This post was a draft that was later completed for an IndieWebClub Bangalore meet
Never in history has so much information been so easily available, and yet I find myself with the feeling that I know more than I can actually think with. So, despite spending hours every day surrounded by information, I feel less capable of thinking than I used to. This begins to make sense once we look at the environments in which contemporary information appears, because we will start to notice that the platforms that mediate discourse are structured around reaction.
Nothing online is designed to be understood because it’s designed to be reacted to. So, if everything arrives already interpreted, then there is nothing asking me to slow down and decide what I’m actually thinking; these constraints, as simple as they are, explain almost everything about contemporary discourse.
A specific characteristic that arises from these constraints is “stupidity”. Though the term requires clarification: by stupidity, I don’t mean a lack of intelligence or thought, it’s a system of incentives, affects, and repetitions that actively resists cognition, it’s the condition in which thinking is continually displaced by the demand to respond, that allows the system to scale.
I wouldn’t call it something that was done completely intentionally by these companies, but I would argue that it is simply a byproduct that they decided to take advantage of. It’s in between the incidental and accidental side effects of rapid digitization and the growing media ecosystem. My fear, though, is that the system is being architected for this and that we will reach a point where my problems are going to stop being a failure of discourse and will simply be the algorithmic optimization for maximum reach and minimum thought.
It is inevitable that stupidity is going to be structural, procedural, and encoded into the DNA of platforms as a strategy.
The Town is Flooding
So let’s begin with this premise: the platforms we use are systems designed to habituate this particular mode of thinking. They are reactive, if I open Instagram and go to Reels I am provided with ten ways to react to the given reel: “like,” “comment,” “share,” “repost,” “save,” “send,” “follow” the creator, go to the creator’s account, and, if I click the three dots, I can “remix,” “sequence,” (though not relevant, horrendously enough “autoscroll”)
I’m going to introduce the concept of an “infocracy” by Byung Chul Han here: In a traditional dictatorship, information is suppressed to control people; whereas in a digital infocracy, people are drowned in information. This results in transparency fatigue (exhaustion produced by infinite access). There are a lot of reasons to justify the fact that we are currently going through what would be a mix of the traditional dictatorship and a digital infocracy, because we are living at a point in time where a handful of people control almost all of the media1 and that said media’s distribution. So we are actively watching the suppression of it while also seeing the cognitive overload that the massive amounts of information online are causing.
It would all be too easy if it were just a suppression of information, because at least then we would be able to recognize it as such. But in an infocracy, we don’t notice control because it appears as abundance.
A river running low calls for suspicion, we would look for drought, or mismanagement. But a river in flood can be misunderstood and read as bounty, something to be welcomed, even as it begins to overflow its banks.
Now, if we were to make the two things distinct: the overload of information and the promotion of reactivity, then you might get the idea that they are functionally opposite and work at the detriment of the other. Because how else would you react if a flood is coming other than just to run. In this analogy, they don’t want you to run and reach the higher ground; they want you to watch as the water climbs higher and higher as it floods the bank and the city. People are drowning, but why would you care, because your danger is right there, with you, the water has reached your waist, and you can’t move; you’re in between noticing your own suffering while watching the others drown, and you are not aware enough to try to escape or try to help.
They reside at higher ground; you are not wanted there, and it is not your fault in the slightest.
So, considering this misreading, during an information overload, the content that requires interpretation is at a disadvantage. The only content that survives is the content that resists interpretation, because there is something narcotically satisfying about clean, thoughtless information, and how it slips past the faculties of judgment and straight into the bloodstream. That satisfaction is unfortunately directly proportional to virality, because what is virality but the weaponization of stupidity for maximum circulation.
The Whirlpools are Forming
Now that circulation came into the picture, inevitably speed became the dominant value, and a side effect of that is that it brought along hostility to slowness and nuance. Understanding is supposed to be a slow dialogical process, but on the internet, slowness is failure, and dialogue is inefficient. This is a terrible path that we are on; Because a tweet cannot sustain contradiction, a TikTok cannot hold an argument, and a headline cannot express nuance. The very formats through which we now engage with the world are structurally hostile to ambiguity of any kind.
Note: Ambiguity is the condition of thinking that allows understanding to be possible. Ambiguity forces the brain to move beyond passive reception of information. Because an ambiguous statement can be understood in multiple ways, the listener or reader must actively engage, using context and personal experience to fill in the gaps and determine meaning.
The content that circulates most effectively is what can stimulate understanding, where it can gesture towards nuance without requiring it. Over time, this produces a feedback loop where, through surface-level analysis, signals of depth co-opt actual depth itself. This leads to the algorithm and these systems being self-correcting, where it orients itself towards what feels nuanced rather than what is.
So the idea that there’s a democratic exchange of ideas where the best idea wins doesn’t hold anymore. The best idea isn’t winning, but rather the one that garners the most attention. And don’t mistake this attention for engagement in the classical deliberative sense; it is behavioral. Engagement implies some relation to meaning, whether it’s agreement, critique, or disagreement, whereas attention is indifferent to such distinctions. Both approval and outrage register identically at the same level of circulation, each contributing to its visibility. As a result, attention is pursued as an end in itself (where engagement would be pursued as a byproduct of understanding), and we —myself included—often pursue content because it’s popular rather than for the sake of insight or enrichment, because this attention suggests value.
Increasingly, a lot of what circulated online functions as a signal meant to be recognized. Ideas and phrases gain traction because they are immediately understandable by those already familiar with them. This makes meaning accumulate through repetition and not actual understanding, and over time, the origin of the idea becomes irrelevant. The meaning points sideways to other signs instead of outside to a shared reality. The trend builds on imitation of imitation, and eventually, these signs become unintelligible outside the contexts of their circulation. What matters is simply whether the signal is recognizable enough to participate in its circulation.
There is no outside because even critique gets self-absorbed, like the meme that mocks the platform goes viral on the same platform, and the post that laments the algorithm is amplified by that same algorithm. Resistance feeds it… and the platform only cares that you participate. Your outrage or protest is captured and circulated within the same machinery; dissent does not threaten the system if it remains inside its architecture because, so long as it remains within it becomes content belonging to the very structure it seeks to oppose.
Speed follows circulation as its condition. That’s the death of duration, and many choices seem to point to this “death”: Instagram copying the “story” idea from Snapchat, or YouTube rolling out short-form videos quickly after TikTok’s success with them, or marketing the idea that asking AI for an answer is infinitely faster than searching things up using a web browser.
This is exactly why we feel more informed but less intelligent. Yes, we are exposed to more information, but just because we’ve seen it doesn’t mean we’ve understood it.2
The Role of AI
because people totally aren’t talking about AI enough
When I open a search engine, whether it’s for the most trivial of searches or some extremely complex ideas, I still need to piece fragments in my mind together, and I still have to synthesize my ideas in a coherent way that will fetch me the responses I want. With AI that synthesizes, thinking isn’t required because AI allows for a lot of vagueness when prompting. And I am not trying to indict tools, because humans have always externalized cognition: writing replaced memory, calculators replaced arithmetic, and search engines replaced recall. But, there is a difference, those tools still required questions to be formed clearly enough to search/ write/ calculate. They required a conceptual structure inside the mind before they became useful.
AI is different because it thrives on the under-formed thought, and it indulges our vague intentions. It bypasses our critical thinking skills by putting on a show of thinking where a dot flickers, and it responds in blocks; it appears like the model is actively thinking and writing. That’s why we find it so easy to trust its responses, as it mimics our behaviour and generates plausible answers that are authoritative enough that they can bypass doubt. So they are selling the elimination of cognitive requirements by force-feeding slop down our throats.
Why should I maintain a deep internal archive in my mind when an external one responds instantly? Why should I labor through any difficulty when a model can simulate mastery almost infinitely more easily? Stupidity is the rational response to these environments that penalize slowness and, beyond surface-level thinking, an environment where we are being disincentivized from exercising thought.
I return to that feeling I described at the beginning, where I feel less capable of thinking.
Maybe it’s not a personal decline that I feel less capable of thinking; maybe it’s the logic of this environment where thinking is no longer required; or maybe it’s just how we will progress that it’s the natural path that we will take.