Get Your Smart On
On information overwhelm and the difficulty knowing what is true, real, and good online. Part 2 of thinking about the most challenging aspects of being human right now.
*In our subscriber chat, many of you shared some significant challenges of being human right now: feelings of isolation; information overload; difficulties in building community; and misanthropic feelings. I've already responded to some of you individually, but wanted to write a more general response to share more widely. After breaking down this problem into its different aspects, this post aspires to provide a philosophical framework for thinking about the second item above, the information overload and disorientation that so many of us are feeling. I hope it serves to better understand this predicament and perhaps give readers a little bit more sense of control. *
“Saturation. Of everything. We have more and more access to anything and everything with little in the way of ordering our lives ...”
Our overwhelm is a complex problem with several interrelated aspects. Yes, we are consuming an overwhelming amount of information and content online, and much of it negative.1 But also, the social media platforms where so much of this consumption takes place are designed to appeal to our primitive lizard-brain instincts, bypass rational judgment, and put us into an anxious and passive state of consumption.
These platforms actively blur the lines between social and commercial interests. They know that when we encounter information, propaganda, and advertisements in supposedly social spaces, we are less guarded and therefore more vulnerable to influence. When we are trying to relax and unwind in these online spaces, we are less likely to exercise the critical thinking, media literacy, and AI detection skills that are crucial to keep us safe and sane online.2 Propaganda and conspiracy theories have come to serve as entertainment, taking us down some rabbit holes that feel like Alternative Reality Games (ARG), and in some cases, radicalizing us in ways that are squarely opposed to our self-interest.3
“My argument here is not that we are all the way into Wonderland, or even close to it yet. But that qualification should be as worrying as it is reassuring.” —Jon Askonas, "Reality Is Just a Game Now"
There is no built-in way to validate information or check facts without leaving these apps, and in what seems to establish a new pattern for online platforms, Mark Zuckerberg recently announced Meta will eliminate fact-checkers and stop vetting political content on Meta properties like Facebook and Instagram, in the name of freedom of speech:
This announcement came on the heels of an earlier announcement that Facebook is introducing AI generated user profiles to interact with existing human users. Like his earlier misstep into the metaverse, after which he renamed his company, this is likely going to fail hard. I imagine they know this and don’t care — they have to know the public is rejecting AI — their ambitions already lay elsewhere. The proof will be in the pudding, so we will see what happens in the next few months to, and on, these platforms. If the demise of Twitter is any indication, this first generation of social media platforms may be in its last throes. Of course, they still have a shit ton of users that they can poison and manipulate to their own technocratic ends, enough to make their death very painful for all of us. I have a lot more to say about this, for a future post…
Returning to our current line of reasoning, this all leads to general confusion over what is real and true that we might call epistemic disorientation, cognitive dissonance arising from entertaining conflicting ideas, and what philosopher Sandra Bartky calls double ontological shock — you’ll recall this is “first, the realization that what is really happening is quite different from what appears to be happening, and, second, the frequent inability to tell what is really happening at all.” It seems advisable to take a skeptical view of anything and everything we take in, but that skepticism erodes the trust that lubricates a lot of our social encounters, not to mention that it is exhausting. The skeptical attitude can not be maintained in the long run.
We have also found all the scrolling takes a toll on our ability to focus, and we now have difficulty holding our attention on something of any complexity for an extended period of time. (Meditation and reading is the perfect antidote to this, thankfully…) As a result, we are just all over the place. We adopt cafeteria-styled belief systems that mix and match disparate and often contradictory beliefs and ideologies (e.g., “MAGA Communism”). Making sense becomes increasingly difficult. Principles are adopted on instrumental and utilitarian grounds, and discarded as soon as they become inconvenient. The stability of reality, and especially of a shared reality, is at stake.
This is all stuff we already know. The usual recommendation to counter this situation involves using a Nietzschean will-to-power to control our media consumption, putting it on the individual to plug the info dam with a finger — an impossible task, obviously doomed to fail. As much as we may want to be the deciders in our own lives, we are subject to powers bigger than us, and we are shaped by these forces in ways that are beyond our control. So, it is not a matter of will power or even intelligence, when these applications are engineered to reduce us to passive consumers and data farm animals.
I will mention just a couple things that seem to work against the tide: have a place or space designated as tech free (for me it’s my art table and the couch next to it) and then go there regularly to escape. Engineering a tech-free space is easier than trying to control it with your will power. Second, make the transition from consumer to creator; this will give you a little more control since your consumption will be organized more around your creations, but it comes with a whole new set of difficulties, so I don’t necessarily recommend. I would also say that trying to be everywhere is a fools errand. If you must, choose one or two platforms at most, and learn to become an unruly user. I hope to say more about this in the future…
I want to frame the problem philosophically, because maybe this will give us some leverage. The study of the structure of reality is ontology/metaphysics, and our experience of it can be accessed through phenomenological description. So, what follows is a phenomenological study of social media, and I’m going to focus on TikTok because in my opinion, it is the most successful social media platform in creating a lifeworld. This is Edmund Husserl’s term for the context that grounds human knowledge and activity. It is the rich, subjective tapestry of experiences and interactions that give coherence and sense to our existence, and in this case for how we exist online.
TikTok constructs a lifeworld for you based on what it knows about you, and it is able to figure you out in a very short period of time. The algorithm is very good at its job, anticipating your interests and needs before they register consciously for you. It presents you with short-video feeds on just two pages: the “For You” and “Following” pages. The short-video content makes the content easy to consume and binge-able for quick reinforcement and the ability for the algorithm to collect many more actions from you than if the content were longer. I’m going to focus on the “For You” feed, since that is what the app opens to by default.
The “For You” page shows you a seemingly endless stream of personalized videos based on previous interactions, preferences, and trending content. You are forced to continually interact by scrolling through the video feed, since if you don’t, the same video will play on repeat infinitely, which gets annoying after a few times. In other words, you are forced to park yourself somewhere or other, and stay more or less still while you consume the content. You can’t put it on in the background, like you might do with YouTube, while you do something else.
Your whole body is fixed in place and focused on holding the phone, the single allowed gesture is scrolling with a finger, with eyes focused on the screen. You are glued kinaesthetically to the app. Two things are happening simultaneously - hand and eyes, and they are coordinated. That hand-eye coordination is very powerful - it is the same that allows us to sit reading a book and enter into a fictional world that completely absorbs our attention. It is why writing things down helps you think, process, and learn better. The integration of motor skills with visual processing is key to TikTok’s success.
Your movement is effectively constrained, all of your focus on what you are taking in with your eyes. Unlike reading words, seeing moving images bypasses your thinking brain, and the music that plays in the background pulls you further in, gives the experience some additional depth, to keep you engaged.
TikTok makes of you a captive audience like no other app, but you don’t feel imprisoned.4 Au contraire, it feels like you just walked into your very own neighbourhood bar “where everyone knows your name.”5 There are ongoing “conversations” that you happen upon, and you can overhear them or join them, troll them or like them. Built into the system is social validation in the form of likes, comments, and shares that provide immediate feedback, tapping into the human desire for social validation and connection.
But it is a flat world in the sense that all videos and all conversations are on the same level. We watch a genocide alongside conspiracy theories about “Dior bags” (the code name for the UFOs seen over New Jersey and then all over the East Coast of the U.S.), alongside videos of people being racist and assaulting others in public, alongside hard hitting political news, climate emergencies, paid partnerships, shopping experiences, live debates, and more. The code names are necessary because certain words will get you “shadow banned,” which means your content will not be shown widely. So we invent code names like unaliving instead of suicide or murder, s.a. instead of sexual assault, and watermelon instead of Palestine, that stick and become part of the glue, insider knowledge that makes you feel like you are a part of something bigger than you. But this is really a social experiment, since the code names are just as detectable. I think the point is just to get you used to having to change how you use language, and perhaps to gauge how quickly things spread. Creating a glossary of TikTok specific terms would likely be very instructive.
Generally, I do feel like I am being experimented on, but have resigned myself beyond care because the app is so damn enjoyable and useful — you learn a lot being on there. There is no way to sort and organize your own experience — that is the algorithm’s job. What you are shown follows a “variable reward” design — similar to a slot machine, the unpredictability of content and the occasional reward of particularly enjoyable videos release dopamine, which reinforces the behavior and keeps you scrolling. Your autonomy is largely reduced to participation or non-participation. If you try to circumvent anything at all, the algorithm seems to adjust and even punish you for it.
For example, when I stopped viewing my “For You” page and only view my “Following” page that is supposed to show me only folks I follow and have already agreed to view, not only did the algorithm begin to limit the videos I could see to a set of about ten to twenty videos (which it would then replay on a loop over and over again) to try to push me to seek fresh content on the “For You” page, but it also began auto-following people on my behalf (people who pay them to advertise their videos and pump up their views), so it effectively becomes another “For You” page. I now regularly unfollow accounts that the algorithm has added to my “Following” page, and am forced to reload my page anytime I reach the end of a set of videos.
Even with all this friction, I can loose myself in the app for an alarming amount of time, measured in hours that pass without notice. For me, the carrot is definitely in seeing the faces to which I have become accustomed, the para-social relationships that feel so much like friendships but of course are shallow, uni-directional, pseudo-interactions. Perhaps because certain forces on TikTok want to sow division, feminist content was pushed to me, and I’m happy about that. But I am constantly having to fight the algorithm to see these people’s videos. The experience as a content producer is different, but I don’t make content on there so I’ll just say it is very social experiment-y as well.
In sum, TikTok bypasses your thinking brain by very quickly figuring out what you are interested in seeing, physically restraining you and retraining your attention on the content the app is selecting for you, using digestible short-form content and music in the background, and creating the illusion of shared interests and experiences through which para-social bonds are made. If someone tied me down and force-fed me content, I would presumably be very upset about this, and would rebel against such a scenario. But with TikTok, am like “bring it on, moar moar!”
I should also mention that people appear to be very attractive on TikTok through the use of filters, and for a time these filters have been applied without the consent of the creators themselves, although many creators choose to use the filters as well. The video creation gives you easy access to a number of bells and whistles, including filters, stickers, and other effects to make your lizard-brain feel good. Even as the app becomes the source of news and solidarity for many, the kind of content that is pushed most aggressively is, obviously, feel good content and advertisements marked as “paid partnerships” in the video description section.
There are probably some things I am leaving out of this phenomenological account of the experience of using TikTok as a content consumer or regular user, but this is enough to get started on an ontological sketch. We are looking for the underlying conditions that shape this experience described above, and why it feels so much like a lifeworld. A useful approach is to think about this world in terms of spatiality and temporality, so let’s try that. Human consciousness is grounded spatially in a concrete situation, and temporally in the present (see Bergsonian duration below). TikTok is able to transport us to a “place” it controls almost completely, and pull you out of your normal flow. Let’s see if I can pull this off!
What we need to do is to shift our orientation towards this technology, beginning with how we are “in tune” with TikTok’s environment at a base level. In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger speaks about attunement as a state-of-mind. An aside here, before getting into the Heidegger, I was taught by someone who worked to demystify Heidegger and reads him rather pragmatically, and so I have a view of Heidegger as a common sense philosopher — it’s just that his common sense is German, lol. That said, attunement is what we might call a “vibe.” Heidegger defines attunement as an existential condition that reveals the mood or emotional state that colors how we understand and interact with a world. It can also reveal how an individual is situated in that context, and with respect to others in that same world of concern. It’s also important to know that these are not individual moods, but shared and atmospheric.
Say you walk into a room where an intense argument has just taken place. Even though you were not present for the argument, and didn’t witness the exchange, you will probably sense the discomfort in the room. Your understanding of the room and your own presence within it is initially shaped by this palpable mood, which orients your interactions and perceptions before you even begin to process the specific details of what has transpired. This illustrates how attunement precedes and influences interpretation, situating individuals within a meaningful context from the start.
TikTok’s “vibe” is that of a fun place where “everyone knows your name,” with its visually appealing people, feel good content, belief reinforcing, doom scrolling, disaster porn, and rabbit holing… TikTok is a world in so far as it is a space in which affects are produced and shared. You are oblivious that every interaction is a test, and every piece of content you see, likely to the level of where your eyes move around on the screen, is data being collected about you and those “like” you. To shift our orientation in a way that aligns with what is “really” taking place, wouldn’t it ruin our experience and enjoyment? While they collect the data, do they control and can they predict the direction in which opinions sway? They would like to do exactly this, but the reaction to certain recent news items indicates not? This is why the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing arguments today that will determine whether TikTok will have to sell to an American like Sharktank’s Kevin O’Leary or face a ban in the U.S..
Both things are simultaneously true — people are finding solidarity in the app, and the app serves to divide and manipulate, and it is not clear who if anyone is driving the bus. I’m not sure they have figured out how to control what affects are created and gain momentum. In fact, I’m pretty certain they have not.
Ultimately, I find my experience of being on the app is incoherent, and it’s as if I have resigned myself to the enjoyment of it, even if “it” is a kind of captivity. I have traded being surprised and delighted by first person testimonial content from which I learn a lot, in exchange for my time, focus and attention, mobility, capacity for thought, and data. But this is how we know - we could have social media without the surveillance capitalism, it’s just that we will have to, you know, get rid of surveillance capitalism first.
A characteristic of lifeworlds is that you can immerse yourself in them, so much so that you loose track of time. My primer was early Twitter, and TikTok is even more absorptive. When you “click into place,” the world you are physically in becomes an exteriority, and that external world fades from your attention. Is this a kind of split consciousness? You become hyper-attuned to worlds of representation. It feels like going into a tunnel, and like being hypnotized.
The other philosopher that I’d like to bring in to help us frame this overwhelm is Henri Bergson. Where Heidegger’s worldliness is spatial, in so far as we are working from our embodied situations in worlds that concern us, Bergson helps us think about the temporal aspects. He would likely focus on how saturation impacts our perception and experience of time. We have been trained to constantly check our social media feeds (it used to be just email, and with social media feeds the cognitive load has increased exponentially). He might argue that the constant flow of information fractures our lived experience, pulling us away from the continuous, qualitative flow of "duration" that characterizes genuine experience.
Time comes to be “out of joint,” our consciousness split between physical and digital worlds. Or time may pass, with us as if in a state of hypnosis. I have definitely lost time while scrolling on TikTok, like literally not been aware of the passing of time. We know casinos do this by creating an artificially closed world that does not reference time outside - no windows, no clocks — and they pump oxygen into the air to keep you awake. The oxygen is the dopamine hit, the enclosure is your fixed scrolling position. Social media platforms like Tiktok that feel like worlds onto themselves, are built to capture your attention so that you loose track of time. It is hard to tell when a video was posted and you can’t organize your experience chronologically.6
Ironically, this is very much like what creative folk like writers and artists describe as being in a “flow state” while working, where they become completely absorbed in their work and loose track of time. The similarity gives us a hint about what is going on here — we are falling into a world that is not ours, our consciousness commandeered not in creation but in consumption. You are completely in the present, past and future recedes, as does the physical world. TikTok is successful because it can hijack your consciousness, with nothing to show for it in the end except a slimy data trail.
Participating in social media dulls our intuition and replaces it with not-our-own-experiences. We can’t get at authenticity taking that road. It kills your ability to think outside the frame and encourages the endless repetition of the same memes. Creativity that is normally oriented towards “the new” is set to work on repetitive endless tasks, the equivalent of moving water from one bucket to another using the tiniest of spoons.
If you understand intellectually what “they” are doing, does it make it a little easier to deal with? Reading this, if you have gained some understanding, do you feel more in control of your experience? Are we any better for it? This piece has felt very experimental... The take aways for me have been the following realizations:
Speaking of which, Bluesky is doing a lot of things right and moving in this direction. Shall I do a philosophical account of Bluesky?
To be continued…
Continue to part three, The Desire For Community: On The growing desire for community and our commitment to individualism.