We Need Guardrails on Internet Usage
We can control hurricanes but not idiocy?
If you take the we live in a society aspect out of the thing, and then further strip a bunch of really crucial context from it, it is easy to see how you could be optimistic about humanity finally confronting the horrific implications of climate change. Flordia is getting battered by hurricanes as a matter of bi-monthly occurrence, and it warrants the morbid question of how much longer it will be economically feasible to keep rebuilding a state that’s constantly at-risk of an environmental catastrophe. Every year is another record high for global temperatures, and once-in-a-generation natural disasters are now annual. Denial can only warp your sense of reality for so long. In the abstract, this situation is dire enough that most reasonable people can accept this on its bleak, horrific, and urgent terms and rally around the idea of a common good and do what’s best for the planet. In another much more drastic, literal, and less abstracted sense, humanity remains a highly defective species.
The internet has all the hallmarks of observing circa-now discourse. There are glimmers of empathy and moral clarity, and there are longer and very different moments in which grown-ass adults behave disconcertingly like infantilized schizos. Both are real enough, but the proportions are currently way off. It’s possible to imagine the ratio between the two shifting somewhat towards sanity as time goes on; again, this is the sort of thing that an optimist could reasonably believe. But it is a lot easier to believe it if you don’t peruse the comment sections.
Some of the posts and comments on Instagram this past week have put me in a state of obvious discomfort about where we are headed as a society. There was a type of take in particular that made me grimace and crawl around making the most anguished possible version of The Jim Face. People believe the government is engineering the weather and sending hurricanes to red states for reasons that appear deeply delusional. The logic behind such a claim is a bit difficult to parse if you’ve ever been to a DMV office. If there isn’t a deeper malaise here, there is a sense of disconnection and desperation. It makes you wonder how these people are convinced that the government is too incompetent to run a national healthcare system, but is also full of evil masterminds that can generate hurricanes and manipulate their trajectories.
I’m not sure whether I am grimacing at the bottomless credulity of the average internet user, or at the realization that we truly live in a society in both the literal and figurative sense. The confluence of all of this—and the extent to which more sane people appear to be suffering in a purgatory that exists both within but somehow distinct from the broader societal one in which we are also trapped—seems to necessitate a new kind of social contract for the digital space: When you are online, you can be loud or dumb, but you can’t be both. The aggressively stupid come in many forms—the anti-woke, the anti-vaxxers, the irredeemably contrarian-brained, Marvel stans, Swifties, foodies, influencers—but they share a commonality in their sheer obnoxious, unrepentant idiocy.
It doesn’t help matters that I have a supercomputer in my pocket that feeds me an endless unsolicited stream of screeching troglodytes. This is also compounded by my Screen Time app which makes me acutely aware that I have spent 10% more time with these screeching troglodytes this past week than I had the previous week. None of this makes me feel good. Why am I doing this? If I was at a bar and a guy pulled up a stool next to me and talked to me about how machines are controlling Hurricane Milton for whatever dog-brained rationale he half-remembers from the deepest bowels of Reddit, I would not want to spend an average of four hours and 15 minutes a day with this person. Instead, I would drop the line—“Wisdom has been chasing you, but you have always been faster.”—and sprint in the opposite direction.
We appear to be using the internet for parallel but slightly different reasons; everyone ostensibly is pursuing information but not any sense of lucidity, which only further demonstrates the gap between knowing what to think and how to think. I recently came across a prescient quote that mentioned how millennials learned about the importance of verifying sources on the internet and not clicking on spam emails, and boomers using the internet is like giving the keys to a monster truck to someone who just shotgunned 12 beers. The internet is a giant Letters to the Editor section, with no editor to filter out all the letters, and it’s on the front page.
We have access to infinite information and it’s objectively making us dumber and angrier. It’s like we’re in a 100-story library and instead of picking up a book, we’re trying to fistfight the librarian. Many of these people stew in this delirious laser-focus aesthetic that recalls Aristotle or appeals to logic and reason, that they are heterodox free-thinkers who are Just Asking Questions and bucking the mainstream narrative. It is a bit ironic that all these free-thinkers happen to think the same deranged thoughts, but I do have to hand it to them: For all their credulity, they also possess curiosity. This isn’t exactly a compliment, as curiosity and incuriosity can not only coexist but also actively fuel one another. A voracious appetite for facts and knowledge will keep you too preoccupied to invite complications that would disrupt what you already know.
In the late ‘90s, when the internet was referred to as “the information superhighway,” Joop Jeans ran bus shelter ads that said, “Humanity is roadkill on the information superhighway.” This seems downright prescient, but there is a method that could clean this up. We need a new captcha test, not just to see if you’re a robot, but to verify whether you will be super fucking annoying in online spaces. It’s one question: Who won the U.S. presidential election in 2020? And anyone who says something like, “Well, some of those ballots were a little fishy…” then no internet for you for the day. Take a lap, go outside, or try to get your adult children to call you back.
“Wisdom has been chasing you, but you have always been faster.”—and sprint in the opposite direction.
😂😂💪🏻
We don't let people drive without licenses, so possibly....?