The Internet Is A Bad Thing
Did you know medieval cities had negative population growth? People died faster than they were born, and this was primarily caused by disease. Too many humans too close together. But cities grew anyways because of immigration.
“Viral memes” in the Dawkins sense are ideas that spread from one human mind to the next, mutating along the way exactly like a virus. It’s exactly Darwinian evolution. A good example is “Hawk Tuah”.
But “Black Lives Matter” is also a good example of a viral meme. A three word bomb, when I first heard it my face flushed in indignation. How could one phrase have such a powerful effect? And it was so fit to thrive in the information environment that it reigned unchanged for years. Incidentally BLM was coined at about the same time as race relations in America started getting a lot worse 1. I’m not suggesting some causation one way or the other.
But it’s not just phrases. These memes can be very complex, not easily legible. There was a latent vulnerability in our population, due to a lack of exposure we lost our antibodies against a certain memeplex, but eventually darwinian evolution produced MAGA and Donald Trump and it exploded in the half the country that wasn’t already totally infected with another meme.
And the internet is the supreme accelerant to this process. Everyone in the world is forced to live in the same city. And there’s trillions in building better evolutionary environments (Twitter, TikTok, etc). 2
I grew up on the internet, and I loved it. It was a weird thing to be a heavy internet user. Us internet addicts were a small part of the population, but I was very proud. In retrospect those years were deeply unhealthy.
And the internet back then was a toy. It’s a superweapon now, aimed at ourselves. Crafted with trillions of dollars of investment and some of the smartest minds of our era. The internet is to the printing press what an ICBM is to a cannon. It’s effective against everyone. And it’s far more potent than it used to be.
Yet we’re still in the early stages.
Now, the internet really isn’t all bad. Having tried to live without it many times, it’s indispensable. It enriches my life, it’s a wonderful thing.
One of my pet beliefs is that I don’t think humans should have much write access to the internet. I don’t think it’s good that we let anyone say anything they want on the internet and anyone can read it. I think only institutions should be allowed to write to the internet. Like Wikipedia, news outlets (including tiny three-man outfits), and the state. And of course the internet is critical to running a modern economy.
But this’ll never happen, there’s no policy prescription here. Maybe in ten years the tide turns and we all decide the internet is actually quite harmful and we quit it like smoking, or limit it like unhealthy foods. It’s possible.
So what to do?
I go to work without my phone. The subway ride, phoneless, musicless, can be mentally tough. But I consider those withdrawal symptoms. And I like my job, so it’s nice not to be distracted by a phone.
I try to go outside without any technology every day. Maybe just to watch the sunset for thirty minutes, or to read a book at the park.
It takes a long time, but you get used to the reduced stimulus.
Watching the leaves on a tree sway is more beautiful than anything I’ve ever seen online. There is far far more variety in sunsets than I thought. And I’ve fallen in love with oil portraiture.
My thoughts proceed in long clear chains. My subconscious, no longer smothered by constant stimulus and external memes, has become my intelligent companion with many good ideas. I can spend my time working on deeper interests that demand much but have the greatest rewards.
I haven’t gone cold turkey of course. It’s too hard, I always break (have to unblock youtube to watch a cooking video), and then I binge.
The methods I’ve found that work the best are to limit the dangerous things, the feeds 3.
I use my adblocker to block all the videos on the youtube homepage so I can’t see anything there. I can still watch individual videos, but the related videos on the right hand side doesn’t work. So I can still watch videos that I need to, or search for the two youtubers that I watch regularly, but YouTube can’t put another cigarrete in my hand the moment I’m done with the first.