BRAINMELT: HOW INFORMATION OVERLOAD IS DRIVING US MAD
Viral insanity is here.
The technique of information is so refined it has now overtaken our capacity to make use of it.
Instead, it is increasingly making use of you - and it also does this by making you useless.
Today’s post is about why you should stop trying to keep up - as doing so will only make you melt down.
THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY
Everything in our mass culture is a sales pitch for the global economy.
Lifestyles, politics, news, entertainment, values and the vices presented as virtues all promote the production of profit, whose byproduct is what we might call ourselves.
This is a total system - a system relying on repeat sales or consumption which could fairly be called an addiction economy.
You do not have to think of what you want, because it also supplies the desires its products promise to satisfy.
In this information age, this is the economic basis of our politics and culture. Data has replaced industry, and we now have a knowledge economy instead.
The knowledge it provides drives the demand for services, and the provision of this knowledge is an industry in itself.
How successful is this industry? As John Gray has pointed out, we now have a knowledge economy in which no one knows anything.
As his former student Maurice Glasman added - no one knows how to do anything either.
MAKING BELIEF
Yet something is being made - or remade. We are.
The feedback loop of our personal desires is returned to us with refined appeals, selling us beliefs, a system, a series of consolations in place of the rising aspiration of former decades.
It is only when we cut the feed that we realise that this is all coming at the cost of a great subtraction. Meaning first, then swiftly followed by the supersession of sanity with a permanent series of shocking sensations.
For more on this, see here:
The internet has no end and no editor. It is an eyeball competition, and to enter it is to have your brain consumed like popcorn - forever snapping off into new morsels of momentary savour which fill - for a while - but do not nourish.
The reason you should spend less time on the internet is it does not just drive your enemies insane.
CUSTOMS OF A STRANGE TRIBE
To try to understand the predicament you inhabit, perhaps consider your culture as a grotesque work of art, and the behaviours and beliefs it promotes as the customs of a strange tribe.
These new totems and taboos are transmitted virally. The worship of George Floyd, the defence of war as peace, the transgender virus. The propaganda of competing tribes is sold in the same way as sugar saturated treats: it is weaponised social contagion via mass media.
It was once a mark of the educated to be well read. It is now more important to read well, or not at all - because so much of what we now consume is worse for us than nothing.
NARRATIVE COLLAPSE - AND DATABABEL
The collapse of the global system is also powering the meltbrain culture.
As people realise the Grand Narrative of liberal democracy was an advert for a death cult, they have become incredulous towards everything - and likely to seek alternative meaning anywhere they can find it.
Secondly, with no reliable narrator it seems wisest to hear as many voices as you can. This does not result in a balanced view but babel. What we receive from the Heraklitean flux of the ever-changing info-river is not a God’s-eye view of reality, but a series of shocking contradictions which cannot be integrated into a coherent picture.
The result is overload and meltdown. The byways to brain-boiled bafflement are constellated by apophenia - the drawing of connections between bright points of dopamined data where none really exist.
In this age of sensation many people are most incredulous at the sight of reality. It is hard to convince people that things are and even can be real, after a century of propaganda towards the contrary.
The liberal advert promised a life without limits. We live in a moment of correction, where this grandiose fantasy is colliding with the hard limits of reality.
One important dimension of this is in your head. Your brain has limits as to what it can integrate into sense. To overload it is to reduce you to a state of overstimulated paralysis, where nothing can reliably be decided or done.
In short, trying to keep up will make you useless.
This is very good from the point of view of an addiction economy, which seeks to create dependence on its products. It profits from your loss of self control and self command. The less you use it, the less it can use you.
The converse is true, as the more you interact with the algorithm, the less of you there really is. It is subtraction for distraction, and the side effects of this regimen include the dissolving of the very self you sought to enrich, or amplify, or entertain. In the end, perhaps the only cohesive picture of yourself which will remain is the one which is attached to your social media profile.
You can refuse to vanish into the mirror of course - though it has an appeal which began well before the digital age.
It was first used by the Aztecs to grant the vision of the demon Tezcatlipoca, “Smoking mirror”.
Obsidian mirrors were used to view the secrets of the lives of other men, with the caveat that the black mirror also looked into you.
Permitting the void to enter you did not just grant knowledge - its black economy also confused the viewer with lies and tricks - with no indication of what was true or false in the visions it gifted.
The simple alternative to meltbrain is to limit your exposure to the void. It does not become you, after all, and it cannot do so if you do not feed it with yourself.
Just as you should not dine forever on desserts, it is prudent to practice the discipline of “enough” with regard to what you are regarding.
And what is regarding YOU.
New habits - especially good ones - are hard but not impossible to acquire. You can set a timer on Satan’s Window.
You can refuse to keep up. After all, what is the fear of missing out against the danger of going missing altogether? Remember that every minute spent in the void of the black mirror is time subtracted from real life. How often are you really there?
This life is not eternal, it is limited - and we are in the end the sum of what we have and have not done. We will answer for this. All of us.
There is a higher spiritual purpose to life than information paralysis. If you can’t look away from the eyeball magnet you may not even remember it is there at all.
Nassim Taleb said he doesnt read newspapers. He said ( I paraphrase because I dont remember the exact quote ) if you dont understand why you should bother with them, look at one from a year ago and you will understand. Nothing written there will matter to you at all. The internet is alot like that, and nearly all Curr3nt Th1ngZ are like that.
Covid accelerated online addiction manifold, I believe.
Deemed an "unessential" worker, still gullibly trusting in the expert class, I initially completely bought into the narrative of an extremely deadly virus rampaging throughout the world. With nothing but time on my hands, I scoured the internet searching for the latest information--a process which never ends and is very difficult to break. Internet-addled is the new drug-addled.