Everything All At Once
On information overwhelm and the difficulty knowing what is true, real, and good online. Part 2 of thinking about the most challenging aspects of being human right now.
In our subscriber chat, many of you shared some significant challenges of being human right now: feelings of isolation; information overload; difficulties in building community; and misanthropic feelings. I've already responded to some of you individually, but wanted to write a more general response to share more widely. After breaking down this problem into its different aspects, this post aspires to provide a philosophical framework for thinking about the second item above, the information overload and disorientation that so many of us are feeling. I hope it serves to better understand this predicament and perhaps give readers a little bit more sense of control.
1. Breaking It Down
“Saturation. Of everything. We have more and more access to anything and everything with little in the way of ordering our lives ...”
Our overwhelm is a complex problem with several interrelated aspects. Yes, we are consuming an overwhelming amount of information and content online, and much of it negative.1 But also, the social media platforms where so much of this consumption takes place are designed to appeal to our primitive lizard-brain instincts, bypass rational judgment, and put us into an anxious and passive state of consumption.
These platforms actively blur the lines between social and commercial interests. They know that when we encounter information, propaganda, and advertisements in supposedly social spaces, we are less guarded and therefore more vulnerable to influence. When we are trying to relax and unwind in these online spaces, we are less likely to exercise the critical thinking, media literacy, and AI detection skills that are crucial to keep us safe and sane online.2 Propaganda and conspiracy theories have come to serve as entertainment, taking us down some rabbit holes that feel like Alternative Reality Games (ARG), and in some cases, radicalizing us in ways that are squarely opposed to our self-interest.3
“My argument here is not that we are all the way into Wonderland, or even close to it yet. But that qualification should be as worrying as it is reassuring.” —Jon Askonas, "Reality Is Just a Game Now"
There is no built-in way to validate information or check facts without leaving these apps, and in what seems to establish a new pattern for online platforms, Mark Zuckerberg recently announced Meta will eliminate fact-checkers and stop vetting political content on Meta properties like Facebook and Instagram, in the name of freedom of speech:
This announcement came on the heels of an earlier announcement that Facebook is introducing AI generated user profiles to interact with existing human users. Like his earlier misstep into the metaverse, after which he renamed his company, this is likely going to fail hard. I imagine they know this and don’t care — they have to know the public is rejecting AI — their ambitions already lay elsewhere. The proof will be in the pudding, so we will see what happens in the next few months to, and on, these platforms. If the demise of Twitter is any indication, this first generation of social media platforms may be in its last throes. Of course, they still have a shit ton of users that they can poison and manipulate to their own technocratic ends, enough to make their death very painful for all of us. I have a lot more to say about this, for a future post…
Returning to our current line of reasoning, this all leads to general confusion over what is real and true that we might call epistemic disorientation, cognitive dissonance arising from entertaining conflicting ideas, and what philosopher Sandra Bartky calls double ontological shock — you’ll recall this is “first, the realization that what is really happening is quite different from what appears to be happening, and, second, the frequent inability to tell what is really happening at all.” It seems advisable to take a skeptical view of anything and everything we take in, but that skepticism erodes the trust that lubricates a lot of our social encounters, not to mention that it is exhausting. The skeptical attitude can not be maintained in the long run.
We have also found all the scrolling takes a toll on our ability to focus, and we now have difficulty holding our attention on something of any complexity for an extended period of time. (Meditation and reading is the perfect antidote to this, thankfully…) As a result, we are just all over the place. We adopt cafeteria-styled belief systems that mix and match disparate and often contradictory beliefs and ideologies (e.g., “MAGA Communism”). Making sense becomes increasingly difficult. Principles are adopted on instrumental and utilitarian grounds, and discarded as soon as they become inconvenient. The stability of reality, and especially of a shared reality, is at stake.
This is all stuff we already know. The usual recommendation to counter this situation involves using a Nietzschean will-to-power to control our media consumption, putting it on the individual to plug the info dam with a finger — an impossible task, obviously doomed to fail. As much as we may want to be the deciders in our own lives, we are subject to powers bigger than us, and we are shaped by these forces in ways that are beyond our control. So, it is not a matter of will power or even intelligence, when these applications are engineered to reduce us to passive consumers and data farm animals.
I will mention just a couple things that seem to work against the tide: have a place or space designated as tech free (for me it’s my art table and the couch next to it) and then go there regularly to escape. Engineering a tech-free space is easier than trying to control it with your will power. Second, make the transition from consumer to creator; this will give you a little more control since your consumption will be organized more around your creations, but it comes with a whole new set of difficulties, so I don’t necessarily recommend. I would also say that trying to be everywhere is a fools errand. If you must, choose one or two platforms at most, and learn to become an unruly user. I hope to say more about this in the future…
I want to frame the problem philosophically, because maybe this will give us some leverage. The study of the structure of reality is ontology/metaphysics, and our experience of it can be accessed through phenomenological description. So, what follows is a phenomenological study of social media, and I’m going to focus on TikTok because in my opinion, it is the most successful social media platform in creating a lifeworld. This is Edmund Husserl’s term for the context that grounds human knowledge and activity. It is the rich, subjective tapestry of experiences and interactions that give coherence and sense to our existence, and in this case for how we exist online.
