Editor's Note, Sept 2025: So much literally incredible bullshit has happened since this post that none of it is worth commenting on anymore.
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I'm sure we're probably not. But we ("we") have reached yet another breaking point in this finite yet far too long series of breaking points. What do we call a series of points again, a line? If a line is one-dimensional and has no depth, sounds about right. I guess a curve is also a line, but this is kind of my point: what is wrong with us? Why can we barely express a complete thought. "We".
I don't even just mean "we" anymore, I think I mean the actual we, as in all of us. Certainly one problem can be called something like patiencelessness when it comes to finding solutions for things, very much like the patience I just ran out of while considering how to start talking about this. To myself.
Let's start over with a couple of basic modern challenges that, when combined, can very easily create the illusion of an impenetrable, oceanic wall of doom, at least for this writer. Off of what passes for the top of my head these days:
1) Dopamine, the "firehose of pleasure" that being online offers us, the constant buzz of harmless, idle consumption...addictive enough to impair us from being creative our own selves in any meaningful offline way, more on that in a bit.
1b) The satisfaction of knowing anything immediately. This is a subcategory of dopamine addiction that makes us unprecedentedly susceptible to new problems like reasonably realistic misinformation, see below.
2) The lowered bar to content creation means that "anyone" can create "compelling" content, instead of having to learn a skill that doesn't involve a phone and an app and some kind of AI...just download a free app that does everything for you. One result of which is that our content keeps getting more homogenous, because everyone is using the same or very similar tools; and said content is generally less complex and "more stupider," because that's the whole concept of these tools...requiring as little skill or intelligence as possible, the less the better.
2b) I think that unless your profession or serious creative outlet involves expressing complex thoughts to an audience of listeners or readers on an extremely regular basis, your ability to express yourself is probably undergoing some kind of atrophy, because all you do is consume other people's gradually stupider content.
3) The fact that getting offline is still a minority position at this point, and probably seems like a comparably "lonely" undertaking, although there's considerable evidence that our being online all the time is not making us less lonely at all. Point being, "how can anyone survive offline!?!?!??!"
4) The disillusionment of discovering that people are generally not as good or as smart as we once somehow thought they were, a position we originally arrived at through a simple lack of evidence to the contrary, combined wish wishful thinking/optimism. Now there is plennnnnty of evidence and no legitimate reason for optimism.
4b) The fucking plague of Comments sections and the resulting decline of polite conversation and general interpersonal etiquette. This is partially my fault. I helped put the internet in everyone's home, which hurts me almost every day. But before 1995, when your average Archie Bunker type used to watch the news and get angry about, well, anything at all, they used to just complain to their spouse if they were fortunate to have found someone insecure or stupid enough to tolerate their stunted worldview, or maybe they would complain about it to a like-minded colleague or two at the steel mill or the slaughterhouse or whatever, or hey probably even the advertising agency if we're talking about pre-Reaganite yuppies. But their circle of toxicity was limited by their lack of transmission technology and the fact that in person someone can knock your teeth down your throat if you say something offensive enough. Then computers happened, but you still needed to have some kind of intellectual horsepower to be able to post content, and access to consuming that content was still very limited. Turns out this was a better, saner model.
5) The plague of misinformation. This is probably going to be the end of us, because: we're addicted to being online; it's making us stupider; the stupider we are, the more susceptible we are to misinformation. And the more evil among us are going to use this to get ahead of the less evil among us, because it's easy. Combine this with our increasingly insatiable need to have the answer to any possible question at our fingertips and well buddy you've got yrself a veritable powderkeg of something. Sorry, still shaking off the atrophy.
My dark dark habit of reading the conservative "news" site National Review revealed this strikingly un-selfaware tidbit today entitled "The Television Age Is Over":
Television maintains certain presuppositions about authority, expertise, and credibility. Anthony Fauci’s Covid pronouncements, “51 former intelligence officials” declaring Hunter Biden’s laptop a Russian dupe, and “fact-checking” debate moderators are all natural products of a televisual culture. They assume certain things about the way information is produced, verified, delivered, and defended.
If televisual forces (network executives and anchors, newspaper editorial boards, etc.) seem more and more defensive, it is because they are now in the position of conducting rearguard actions against the digital culture that has overtaken them — and that operates on altogether different premises. Joe Rogan and Walter Cronkite occupy entirely different roles in their respective information economies. If the basic question of television news is: Who said it? Do I trust them?, the basic question of digital news is: How does it map onto my prior beliefs? How does it make me feel? Indeed, what constitutes “news” in each economy will be different. The salacious rumor is digital. Proclaiming it bunk is televisual.
They say this without any acknowledgement that this is a serious problem, it's "just the way it is now", breaking their arm patting themselves on the back for realizing "we're in a digital age now". OH ARE WE?
ETA: This seems relevant.
