[News] The Internet Was a Mistake

The brain-breaking effects of the internet are by now well-documented. Author Nicholas Carr was a Pulitzer finalist in 2011 for his exploration of the subject in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, which remains a landmark work on this phenomenon. "Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory," Carr wrote in an Atlantic article that inspired the book. "My mind isn't going — so far as I can tell — but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think." The internet, Carr said, "is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation."

That article came out in 2008, when Twitter was just two years old, a silly place where you pointlessly announced your breakfast, and Instagram didn't exist. Facebook felt innocuous — Carr didn't even mention it in a story about the destructive mental effects of "the Net," an unthinkable choice today. The risks our brains faced then, real though they were, look laughably meager now.

The attention span degradation Carr described has massively accelerated in the dozen years since his Atlantic story published, time in which social media and smartphone use has become ubiquitous. Our habitual distraction is debilitating; "addiction" is often neither too strong a word nor entirely metaphorical.

But it's not only that: The brokenness I'm describing is more than distraction. Carr focused on the medium over the message. "[I]n the long run, a medium's content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act," he said in his book. I don't disagree, but what we're seeing now is that the content itself cannot be discounted as a potent force of mental disorder and relational discord.

There is so much content on the internet, and so much of it is bad. It is blasting in your face relentlessly. To navigate it well — to discern truth and lies, to parse one's own emotional and reflexive responses, to summon the mental energy to pay attention to credibility and incentives and the small, almost indescribable cues that might indicate whether a piece of content is to be trusted — is very difficult. It is especially difficult for those who have low digital literacy because they did not grow up using the internet.

Time and again I've had some variation of the following conversation with my mother, whom I am worried is drifting from garden-variety low-information folk libertarianism into whatever nonsense she happens upon in the weird dregs of YouTube.

Me: This is really sketchy; I don't think you should read it.

Her: What's sketchy about it?

Me: I can't even tell you if you can't see it. It's a bunch of little things. It's ... like look at that logo. You can't trust that.

Her: But why? Try to explain it to me.

Me: Just look at the logo! Look at the way it looks!

Her: ?

Then she sends the sketchy thing to another boomer, who immediately accepts it as gospel, and I know I've failed, but I don't know how I can better communicate what I see. I don't know how a few texts from me can compete, from hundreds of miles away, with YouTube video after YouTube video, each worse than the last, no matter how much YouTube claims to have fixed its algorithm. I don't know how 20 minutes on the phone a couple times a week can carry more weight than her daily grind of content consumption.

It's not just the logo. It's never just the logo. And it's all so obvious to me and invisible to her as to be ineffable for both of us. I don't know what to do.