Hello, everyone—
Allow me to reframe something, briefly. Just to try it out, no commitments, like a pair of jeans you try on in the store: when you read a book, watch a movie, or scroll through the small screen, you’re not consuming media. instead, you’re being consumed by it.
I do not like this idea, on its face. Primarily, it deprives us of agency. To ascribe agency to more powerful beings than ourselves feels infantilizing, particularly if we cannot affect or even understand them. It’s uncomfortable, in gut feeling and in consequences following from this line of thinking. It’d be easy to disclaim responsibility for our own actions in this way, to cast aside any nagging dream of free will—
And yet, the model works. And when I run up against some concept that I do not like, on its face, but that’s more useful than the things I do like, it deserves examination. Useful in limited ways, maybe, but to throw out any substantial number of cases for the sake of a unified aesthetic is stupid. I try my best to do things that, as far as I know, are not stupid.
So I tolerate the mindworm, and I sit with it in just the way I know I shouldn’t.
By the time I sit down to push things out of my head, I’m convinced that a singular phrase explains half the observable phenomena in the known universe. By this hyperbole, I of course mean: regarding what I can see, in the set of things I know about, little clumps of words explain a great deal.
Here it is again: you’re not consuming. You are being consumed.
“Is this wolves, Orion?” you may ask, and be completely justified. It’s kind of wolves, in the very kind of sense; this isn’t about things that are striving for your time or money. Not in the direct way that charities, political causes, religious organizations, social media, or employers do (though they’ll get it, incidentally.)
Instead, bless their merciful spirits, they only want your mind.
I think about this a lot. Fiction has this property, in that it’ll change what you reference when you interpret reality. A constant stream of news will change your perception of what’s common and what isn’t. A similar, steady drip of interpretation or conversation will change how you react to the events around you.
If you learn a new word or idiom, you’re more likely to use it. If you learn a new language, you’re more likely to absorb the ways of thinking that lie in the grammar. Information, in and of itself, isn’t malicious. Some of it just reacts poorly with the human mind.
I use a god, or a monster, to describe this property, not because of any positive or negative connotations, but because the critical thing is that information isn’t human. It doesn’t think like we do; it meanders around looking for more places to go. Sometimes, it sticks. Sometimes, that adhesion does damage to the surface it’s stuck to.
That surface, of course, is a human.
But though the motivations of Information are orthogonal and alien, they’re weak. They don’t have goals, necessarily. Truths, in their base state —opinions, even— just exist. They remain in stasis until catalyzed by a narrative, actionable point, or useful property. A stick, until someone realizes it’s carvable and shapes it into a spear, is just a chunk of dead tree.
One bug-not-a-feature of the human experience is that we are very good at seeing which sticks are pointiest and helping them get there. The vast majority of the time, consequently, information turns into an Idea very quickly. With touchy subjects, for example, in common conversation, ‘fun facts’ don’t exist. There’s very little room for them to breathe before they’re burdened by context into being more than harmless fun.
And something strange happens, somewhere in that process, resulting in people who are visibly stuck in some cloud of information, unable to act on any of it. They think about this information, sure. They post about the topic, and they share relevant material, but somehow it never seems possible to accomplish anything around it. Key distinctions:
They’re unaware of this behavior, or falsely believe it to be meritorious.
It’s not really an addiction, per se, because it’s approximately self-contained.
The obvious caveat: I’m approaching this in a descriptive rather than prescriptive sense, from my own perspective, in pretty lossy terms.
(As in: if I were doing this, and couldn’t see it; I’d want someone to tell me. The closest parallel I can readily identify in myself is using a degree of highfalutin language or iffy humor, but those don’t quite fit. For one, I know these qualities to be deficiencies and areas for improvement, which by definition renders them basically invalid. For another, I can switch them off with a little effort.)
Allow me to describe some common cases, as I see them: people very into reality television, transfixed by the minutiae of politics they cannot hope to affect, viewing everything through the lens of some social cause, referencing the same work of fiction in every paragraph, etc.
It’s not the specific quasi-obsession or the wasted brain cycles that bother me, not at all— it’s the apparent inability to switch off. Moreover, it’s that the specific set of behaviors I’m trying to explain here are really well approximated by any index along the lines of [means well, is pretty smart; pick two.] It’s a failure mode that’s very close to where I am, realistically, given the low-level psychic pain I incur when I don’t shave the yak properly.
The problem feels under-discussed almost because it correlates with these positive traits, or is even caused by them. The need to swirl around information that pings ‘important’ in some illegible way is deeply familiar. It’s pernicious because it can leach out into those incidental areas like time or friendship, even if it looks from the outside to be harmless.
And this brings me to a category of people who perplex me, and that I want to somehow help: the people who are only happy when it rains. I have a lot of sympathy for them, because many of the common, popular, optimized information platforms incentivize the need to be negative. It’s hard to wake up and to choose not to be sad or angry, to self-indulgently cram pointless facts about potential enemies.
I try to alert myself when I do this, but it’s difficult to shake out of it— sometimes, more difficult still to notice. And yet it hurts to see others consumed by information, because they may soon be enveloped by Ideas. Having concrete, definite opinions is risky, because others can attack them. In the same way, it’s a bad habit to get into; because the tendency to form and hold beliefs is an attack surface for any dangerous Idea that chooses to involve itself.
Paranoid, maybe, but I try to stay on the meta-level like the floor is lava. I do this because it’s absolutely not the default. With a decent amount of self-restraint, I spend most of my time in the weeds anyway, despite thinking that it’s harmful. With none, it’d be none, and I’ve gotten a little better; it’s a learned skill.
I don’t know that these half-hearted, faulty defenses are better than constantly ruminating on the individual cases of every given case study that I can’t affect. It’s certainly a less passionate way to solve problems, though probably a better one, and it loses first-blush appeal in that trade-off alone.
But, that said, it does make me sad when people don’t (or can’t) think this way, because it makes them sad and angry. Moreover, it seems like they want to feel negative, and in that case, it’s tough to find a way to help.
Thanks, rubber duck, reader: you’ve made me write this out, at least, and that’s a start.
Links for you (quick, miscellaneous:)
podcast interview (investment, non-technical, measured and pretty interesting throughout.)
podcast interview (online culture, etc. in an unusually thoughtful and considered manner.)
podcast interview (books, writing, productivity, priorities; again, measured and insightful.)
there’re some books somebody stole
there’re some card game traits people have
Thanks again; Twitter or email both work, if you’d like to tell me something.
Best,
Orion