Internet Brain: Curiosity to Catastrophe

I followed a series of YouTube recommendations that lead me into literal hell. Unfortunately, I don’t have the option to click away when these rabbit-holes seep into the real world.

My descent into YouTube hell started when I searched for a tutorial about the to-do app Omnifocus. The right-hand column of recommendations showed a TED talk about productivity that eventually I clicked on. Then a recommendation caught my eye that looked like a kind of “power of positive thinking” version of productivity with a heavy Christian slant. I clicked to watch it ironically because I’m a bad person (or something).

But before that video got started, I saw it. A thumbnail of dark ashen humanoid creatures with beady red eyes and gnashed teeth. They looked like Smeagol from The Lord of The Rings. The title of the clip was “How to know if your friends are controlled by demons”. (I wish I could still find this video but it’s either been taken down or inaccessible through YouTube search.)

Of course I clicked on it.

The message of the video was that my friends are controlled by demons if they are not sufficiently supportive of my life goals or my methods for achieving those goals. Questions, doubts, or dissenting opinions are all evidence of possible demon possession. Yikes!

If you suddenly felt that you can’t trust your friends – that they are agents working against you – your reality has destabilized. On YouTube it only took four videos and three clicks to reach the end of reality.

Back in the real world…

Several months later, my wife and I were at a funeral luncheon seated with a group of strangers. They were three married couples, all old friends in their mid-60’s. It was after the worst of the COVID-19 lock-downs, and we made small talk about little ways that daily life has changed since the pandemic.

One guy remarked that some businesses will now only accept credit card payments, but he still preferred to pay with cash. He told an anecdote where he had gone to a gas station and tried to buy something with cash, but the cash register system had broken down. The cashier, described as a kid, was apparently unable make change without the assistance of the cash register.

The man demonstrated to the cashier how to count the change he expected to get back and together they were able to work it out. He was proud that he taught someone about making change, but he was distraught at the cashiers shortcomings.

The man rhetorically asked, “What is the world coming to?”, which is a question so banal that anyone can agree to its sentiment without endorsing any kind of worldview. I nodded along.

“It’s the new math.” said his wife, who identified herself as a teacher.

Knowing nothing about so-called new math, I took the bait, “What about the new math? What’s wrong with it?”

She offered no specifics, but she felt the curriculum didn’t really teach kids the basic arithmetic they needed, and they were unprepared for practical uses of math. A damning criticism, if true.

Before I could ask another question to try to understand this problem of new math, another woman at the table interjected, “But they have tampons in the boys bathroom!”

That’s when the conversation turned.

She continued, “And that’s why they have a lot of rape at the schools.”

For my sensibilities, this was so far past the line for appropriate conversation with strangers at a funeral. Claims of widespread child rape demands justification and evidence. And you may notice, what it really demands is attention.

I said, “One rape seems like a lot of rape. What’s a lot of rape? How often is this happening?”

“All the time!”, she said.

This obviously couldn’t be true. In my last appeal for normality, I asked “If this is so common, wouldn’t the police be investigating it?”

Another couple offered that one of their adult children was a police officer. According to them, police are essentially not allowed to stop crime anymore. They continued, that if homeless people were to squat on your private residence, the police can no longer remove the squatters, and the squatters can now sue you if any harm comes to them while they were squatting.

I couldn’t keep up with the pace of it. I thought to myself, “Why is this happening? What the hell is going on here?” The group fully agreed that these ideas were connected, not separate conversations.

As though he heard what I was thinking or noticed the expression on my face, the father of the police officer declared, “It’s because the Communists are taking over and they want to take away our property!”. There seemed to be agreement around the table and similar concern. He added, “That’s why I keep a gun.”

It ended there. It had to. We reached a conclusion where society as we knew it was over. There’s nowhere to go from there.

I stared down at my half-eaten food and pretended that I was studying something on the plate, feeling unsettled.

How did we get here?

The conversation at the funeral reminds me of my YouTube rabbit hole. In both situations an innocent topic connected to the end of the world or the end of society.

We started with “the kids” not knowing how to do math, which connected to transgender accommodations, which was somehow a cause of rape, which connected to restraining police officers and the end of the rule of law. Finally the total takeover by “Communists”, which can only be mitigated with gun ownership. That’s a straight line between buying something at a gas station and the end of society!

That’s internet brain. Internet brain is where our internal narratives take on the shape of the internet as a medium.

Traditional media of television, radio, and print all have linear presentations of content. The media of the internet is more about the connections than destinations. It’s right there in the name: the World Wide Web. The order and relative position of content is completely fluid. Everything is connected to everything else.

The content of the internet is a reflection, of sorts, of the real world. There is very little we can do about the quantity and kind of stuff available on the internet because the world contains everything, including all the wonderful and terrible possibilities. We can’t medicate, legislate, or pray that away. But we don’t need everything tied together. We don’t need the ability to reach any destination from any origin.

The people I met at the funeral think of themselves as smart. While I disagree with everything they said, and even more of what they believe, they were not stupid people. They were retired teachers and (unspecified) professionals. They had careers doing jobs competently for 30 to 40 years. Yet their mode of thinking about current events has taken the same shape as internet media.

Please understand that I’m not picking on these people. My point is that no one is so smart that they can spend hours a day steeped in media and end up unchanged. And by the way, conspiratorial thinking is far from the only way that internet brain presents itself in the real world.

Going forward

I take this problem of internet media more personally than most people because I arranged a lot of my life around computers and the internet and, to put it mildly, this is not the future of the internet that I wanted.

I was a tech-savvy kid in the late 90’s. I imagined the internet would connect the world like a giant library, breaking down barriers of wealth and education in the process. I was in college for computer science when the iPhone was introduced. I believed that making computers more accessible to normal people through smartphones would benefit the whole world. I have made a career as a mobile application developer. I wanted all of this to be great. I still do.

Instead the apocalyptic energy of the internet seeps into the real world. And my own internet usage drags on me in ways that are often difficult to articulate. I don’t want this for myself, my family, or anyone else.

I think the right approach to this problem is to fortify my own mental and emotional integrity. After all, if I try to counter somebody’s internet-brained nonsense with an equal and opposite dose of my own internet-brained nonsense, I only add to the noise.

My goal is to put up guardrails that interrupt, or at least slow down, the connective tissue of the internet. All of my technology projects right now are about this. I’ve deleted my social media accounts. I avoid services that push recommendations. I jump between using my iPhone and a Light Phone. I’m building more of my own stuff (including this website!), and experimenting with free software alternatives to commercial products.

Some of these things stick and others don’t, but I know I’m on the right track. My perspective is shifting. When I run into internet-brained weirdness in the real world, it’s more apparent than ever.

I’ll make any lifestyle changes needed to avoid succumbing to ‘internet brain’ and becoming what I dread: a living hyperlink between real people and online noise.