How the Internet Breaks Our Brains

Some thoughts on how difficult it is to process scale instead of the introductory post I should start with.

A Sumerian Live Stream. "Sumerian Cylinder Seal (d2a_0637)" by swh is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

My understanding - which, like everything I ever say, could be wrong - is that we used to be aware of the world immediately around us and had no more of a perception of the rest of the world than “there’s predators there.” Anything else was useless for survival. As humans developed so did our ability to understand the rest of the world, but extraordinarily little changed about our ability to perceive that world. We had the world in front of us, and we could hear about that world through oral traditions or, if we were in a literate society, read about that world. If you were an Ancient Sumerian you knew about your city and could learn about other places, although your society’s sum of knowledge about those places was limited. Apart from the growth of that sum of knowledge, that picture didn’t really change for the entirety of human history. Your ability to travel to those places could grow, or meet people from those places, or taste spices from those places, but your ability to perceive anything was limited to what was immediately in front of you.

But then, less than 200 years ago, we got the ability – through technology – to actually see something not in front of us. a photograph of something not in front of us. Suddenly, you didn’t need to actually go somewhere to see something. You didn’t have to rely on your imagination, or a work of art to charge that imagination.¹ This technological miracle is called photography and it was an absolute revolution of perception. And, despite it taking millennia of civilization to achieve that revolution, in the blink of an eye we left it in the dust. Less than a half century later, we had moving pictures, or as we hilariously still call them, movies. You could have been a child when photography was in its infancy and as an adult you now had movies. This is a second revolution in perception in one person’s lifetime.

But then we quickly blew that away. In August 1920, radio station 8MK in Detroit broadcast the first ever radio news program. We started by talking about the Ancient Sumerians, now we’re talking about something when my grandmother was about to be born. The ability to hear – live – other people hundreds of miles away talking. Show that to one of those Sumerians and they would assume it was magic.

The impact that film and radio had on the world is extensively documented. The reams of paper spent just on how Adolf Hitler used this new media to rise to power is enough to kill a small forest. These were civilization altering technologies. And they came less than a century after we couldn’t even see something unless we were stood in front of it.

Then we blew that away again. When my grandmother was born, only a few people could listen to radio. By the time my mother was born, 44 million Americans were watching I Love Lucy from the comfort of their homes. These are technologies we all take for granted but were massive revolutions in how humans perceived the world.

It’s popular to downplay the internet (“email isn’t special, it’s just faster letters”) but anyone who lived through the COVID-19 pandemic knows that’s false. The internet has completed revolutionized how we interact with each other and with the world around us. I can have a live videoconference with someone on the other side of the planet while watching live television and getting real-time updates on my phone about even more far-flung events. This is not even considered unusual, except for the entirety of the time humanity has existed.

Why am I writing about this? In part, because the idea behind this newsletter² is the intersection of technology and society and how we need to think about how these things interact with each other. But it’s also because I want to discuss the relative unpopularity of things we consider to be popular how that warps our perceptions.

Up until sometime last year, I very carefully avoided using social media to follow anyone even remotely political. During the boredom of COVID lockdowns, I began exploring that space. I found a lot of writers who had views relatively like mine and who I found thoughtful or interesting. Then I discovered that there are also many people online who are obsessed with hating these people. I’m not talking about people who obsess online over the President. I’m talking about people who spend what is seemingly a large part of their day obsessing over random journalists. The most bizarre case of all this bizarre fixation was of a writer - and fellow Substacker, although one slightly more successful than me - named Jesse Singal. A lot of people on the internet consider him a transphobe. This apparently begins with an article he wrote for The Atlantic on youth gender dysphoria. I have less than zero ability to adjudicate who is and is not a transphobe, and the answer to that question is actually not relevant to the point. What’s far more interesting to me is the sheer amount of time and effort people spend arguing that he needs to be deplatformed because he’s actively harming the trans community. The tweetstorms. The articles about him.³ The professional writer who authored a book that has multiple chapters about him. This is absolutely insane because, well, he’s a journalist on the internet. Which is a cohort of very erudite and respectable people who are slightly more powerful than the guy who makes your sandwich at Subway.

At time of writing, he has about 100,000 followers on Twitter. That is far more than my twentysome. But, to put that in perspective, Dave Chappelle (currently facing similar charges) has roughly 850,000. Which does not seem impressive, except he hasn’t tweeted in nine years. Mr. Singal cohosts a podcast that has thousands of paid subscribers. To put that in perspective, Joe Rogan (who has also faced similar charges at times) has hundreds of millions of monthly downloads and views. That’s what famous looks like. Even the article that angers people is from a magazine that, at its peak, had less than 900,000 subscribers. More people watch professional wrestling every week. Brian Eno once said that the first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 albums, but everyone who bought one went out and started a band. You essentially must assume that everyone who read The Atlantic article went out and did the transphobe equivalent of starting a band for this article to have had the impact in the real world that these people think he had. And yet, they are obsessed with him.

I find him to be an interesting example because of the discrepancy between the vitriol he inspires and the fact that when Twitter suggested I follow him I had never heard of him. But if that’s not your jam the internet is replete with examples. People who exist in the politics Twitter bubble⁴ are constantly creating tempests in teapots because they’re unaware of how few people are paying attention to these things. The amount of words spilled over MSNBC and Fox News are like grains of sand on a beach. They’re treated as incredibly important, and many people consider the latter to be hugely influential in American politics. Of course, those countless words don’t include many on how few people watch these shows.

About 155 million people voted in the last Presidential election. About 3% of them watch MSNBC or Fox News.⁵ The juggernaut that is Rachel Maddow gets a little over 2 million people to watch her show, about the same amount as watch Dateline or WWE Smackdown. Tucker Carlson, the most powerful man in media with cable’s highest rated show, gets about three and a half million. Which is really impressive, it’s almost as much as the amount of people who watch the Monday Night Football postgame show at 11:45 at night. Maybe Chris Berman is the most powerful man in media? Combined, last Wednesday they still drew a million less than the Country Music Awards. This doesn’t even account for how old their audiences are. Combined, Maddow and Carlson don’t even sniff a million people under the age of 55 watching their shows. More people who aren’t in AARP are playing World of Warcraft right now than watching those shows. And these two are titans compared to the people on Twitter!

Look, it’s incontrovertibly good that technology has allowed us to decentralize content distribution enough that someone can make a living marketing a product that tens of thousands of people want, or even become incredibly rich off marketing a product that a couple million want. But that is a tiny niche. Because of how the internet generally and social media specifically is designed, people who have created a world around these issues are fooled into thinking that this is much more impactful in the real world than it is. Leaving aside all the emotional side effects to the person engaging in this kind of catastrophizing, and the general poisoning of the discourse, it also has the very real problem of being a gigantic waste of time. And not in a “well, this issue is important, but it’s no Darfur” way, but in a “this actually has no discernible impact on the real world” way. Spending time tweeting about a writer that almost the entire country has never heard of does exactly nothing to improve trans rights. If this is an issue you care about, you should want to spend time on achieving that goal. But social media makes it seem to these people like they are actually doing something important when they’re wasting their time. It is a fake world.

Yet to these people it is deadly real. They’re being fooled by algorithms and network effects into believing a simulacrum of the world they’re involved in creating is the real world. And I suspect there are two main culprits here. The first is the death of the monoculture. The monoculture wasn’t exactly great, as anyone who lived during it knows. There were lots of excellent television shows canceled for “unpopularity” or bands you never heard of because a record company exec didn’t think they could sell. Most of my life has been greatly enhanced by the death of the monoculture, which is due almost entirely to the internet. But at least it gave perspective. You knew what was actually widespread and what was niche.

When I was a teenager, I loved the internet in part because I didn’t know people in real life who wanted to discuss the niche topics I found interesting and, because I was a teenage nerd, obsessed over. The internet let me talk about those things, and write about those things, which allowed me to connect with more people about those things. Suddenly, the progress of some 19-year-old goalie in Sweden or the release of a new starship design on Star Trek was a big deal, not just some random footnote I might remark on to an uninterested friend or family member. But at least I knew it wasn’t really a big deal. The actual world around me was, like it was for all of humanity, what I mainly experienced. I had perspective.

Then the world continued to change, and instead of using a 2800 bps modem on a clunky desktop sitting in the living room to connect with a handful of people I could interact with via text, I had almost instantaneous full video and sound interaction with billions of people across the planet in a device I always have with me. The connection was better and ubiquitous. And as more people came online, the network effects took hold. I wrote about hockey on the internet as a teenager. I was rather good at it, which meant I would get hundreds and then thousands of people reading my articles. Now, if I wanted to talk about hockey prospects, I have hundreds of thousands of people I could do that with. That’s not just a quantitative difference but a qualitative one. I no longer must live in a world where my perception is that this is a niche thing I need to interact with some random strangers about. This becomes practically indistinguishable from reality.

I spent a few years living in a hipster hotbed (not Brooklyn) during the height of hipsterdom. I went to a hipster bar. I had friends who became, if not hipster, hipster adjacent. This created a subculture where these people came to believe this was not unusual. I knew people who believed LCD Soundsystem were popular. Not merely among their community. They thought this was a legitimately big musical act. Their best album went gold (which means it sold between half a million and a million units). Shania Twain’s Come On Over moved forty million copies. That’s popular. But the network effect of living in a place with so many people like them allowed them to think the world was quite different than it was. They were like 10th Century Berber nomads believing the entire world was desert. That’s what the internet does to people. In a world that allows people to follow whatever niche they desire they can fool themselves that it’s not a niche. They’re creating their own Williamsburg anywhere they are, and they’re barely conscious of it.

This is the second big cause. My hypothesis is that humans are unable – evolutionarily – to grasp the size of society. There’s famous work about how part of the problem with Facebook is that we’re only able to process knowing a relatively small amount of people. Ignoring how precisely true that is, it’s certainly true that for most of human history the amount of people we could interact with was limited. The problem is that there’s seven billion people on this planet. And a large amount of them are online. We can’t fathom the scope of this naturally, so unless we’re consciously trying, it’s a problem.

This is what I call the Kardashian Conundrum.⁶ Kim Kardashian is genuinely famous. People know she has a television show. People know that there are people obsessed with the Kardashians. People assume that America is really into the Kardashians. But they’re not. Their television show - Keeping Up with the Kardashians – was so unpopular it makes Tucker Carlson look like an NFL game. The absolute highest amount of people to ever watch an episode of it was under five million people, but they generally only had about a million or so people watching their show, two if they were lucky. In a country of 330 million people. If you worked in an office with 165 people, and there was one person who was just wild about coffee enemas, and would not shut up about coffee enemas, would your conclusion be “Wow, coffee enemas are really popular” or would you just assume there’s someone really into it and everyone else just knows because of them? Our brains can understand when we think of it on this village level, but not at a national level. And certainly not a global level. But social media will feed the idea that something is popular even if it’s just a niche, and the people whose voice will be amplified will be those most obsessed with a thing. So instead of properly assessing it as “The Kardashians are famous, Kim is very famous – in part because of her attractiveness – and so most people have heard of them and a tiny few are really into them” your brain assesses it as “Geez, Americans love them some Kardashians.” It’s a false consciousness because we don’t actively attempt to process scale.

In a span of less than two hundred years we went from being able to perceive nothing except what was directly in front of us to being able to perceive the entire world whenever we wanted. In that time span, our brains have not caught up to processing scale. We constantly misperceive how widespread and important things are. I used a somewhat simple example for it in this one because I both found it amusing and also I need to save examples to return to this topic again in the future. But the world around us is now filled with people creating their own niche realities and then believing those are the reality that everyone else lives in too. That seems inherently more troubling. Is it surprising that the internet – and increasingly the real world – is descending into people just talking past each other? There’s a famous – and possibly apocryphal – quote of “How could Nixon win? I don’t know anyone who voted for him.” That’s becoming the entire world. Or, possibly worse, when the only people you know who disagree with you are those who are willing to argue loudly and long about it online. How can we possibly leave the world a better place than we found it if we don’t even know what our world is anymore?

1. One of the more interesting hypotheses I’ve read about why art got so weird is that once you had the ability to see the actual thing, you no longer needed realistic depictions. I don’t know if this is true but it’s interesting.

2. And yes, a wiser man would have begun a Substack with the post about what the Substack is about. I chose to do this backwards and just start writing.

3. And not the way I’m doing it, with using him as an example of a trend, but just fully about him, which seems insane.

4. Which is definitely a bubble. Politics takes up a small amount of the activity on Twitter.

5. Not counting the millions who see the programs without audio on the television at the gym.

6. Should it be Kardashian Konundrum?