We Were Never Meant To Consume This Much Information
October 24, 2026
We are humans. Mammals. We were never meant to be taking in this much information all at once. The internet is amazing, but it facilitates a particular kind of usage that I think is dysfunctional to the human spirit.
Not all internet usage, mind you. Just the kind of thing that tends to happen in, for instance, most of the various short-form video apps -- Instagram, TikTok, probably YouTube Shorts too. I only really use Instagram, and I wish there was an option to turn off all of these "reels" from creators I don't follow -- except maybe if I hop over to the Explore tab. But it shouldn't be forced upon me in my home feed when I'm just trying to catch up with what my friends are up to.
So what am I talking about? Well, you go on these apps or websites. You're inundated with some kind of drama. Somebody you've never heard of cheated on their girlfriend. Somebody else you've never heard of said something transphobic, and for some reason, a trans-supportive creator has decided to stitch it, putting "response incoming" on the video before they pop their face in and give their two cents on the thing. Why are trans-supportive content creators signal boosting the hatred of transphobes onto their trans and trans-ally audiences?[1] I don't know. Might just be a product of the information environment that Big Tech has deliberately manufactured, where what gets clicks and attention is what wins. So folks who don't do that crap don't get popular enough to be seen, and pretty soon you witness everybody starting to adapt to this winning behavior.
You see the same thing everywhere. Political progressives reacting to whatever reactionary bullshit they saw somebody talking about online in the very extreme far right. These aren't the kind of takes that might reasonably be "up for debate" among their following. We're not seeing progressives usually reacting to debates about UBI, or whether "shopping with your wallet" is an effective tactic for change. We're seeing them react to calls for Eugenics, or gay conversion therapy, or forced de-transitioning of all trans people in the country or something.
My view is this. We're mammals that were meant to be living outside and talking to people, and engaging in consistent, slow-changing, small communities. Mostly, we would be interacting within our own tribe, and sometimes we'd speak with neighboring tribes, as well. It's already strange enough as it is to exist in a country like the United States where policy questions need to find compromise across people groups who live on opposite ocean coasts. It's simply untenable to then expand further by forcing us to regularly interact with all these things that make us angry, spoken by people we will never see from again. The fact that we get some amount of catharsis out of the reaction/rebuttal does very little to sooth the difficulty of this mind boggling information environment.
We're all collectively being overstimulated. Our recency bias kicks up into gear and we start thinking about all these simply unimportant pieces of media we've consumed. And it's all operating in our subconscious, because we can't actually remember any of the videos we watched after we get off our phones.
I don't really know how to solve this problem, but we need to address it first, because I don't really think many people are talking about this specific aspect of the information era.
To be clear, I'm not talking about when somebody important like a government official, or maybe a really big important figure in pop culture. I'm talking about when some literal nobody on the internet posts a video saying something hateful, or when a podcast bro or something does similar. I understand why we might be signal boosting the fact that somebody in our government or largely influential to pop culture says something shitty. ↩︎