Living in the internet

It’s 7.45 AM on a Tuesday and the noise goes off again. You may have been lying on your side with a slightly defensive expression on your face. The kind of defensive expression one makes while preserving a hard fought victory. But the noise had to be suppressed and you had to disturb the peace to turn it off. The noise brought the daily tidings: newsletters, instagram stories, group chats popping. You’ve been summoned and you must answer the call. A few moments ago, you were riding a unicorn in a subconscious stupor. You had nearly figured out the approximate setting of your grand adventure, but now you’re awake and you can already feel the imagery slipping away. The inbounds had won again. It’ll be a long day and the chiming sounds just won’t go away. At least you’ll be informed, right?

On a morning like that, as I took my first sip of tea and prepared to begin a day’s work, my phone screen lit up with an email. This was one affront too many and I aggressively unsubscribed from the newsletter. The newsletter itself was exactly as promised: a daily roundup of key industry news. It was pretty good too. My quibble was mostly with the “daily” part of it. Of course, the correct response would have simply been to archive it or save for later as I had done with countless others. But the problem with seeking daily relevance is that the prior days don’t matter. If I don’t read this today, I’m never going to. I found myself wondering if I needed another inbound that goes stale in less than a day and I didn’t. I was experiencing a symptom of some kind of fatigue. Fatigue that I willfully caused, to be sure, by seeking out interesting sources. But I suspect I’m not the only one. For us infovores, there’s never been a better time to be alive. We understand no one thing is worth paying attention to all the time. The trouble is that there’s always something worth our time and the internet increasingly works to bring those things to our attention.

Was this fatigue caused by excess information? Not really, most of us aren’t reading Nature science research papers, we’re watching short form videos and reading text snippets. These atomic media features content that cannot be coherently sliced further. They capture the most essentialized version of an emotion, experience, or thought. What we’ve come to refer to as vibes. Vibes are so compressed that they can only be made sense of by viewers who understand the wider culture. Unlike a standalone work like a movie or an essay, a vibe cannot be understood on its own terms. The home of vibes these days is TikTok, where the average user supposedly spends 95 minutes a day. As long as a feature film, an average user session can pack nearly 95 immediately enjoyable but distinct bites of video. Frame-for-frame, these bites are forced to capture your attention because a moment’s pause will make you swipe to the next one and its virality will be thwarted. A video about obscure credit card rewards is followed by one about the perils of adulting and then one about the best eats in Vegas. And as you do that, the group chat goes off and two emails flood in.

In large part, experience is about memory and memorability. Our very act of remembering the past lends it a narrative structure. Those of us who use reflection as a pastime often find ourselves stitching together the story of our lives. But we need to be able to look back to chunks of time which were spent in sharply distinct ways to form our story. It is this ability to point to memories that gives us our sense of the passage of time. But networked media is causing a fragmentation of experience and this fragmentation impedes our ability to clearly remember the past. Scrolling endless feeds while being interrupted by other inbounds and then noticing the time fly is surreal. There’s a frenzied stream of consciousness style to how we process these sessions when we’re going through them followed by a haziness about how we remember it. Like being in a dream state with your eyes open. Time passed, sights, sounds, and words were encountered; but what was I even doing? Atomic media is always fun and often informative but it’s rarely memorable. In his landmark 1964 essay, Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message. A very online world increasingly appears the same as our own minds in the middle of internet detours: fragmented, disoriented and basically overwhelmed. Maybe the world feels weirder lately not due to climate change or politics but because we encounter it through media forms that are too atomic for us to narrativize.

This may be fine. Some even say this is just the natural evolution of content. The mass proliferation of every new technology was followed by a moral panic about what it was doing to society. So it’s important to recognize the exciting possibilities unlocked by our new media. The most notable to me is how the internet has enabled permissionless discovery. For people like me, who devoured encyclopedias as children, the internet has been a wonderful curiosity fulfillment service.

We doubled down and became more infovorous. When we wanted to see what else was out there, we would lurk on forums and see what people were saying. Reddit is a callback to this earlier, more simple internet where discovery was initiated by the user. The brave new internet is one of giant, rapid cycles. But that creates a new kind of spontaneous order. People share things they didn’t use to share, we all notice and add to it, and over time we create a wider mood. Creators coalesce around a trend and form cottage industries: BookTok, ChatGPT Twitter, even CottageCore.

These memetic renditions capture our interest and become hubs for subcultures. Our new media excels at this kind of fast amplification, remixing and coordination. In places like Twitter, people share ideas and build off of each other’s creating compounding effects of insight and understanding. Like a global, distributed hivemind. As the legendary Venkatesh Rao has said, we are all nodes in the global social computer. You can either participate in the neurotic frenzy, or you can wait a month and read some downstream version of it in a roundup magazine. The liveness is exciting and new.

But spend enough time on it and your brain will turn to mush. The sheer amount of stuff coming at you and the constant context switching is going to exhaust you. Rushabh’s explanation of underlying business incentives explains most of our high inbound rates. It’s the news as conventionally understood. But it’s also a lot of other information that has a short half life, like snippets from your friends’ lives that disappear in a day. Human attention is a precious resource. After all, it’s the same humans who scroll Instagram who also go to brunch, buy shoes, and pay for Netflix (or HBO). None of this is nefarious, it’s just business strategy turning us all into content creators for each other at various scales. But the economic incentives are suddenly aligned to make us seek growth and a wider audience for our content. In some ways, this market has also created an unprecedented global memetic competition to attract frequent attention. Whether your desired attribute is attractiveness, relevancy, relatability, or insightfulness; each of those are being optimized for by creators who specialize in that attribute. And even the purely casual creators among us are unwittingly playing a role in driving this. Across digital settings, even in the intimate group chat, we have become more sensationalist versions of ourselves fighting to captivate even our real friends.

Quality of thought and depth of reflection are also limited by the virality-seeking short form. Thoughts cease to become inlets to inquiry when they can instead be shareable bites for social media attention. Many a great trail of thought has been squandered by a rush for quick validation. Engaging with a complex, fully formed work like a great film or an album becomes an increasingly precious and unique experience in a world used to bursty, ephemeral content. But that’s also why it becomes increasingly necessary. Engaging with a great novel like War and Peace has been described as a moving, transformative experience by friends. Those works have the ability to fully immerse us in a different time or world, making us more imaginative and giving us more perspective. Their expansiveness forces us to take our time and really chew on our thoughts and feelings. And it breaks the fatigue many of us have from being constantly exposed to current events. Our world is a lot more complex and nuanced than our media often lets us appreciate. Of course, I wouldn’t know because I was busy keeping up with internet drama on Twitter.

The demands of a default-on world push us into a space where computers and creators are constantly blasting us with stuff. More stuff than any of us can actually navigate. Over the years, a lot of people have felt, and indeed written about similar feelings of being overwhelmed by the internet. But a full digital retreat is not the way. We need to find a principled and deliberate attitude towards internet streams that is neither abstinence nor indulgence. I think that attitude exists for each of us and will represent a different information diet best suited to our wants and needs, with each of us deciding our own diet. This diet will need to contain lower and higher frequency media, short form and long form, various modalities including text, video, and audio all coexisting to serve different purposes.

Not taking intentional approaches to how we consume information throws us into a constantly reactive posture. And it is constantly having to react that’s bringing about fatigue. Instead, we need to adopt a more proactive posture towards our internet lives, curating sources and pruning aggressively. We need to resist the attention economy pulling us into growth schemes and trade it for queues that we manage. This will bring discovery and serendipity back into our online lives like the old days and we will find new influences from the open internet. Large language models, such as ChatGPT, will also play a role in managing our inflows. With the arrival of intelligent and personalized bots, worries about cognitive overload may just be a decade-long blip in the long arc of history. Occasionally, we will need retreats from it all to go read a classic novel or to see a play. For ideas and inspiration but also because the medium is indeed the message and non-networked media is essential for us to retain our vitality. More than anything, we need to actually touch grass and experience the world around us, seeking direct and unmediated experiences. There is a rich world awaiting us on the other side. Hopefully this blog, with its infrequent attention demands, will make it to your shortlist.