTok, but it's still an example of relatively short content being prioritized over longer-form.
But much worse than any individual instance of short-form content is what I am just going to hesitantly dub the short-form attitude. This is the expectation from a user that things, including difficult ideas, are to be consumed incredibly quickly. That is the idea that things are not worth dwelling on or digesting or pausing to think about. It's less the mere existence of platforms like TikTok that I'm worried about, and more the mindset it encourages if it becomes our dominant mode of communicating because it carries, I think, the implicit message that ideas in general are to just be skimmed over without much consideration or thought. Short-form content is so much easier to produce than long-form content, so more of it is produced, and it's also easier to consume, so more of it is consumed. And I worry that this all encourages us to take our TikTok and short-form-trained approaches into things like our reading and our thinking.
I don't have anything against short, brief ways of presenting things in principle. It's more that if it becomes the main or dominant mode with which we present and communicate and consume and understand ideas, I just sort of worry that that will then be locked in. That will be the frame through which we then view information. And that, I think, is incredibly worrying because almost all of the valuable things worth talking about can't be communicated in short-form. They can't even be communicated in, like, you know, the kind of length of videos that I make, which is like 30 to 40 minutes most of the time. They really can only be communicated in large books and with the help of sustained focus and a kind of conversation between you and the author, and if possible, a conversation between you and other people who are also engaged with those ideas. For the record, we'll be coming on to conversation later, and this kind of impromptu rant is unscripted, so I apologize if it, if it seems a little bit out of focus, but I did think that's important to clarify. I don't have an issue with TikTok or YouTube Shorts in particular. It's more that, like any technology, they come with a particular way of viewing the world embedded within them. And while I think the way of viewing the world that is inherent in a in a TikTok is fine for TikTok, I think that it's disastrous if it becomes the mode with which we approach the world. So anyway, rant over. I'll get back to the script.
I think this valorization of brevity is clear even outside of just short-form video content. One of the internet's most lauded achievements is the witty quip or the witty put-down. Often times, this will be done with a retweet and a sardonic, ironic reply like "This isn't a good look" or some variation on a potent and rather irritating mix of condescension, arrogance, and insult. These are much easier to consume than long, detailed, good-faith rebuttals and are consequently much more likely to reach viral status. I'm not saying that there doesn't exist good long-form writing online. There is plenty of it about, and the internet has been a great thing for sharing long-form written media as well. But I'm simply suggesting that the general incentives are pointing in the other direction. If you are reading long, detailed writing on the internet, that's fantastic and I highly encourage you to do so, but you're swimming against the tide.
And our next point is closely related to this short-form attitude. In fact, I think they both feed into one another an awful lot.
Three, a hyper-stimulated world. In his book, *The Age of Addiction*, David Courtright argues that more and more of our economy has become structured around addiction and compulsion, a phenomenon that he refers to as "limbic capitalism," after that lovely limbic system that we met earlier. He covers a huge range of topics like food, gambling, and straightforward alcohol. But he also devotes a number of pages to the addictive nature of the internet. As he puts it, "Whether it was forbidden content that drew users to the internet and social media platforms or many hits of stress-relieving information or both, critics began to detect ill effects of heavy use. With the exception of trauma caused by distracted driving and walking, few of these effects are acute and non-toxic in the manner of alcohol or drugs. Internet addicts are not overdose candidates. Their heavy use is instead a slow poison, one whose cumulative toll is cognitive and moral. The primary danger, particularly with smartphones, is constant distraction from personal conversation, sleep, driving, study, reflection, practice, and work, which translates into difficulty achieving or maintaining intimacy, health, safety, knowledge, creativity, expertise, and socially constructive flow states."
The idea of an internet addiction has certainly gained more traction over the years. And there is increasing evidence that, especially in extreme cases, it has pretty similar effects as other types of addiction. But the fact that the negative effects of internet usage are often less noticeable compared to narcotics or alcohol or gambling means that it's very easy, I think, to underestimate just how much the hyper-stimulative world of the internet dominates our lives. Courtright cites a now rather old study from 2011 where young people expressed quite a lot of surprise at just how much it affected them to go 24 whole hours without access to electronic devices or the internet. How many of us are underestimating just how much time and energy this machine is sapping from us?
Obviously, this ties back to the point about attention in the last section, but I also think that it's deeper than that. Something Courtright emphasizes over and over again is what we might call the hyper-reality of the internet. One comparison might be with explicit online materials, which sometimes impact users to such an extent that they struggle to find emotional fulfillment in actual physical romantic interactions, so to speak. But the internet is hyper-stimulative in almost every direction. We saw this with emotions earlier. One of the easiest ways to grab your attention is just to offer something that stimulates you, both in the sense of your senses and in the sense of your emotions. But like any stimulus, once you become accustomed to it, you demand more and are less satisfied with less. What often begins as a wish to escape the mundane boredom in the little moments of under-stimulation during the day may later recalibrate us to demand hyper-stimulation at almost all points in the day.
As one meta-analysis puts it, "the dynamic, captivating, and visually stimulating features characteristic of screen-based media and technologies may challenge the capacity to both focus and reorient attention towards information that are more mundane and a lot less stimulating and rapidly changing." Plus, I know this is only anecdotal, but I noticed this dependence in my own life just a few years ago when I found that I was struggling to read because books, however interesting their contents might be and however edifying they were, were still just words on a page and were much less stimulating than the glowing, moving, highly edited pictures on my phone. I've even noticed a few people online say that watching an entire film now feels weirdly productive or like a focus achievement. It's probably at the extreme end of things, but I don't think that we should ignore the potential we have to get used to this higher level of stimulation and thus to make the world itself in its unadorned and undigital state seem dull and wretched by comparison.
In a very interesting paper that I actually haven't seen too many people talk about, Gregory Robson argues that we are prone to just overlooking the cumulative effects of multiple sources of stimulation in our lives because we tend to judge the stimulation of individual technologies in isolation rather than considering their effects when we put them all together. That is, we think of the effects of social media and YouTube and TikTok and television and billboard adverts and news articles, but we don't often step back and realize that when you put all these together, they're really quite overwhelming. He quotes the psychologist Michael Sinclair, who says the following: "In daily life, this reality looks something like this. Glancing at a television in the kitchen each morning to break the silence and catch the weather or highlights of last night's Red Sox game. Listening on the commute to an iPod for music or for the latest news or an uploaded book or recorded program. Checking the smartphone for text or voicemail messages. Arriving at work and turning on the computer for the internet to check on email or the current Dow Jones numbers or surf for some amusing video clip on YouTube or a wall posting on Facebook."
Robson argues that this constant stimulation divides our experience of the world into short, quite isolated chunks as different compelling things demand our attention in very quick succession. He states that this interrupts the steady flow of experience and gives our phenomenological lives a sort of choppy quality that might make clear, sustained thought a bit more difficult. As lower-stimulus states, which are more helpful on average for higher-quality thinking, become fewer and further between, we just lose our best thinking spaces. I know it becomes trivial to say, but we are physical, embodied beings. If we are deprived of the best environment for a given task, we shouldn't expect that most of us will be able to overcome that through sheer will in order to achieve great things in that task. Regardless, the more that our world becomes a haven for hyper-stimulation, the fewer spaces there will be that can facilitate and deliver great thinking. Couple this with the prospect of us getting less tolerant of low-stimulus states given our general high-stimulus environment, and we find that we're slowly crowding out both the internal and external environment that facilitates good thinking. Like many of the factors that we've talked about in this video, the internet is not the only cause of this, but it is one of them. And at least in my view, it is an important one. If the overemphasis on highly motivating emotions like anger disrupts the underlying calm that is required for clear thinking, and this short-term attitude that we discussed disrupts the durations of attention that are also required for clear thinking, then hyper-stimulation robs us of the physical and mental space for clear thinking. And all of these come together to disrupt something that I think is also absolutely essential to great thinking: high-quality conversations.
Four, conversations with enemies. Very occasionally, I like to remind myself that the natural home of philosophy, at least according to Socrates, was not how we see it today. That is, in treatises and books and papers largely written by a single person. He thought that instead, philosophy was meant to be an evolving conversation partaken in by multiple people with multiple different perspectives. We can forget that Plato's dialogues, while they give us a very good idea of what Plato himself thought, and that is largely why we study them, also include perspectives from rival philosophers, including the Sophists, as well as the perspectives of ordinary Athenian laypeople who are untrained in philosophy. And sure, at their worst, these dialogues can give us a bit of a biased picture on these thinkers, but at their best, I do think they show what a philosophical conversation could be. That is, an exchange of ideas where people can learn from those who have seen what they, stuck in their own particular perspective, could not, and a situation where everyone can do this and thus everyone comes away with a slightly richer set of beliefs than they went into the conversation with.
All of that's to say that I am a firm believer in the value of conversation to the development of our individual ways of thinking. And this is for a few different reasons. The first is that while I love the written word and think it has been obviously a fantastic thing in a myriad of ways, it does have its drawbacks. You can't ask a book questions directly. And that means it's very easy to misinterpret or even unintentionally strawman an opposing perspective without consciously meaning to, without trying to. I've spoken in the past as to how this has happened with really quite disparate figures like A.J. Ayer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the Buddha. It's just harder to do this unintentional uncharity if you have someone in front of you who believes in a given perspective because then you can, well, to put it bluntly, you can just badger them with questions, you can ask for clarifications, and they can correct you when you misunderstand them. At least in my own life, in-person conversation is one of the main ways that I have felt truly able to do justice to opposing points of view. And I don't think you have to be some kind of radical relativist to recognize that talking to a variety of viewpoints can be immensely helpful, even if you're pretty sure that you're right, because it's just that they may have spotted things that you have not, and vice versa. For example, a friend of mine recently pointed out that I had slightly misunderstood a point by Epictetus because I was working with a subtly misleading translation of his discourses, and that the original Greek would have cleared it up. Now, I don't read ancient Greek, and so it would have been almost impossible for me to spot this by myself. Trusting in the translation, I didn't even have the means to become aware of my own error. And sure, it is possible that I would have stumbled across this by myself by chance. But the fact that I have a very clever friend who reads ancient Greek meant that he was able to pick me up on it. You don't need to start talking about mysterious notions of "my truth" and "your truth" to realize that different perspectives offer different bases of knowledge, different cognitive interests, and also just different areas of interest. And that having access to those perspectives is a really good way to gain enormous treasure troves of knowledge that might otherwise go unnoticed within our own limited perspectives.
And in theory, the internet should be great for conversations just like these. You can even see glimmers of this optimism in its early days. Now, we don't even have to be physically near someone to engage them in conversation. We can reach across the pseudo-dimension of cyberspace and pick their brains with a digital finger. But as we all know, in practice, things are just not so smooth. This is just my personal observation, but it really seems like the default way of interpreting statements online, especially from people you don't know, is more hostile than how we interpret statements in person. For a start, we miss out on a whole swath of extralinguistic information that we pick up on when we're talking to someone face-to-face. But additionally, the relative anonymity and lack of embodiment online just allows us to be ruder. Put bluntly, if you said some of the things people say online in person, you'd almost certainly be slapped in the head. I speak from personal experience, being a mouthy little kid as a teenager. It feels almost alien now, but not so long ago, if the average person wanted to insult someone, they had to either say it to their face or put it in a letter. And it certainly doesn't help that, as we discussed earlier, anger fuels engagement. So, it's actually incentivized to engage in conversations in a hostile manner. But when you're actively looking to come up with something snarky and clever and clickable to say, it's just much more difficult to encourage earnest, explanatory, and exploratory conversation. Just look at the number of YouTube videos that are about "destroying people with facts and logic." It actually got so bad that I made a parody video outlining how you can do it.
And then there is the irony poisoning. I've spoken about this before, but online, we are subtly incentivized to be more ironic, since being ironic, and thus not being clear on what your genuine position is, doesn't open you up to as much ridicule in the way that sincerity does. But again, this is just discouraging us from honestly having conversations with one another and having a genuine exchange of ideas. To borrow an image from Isaiah Berlin, the internet is sort of the conversational equivalent of putting a group of wolves in with a herd of sheep and then telling them both that they are equally free to do whatever they like. None of this is to say that it is impossible to have good conversations online. But the public square we construct and maintain online is incredibly ill-suited to encouraging and facilitating these conversations. It's less like a Socratic symposium and more like a constant churning cruel theater where everyone is trying to get the biggest applause by making someone else look really dim.
And this doesn't even touch upon the way that the internet allows us to isolate ourselves from opposing viewpoints and from people that disagree with us. I don't mean this in the way that algorithms won't expose us to alternative perspectives, because funnily enough, that's actually not really borne out by the currently available evidence. Instead, I'm just talking about our propensity to create an echo chamber for ourselves. The reason for this is simple: it's often pretty unpleasant to disagree with people, especially in the acerbic manner that we do online. So, we naturally seek out those who agree with us. But this then shatters the dream that the internet will allow us to understand one another better and see the world from a rich panoply of different perspectives. Because in practice, it can just as easily turn into a circle of self-aggrandizing reinforcement where we all just sit around with people who agree with us and congratulate ourselves on how clever we are, all the while constructing straw versions of our opponents that we can set alight to warm our midnight chats. All of this has made the internet a pretty terrible place to have conversations. And sure, this wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that we are meeting up in person less, having fewer friends, and we feel less connected to one another than just a few decades ago. I don't know if this is the internet's fault. I'm sure that it's a complex mix of factors, but I do know that the only real public square that many of us have access to is a poor vehicle for in-depth conversations. And that is an absolute travesty for the quality of our thought.
And almost paradoxically, while the internet has damaged our ability to have productive conversations with one another, it has also meant that we struggle to find the benefits of thinking by ourselves. Either thinkers across history have recommended spending time in controlled solitude in order to fully develop your own thoughts on a topic. Famous examples here include Nietzsche, who reportedly came up with some of his greatest ideas while on long walks in the Alps, and Wittgenstein, who retreated up into the mountains as well for solitude and philosophy. But they're certainly not the only ones. The most extreme examples are probably found in spiritual traditions where devotees would often spend weeks or even months mostly in silent solitude in order to gain a deeper understanding of their particular faith. The counterpoint to the value of good, exploratory conversation is the ability to detach from this ever-writhing flow of the external world and to organize our own thoughts without having to consider what other people might make of it or what they might say.
And the cruel irony of the internet is that it deprives us both of good conversation and of this solitary focus. Recently on the channel, we looked at Laurie Pressman's book, *The Right to Oblivion*, in which he discusses the gradual erosion of the private sphere by various different forces. And there he says that in order to feel like we are truly in private, it's not enough to just have no one watching us; we must also stop considering what someone else would think if they were watching us. And this is a subtly different thing. A friend of mine says she doesn't even sing in her own house when no one else is there because she keeps considering how they would react if they heard her. And yes, in a merely physical sense, she is in private, but her mind, her mind hasn't embraced this privacy. It is still concerned with what others think, and this deprives her of that feeling of repose.
In one section, which I've quoted before, Pressman discusses the effects of the internet on his own thinking and his inability to totally detach from external concerns and lose himself in thought. "It certainly is my experience that the constant connection to the digital public sphere in which I can publish and participate at any hour of the day has changed my habits of thought. I'm less immersed in the book I am reading. I wonder without meaning or wanting to whether this paragraph or that one will make an engaging post on social media." This means that even though we're struggling to have these conversations with one another, we are also strangely unable to forget other people in order to explore what our own original and peculiar contributions to a given idea might be. This may seem like it's a contradiction, but it really isn't. I just think that at its worst, the internet gives us a sense that we are both never alone but also never in good, friendly, relaxed company either. Of course, this is the extreme end of things, but we don't have to be in such an extreme state to recognize the damage that the internet may be doing to the participation of both solitude and company in the development of our thought. Great thinkers throughout history have recognized both the importance of healthy intellectual company and of this deep, reposeful solitude to high-quality thinking. And yes, ordinarily, these aims are in tension and must be balanced. But my worry is that in an internet context, we're getting neither of them. It is the worst of all possible worlds.
And finally, it's worth reflecting on the way that all these factors interact and tie together.
Five, a naughty issue. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan used to use the image of the Borromean knot to illustrate his later model of the psyche. The idea was that the three domains of his psychoanalytic model, the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, hung together in such a way that none could be removed from another and studied separately without also discussing the involvement of the other two. They are interdependent and interactive. We won't be going into Lacan here in any detail, but I just really like this image as an illustration of the interdependency of different concepts. And I think it is very apt for discussing the factors affecting our thinking that we've looked at today.
Because, as we've touched upon at a few different points, the encouragement of anger, the shortening of our attention spans, the hyper-stimulation, and the damage done to our conversations are not separate things occurring in isolated pocket universes from one another. They each affect and feed into each other. And in one way, this makes the issue more difficult to tackle, as everything becomes magnified by everything else. But in another, it means that just tackling one will have some ripple effects on the others. Being angry makes it harder to focus. Being hyper-stimulated makes it harder to pay attention to less stimulating things. Anger is itself deeply stimulating, so it's an essential weapon in hyper-stimulation's arsenal. Having anger bubbling away in the background of social media makes it much harder to have good conversations, as we begin to interpret more and more things as hostile. And having endless online arguments is just another form of overstimulation, and it takes our attention away from more edifying things. So each of these factors enhances and facilitates the others.
Obviously, this makes the problem far more worrying than it would be if these were entirely isolated. But I do think that at least from an individual perspective, it means that if we make progress in one domain, we will become less susceptible to the others as well. Each time we choose to make the internet a less angry, less short-form, less hyper-stimulating, and less fighty place, we are chipping away at this Eldritch cognition-killing edifice. So there is room for hope, but I also personally remain somewhat pessimistic.
This is because of something else that David Courtright says in his book. In his view, the problems with addictive substances or gambling or the internet aren't necessarily to do with these things in isolation at all. It's to do with human psychology. All of these, in their own way, hijack a human tendency that in other situations might be profoundly helpful. And the same applies to each of the factors that we have looked at today. The reason the internet is so angry is because we seek out things that are likely to make us angry and allow them to grab us for entirely sensible evolutionary reasons. The reason the internet is hyper-stimulative and short-form is because those appeal to our particular psychological and neurobiological setup. They are easy to pay attention to. The internet often takes some really quite helpful things about humanity, or at least neutral things about humanity, and uses them to its advantage in a twisted and harmful way. The root of our problem is partly in the internet and in what Courtright calls the limbic capitalist mode of doing business, but it's also in us. And I don't know what to do about that.
The internet at its best is potentially the greatest tool for cognitive enhancement we have ever made. We have information at our fingertips that our ancestors could just never have dreamed of. But it may also be the greatest thing standing in the way of that enhancement as well. And it's become so intertwined with our economic systems that, to riff on Neil Postman, it might be that we are now serving it far more than it is serving us. So we can talk about piecemeal solutions and how each of us can adjust our lives to escape some of the more damaging parts of the internet and try to reap the benefits of its more edifying parts. There are plenty of videos out there on that. For my part, I just wanted to encourage us to take a step back and recognize the magnitude of what we are up against. It's not a small task, and we shouldn't beat ourselves up for succumbing to the temptations of the web. Some of the smartest people in the world are working incredibly hard to ensure that your thinking is disrupted by their algorithmic deities. So, we shouldn't be all that surprised when they win out against us, at least some of the time.
At the same time, difficult is not impossible. And I hope that by acknowledging the scale and difficulty of the problem, that this can shore up our resolve. Hell, maybe it has even got you a little bit angry. And, uh, not to contradict what I said earlier, but I think that anger might be pretty well-placed in this situation. So hold on to that feeling of recognition, that realization of what's at stake, and use it the next time that you feel your own thinking disrupted by this strange mixture of angel and demon that we've created. I can't promise it will help, but it might give you that tiny bit of an edge.
But if you want to look in more detail at just how important focus is to living a fulfilled life, then you can check out my longer video on that very thing right here. Thank you so much for watching and have a wonderful day.