This is a topic to discuss Joan’s post of the same name.
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In the olden days of neatness and email we would sometimes quote parts of each other’s messages and respond in lots of little snippets. It’s often not a good way to have a technical discussion, but it felt social. It was with extreme nostalgia that I created the following massive response. 
The Discourse is a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack
The attack succeeds when the system has spent so much energy processing requests that it can no longer serve its actual function.
A DDoS attack happens because something is trying to listen to the whole world (the whole internet). In the olden days you could do that. Today you can’t.
Most of the topics that dominate our collective attention on any given day are genuinely important to… someone. And many of them are important to almost everyone.
Absolutely NONE of them are important to most people in the world, or even most people on the social platform you’re on.
Of course it doesn’t feel that way when you’re drinking from the firehose.
The problem is structural. The total volume of things-you-should-have-an-opinion-about has exceeded our cognitive bandwidth so thoroughly that having careful opinions about anything has become damned-near impossible. Your attention is a finite resource being strip-mined by an infinite army of takes.
New motto:
→ You do not want to be listening to strangers. ←
Don’t let anyone or any thing into your life without an introduction by someone you know and trust. If my friend Bob introduces me to Jane, then I will be willing to look at Jane’s messages.
Local political disputes in New South Wales? Nobody in Washington DC gave a shit, and vice-versa. This was as close to optimal as we’ve ever got.
Agree 100%. When newspapers were gatekeepers, it was a big deal when they were corrupt, because people depended on them and trusted them. These days nobody is really surprised when billionares own newspapers and use them as personal mouthpieces. Too many people feel like they can “route around” them.
What Cognitive DDoS Looks Like
I think it’s clear that social media is bad for people. IMO the problem is that we don’t have a compelling narrative to convince people to stay away from it.
It’s my instinct to say we should build a better thing and then convince people to use the better thing. But that’s not how people work. You have to make them afraid of the thing they’ve got because that juices their limbic system.
So my new attempt is: Don’t talk to strangers!
You have to assume that anyone you don’t know is a bot, a paid influencers, or a con man. This includes people who forward you true stories! The way radicalization works is by telling victims the truth, but they choose the biased-but-true things that they send you. And it’s not just radicalization, it’s the entire global discourse that works the same way.
From Passive to Participatory
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Silence is interpreted as complicity, or at least as suspicious.
I suspect the feeling that you are obliged to respond is much stronger than any observers’ negative judgement on your silence. Thinking that everyone is watching you all the time is part of the trap.
In Middlemarch George Eliot writes
Nice reference there, I’ll have to read more of it.
The economy is going to shit! And how dare I suggest that people should care less about these things?
These things wouldn’t be such large problems if people cared more about what’s going on in their own back yard.
What’s the right carbon price? How should the burden of decarbonization be distributed between developed and developing countries? What role should nuclear power play? How do we balance climate concerns against other development goals?
These are hard questions.
Those hard questions have already been framed. The questions themselves exclude certain kinds of thought and feeling. We need more people that we trust curating those issues. Thinking about them, caring about them, explaining them to us. If every influential figure starts with an opinion and then tries to convince people, nobody is trustworthy. I need people who start from ignorance and then share their learning. Those are the people I trust.
each of which generates heat and engagement while bringing us no closer to answering any of the actual hard questions.
In the olden days we evaluated online discourse based on “heat to light ratio”. These days it’s all heat, no light. A true fact forwarded by a biased stranger provides no light, just heat.
There is a critical distinction between having a position and understanding a subject. Having a position involves knowing which side you’re on and being able to articulate a view.
IMO anything that has two “sides” is already dumbed down way past the point where it’s worth any of my attention.
You can have a position on something without understanding it, and you can understand something without having a confident position on it.
Yeah, “position” is heat. “understanding” is light.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell remarked that the fundamental cause of trouble in the world is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
aka: “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”
I think the discourse has broken this relationship. It’s not that intelligent people have become stupid. It’s that the incentive structure of public conversation
“public conversation” is a contradiction of terms.
It feels like a conversation, but it’s not. It’s social junk food.
You had journalists who checked facts, editors who pushed back on weak arguments, academic peer review that caught errors, and a reading public that had time to actually read long articles and form considered opinions. Each layer could fail, and often did, but the failures were usually independent of each other, so the system as a whole was reasonably robust.
Overlapping areas of responsibility is the way humans build large complex system out of humans. It’s redundancy-by-overlap, not redundancy-by-duplication. It’s the way organic systems evolve.
An Ecology of Virality
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Lies can be exciting and simple, perfectly calibrated to make your side look good and the other side look bad.
Anger and fear motivate more strongly because historically they were more likely to keep you from being betrayed by someone you trust or eaten by a lion. Trust in your social unit and physical safety are evolutionary survival requirements.
The Impossible Position of Expertise
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When you ask an expert a question, you’re essentially borrowing their cognitive labor.
You’re not borrowing their cognitive labor, because that’s not a social relation. It’s not a thing people do. What you’re doing is trusting them to have a useful opinion, because they have convinced you they have done research and unmotivated reasoning to reach an incremental conclusion. Earning that kind of trust is not rewarded with cash and prizes so it’s rare.
This creates a vicious cycle. Experts withdraw from public discourse because it’s frustrating and unrewarding,
Yes!
In Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground the narrator talks about how consciousness is a disease. The more aware you are of everything, the more paralyzed you become. You can see all sides of every question and understand all the complications, and as a result, you can’t actually do anything.
the best lack all conviction
Meanwhile, the stupid people of action, the “men of iron,” barrel forward confidently, untroubled by doubt, and end up running the world.
the worst are full of passionate intensity
The discourse doesn’t just waste your time while you’re in it. It permanently rewires you.
Yes!
The discourse doesn’t merely DDoS your attention. Over time, it DDoS’s your character.
The DDoS metaphor implies something is doing it to us. But we’re doing it to ourselves. As you say above, the botnet is us.
Let me try another analogy. In computer science, there’s a concept called the halting problem:
Discourse is inherently emotional and irrational. It doesn’t execute like a program. Therefore, there is no expectation that anything will ever halt. The metaphor doesn’t work for me. But that’s me.
Even if I personally stop engaging with the outrage cycle, the cycle continues without me, and I become less able to participate in public life as a result.
No, no, no. You become MORE able to participate in public life. That is, if “public life” wasn’t a contradiction in terms. To the degree that it’s public (global), it’s not real life.
Opting out of the discourse is possible, but it has social costs, and it doesn’t do anything to change the dynamics for everyone else.
Look closely at what those “social costs” really are. I suspect they are mostly illusionary.
The Loss of Aura
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Walter Benjamin wrote in 1936 about how mechanical reproduction was changing our relationship to art.
Another cool reference!
Must read more about it.
Every attempt to discuss the problem becomes another piece of content, another take,
There are places to have that conversation other than the public firehose. Private forums, etc.
to step away from the flood long enough to do some actual thinking.
Thinking by yourself is not enough. It needs to be collaborative but outside the firehose.
Find some topic you care about. Just one. Resist the temptation to have takes on everything else. Let the discourse rage without you
Yes!
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Fantastic piece Joan, thank you!
A world of infinite information “delivered at such volume and velocity that reading any of it becomes impossible” reminds me of Clay Shirky’s “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure”
The world was always big and complex but today we try to digest more information about it. How most us act today is not well considered. We’re eating infocandy morning, noon and evening, every day, all the time.
We should limit the intake. Anyone who has done a news fast knows the feeling of clarity and calm that arises after a couple of days. We all need that sensation.
We should also shape the intake to needs and wants that are clear and more thought through. I think we need to select and filter, test what seems important, learn from that, improve our filters and so on.
A short remix of your suggestions Joan:
- Limit your information intake.
- Do some meditation or yoga to calm your mind.
- Find a topic you care about.
- Read books about it.
- Talk to experts.
- Follow the evidence where it leads.
- Change your mind when you find you were wrong.
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Joan makes a distinction that I find important, even if he never names it explicitly. It’s not that we want to know everything, but rather to be aware of everything. Being aware works like gossip: fast consumption, social signaling that you’re up to date. Knowing, on the other hand, implies something else entirely: time, friction, real cognitive work. And almost the entire contemporary system seems optimized for the former, not the latter.
That may be why exhaustion isn’t limited to the digital world. Even though the article focuses on online discourse, saturation goes much further. Choosing a coffee from a hundred options is also exhausting. And the same goes for almost any product. Too many options for something that should be simple. In theory, mental bandwidth should be reserved for important decisions, but the market does the opposite: it spends it on everything.
The friction we’ve removed from shopping — one click, 24-hour delivery — we pay for in decision fatigue.
From that angle, the guy watching Netflix while eating Doritos, so often despised by productivity gurus, also makes more sense. I’m not sure it’s laziness. Maybe it’s someone who’s already spent all their energy deciding, reacting, processing information. After hours of cognitive friction, there can’t be much willpower left.
On top of that, there’s another layer: the wellness industry. You walk wrong, eat wrong, sit wrong, breathe wrong, have sex wrong. Every “optimization” adds a new cognitive load.
The wellness industry doesn’t free you from exhaustion, it intensifies it. Now, on top of deciding which coffee to buy, you have to track your sleep, meditate, journal, optimize your posture. The promise is wellbeing; the result is often more fatigue.
The article mentions that disappearing has social costs. I’m not entirely convinced. It does if you have a business, and in that sense I agree — I’m there myself. But outside of that, more than losses, what I see are missed opportunities: books you don’t read, films you don’t watch, flowers you stop finding in the trash.
In fact, in an attempt to reduce that fatigue, I unsubscribed from all newsletters. Even the good ones. I preferred having space. What’s interesting is that the void ends up being filled with other things anyway. The difference is that now I’m more selective: less time, fewer promises, more honesty about what I’ll actually use.
I also abandoned the idea of “building a second brain,” partly because of a text by Joan. Most of what I know comes from books I’ve read, from ideas scattered across physical and digital notebooks, from notes I almost never return to. And yet, the ideas that really matter stick. They lodge themselves during the first reading. They obsess me. And when I write, it’s usually soon after, before they cool down. Never by returning to a neatly organized archive.
I don’t condemn the internet. Searching for flowers in the middle of the trash is worth it, even if it takes effort. This community is one of those flowers. But even writing this leaves me exhausted, and it won’t bring me any economic benefit. Still, I participate. Which, as the article itself suggests, is probably just more steaming shit being added to the pile.
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Co-signed! Over the past few years I’ve done the same thing to my own feed, repeatedly. At first it was because I was overwhelmed. But when I was finally able to keep up, I now felt like the past self who designed the feed was oppressing me, taking up all the oxygen in my mental space. I pruned much more, and space returned. It was wonderful.
What’s interesting is that the void ends up being filled with other things anyway. The difference is that now I’m more selective: less time, fewer promises, more honesty about what I’ll actually use. [emphasis added]
This describes my recent experience so well. I took a hard look at all the things I thought I might get to, articles in the feed and books on the shelves and projects on the “someday” list. Then I thought about the years I have left — not too many — and the rate I’m able to do things — ever slower as I age, less efficient, less diligent, less urgent — and had to acknowledge that I’d get to almost none of them.
But realizing that was liberating. Topics I’d been studying for years, I decided I knew enough about and could be done with. Topics I had hoped to get to, I decided there was really no point, especially if they crowded out the few that were still important to me. I cut my feed way, way back, donated most of my unread books to the local library, threw away my “someday” project list … and found myself luxuriating in days where I read at whim, for pleasure, with no pressure to accomplish anything beyond understanding the world a bit better — the parts I find interesting, anyway.
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I feel like people can run on at least two different operating systems. I’ll call one “commitments”. You make commitments to people wisely, you meet your important commitments. You are careful not to overextend yourself. Every day you wake up and prioritize. I think the other operating system is “construction”. That’s where you’re always building things. Building knowledge, building relationships, building a project, building a plan. It’s not so much about whether the thing you’re building is the highest priority thing, but whether the thing itself feels like it has value. If I thought I was going to build one thing and then I ended up building something else instead, that’s not a big deal as long as what I build was worth it.
I need a certain amount of unstructured time for my unconscious to remind me what’s important. If I don’t unwind my brain and give my unconscious a chance to talk to me, then I get all wrapped up in tasks and commitments.
If I turn on my default mode network (by turning off the other networks) then stuff just pops to mind. If the stuff that pops up feels like a commitment, then I write it down someplace useful so I don’t forget it. I’ll get to it when I reenter “execution mode”. When I’m really open, I start to remember things that were exciting to me once but I’d forgotten all about them. I just think of stuff. If it’s a task, I write it down. If it’s really exciting I just go start doing it. I don’t have to finish, but starting something when you’ve just had an idea is a great feeling. Put it aside when you get the essence captured or finish the first phase. That’s what “unstructured time” looks like for me. It’s not most of my day, but it’s an important part to keep my soul alive.
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I like this very much — discovering and choosing directions over setting objectives. It reminded me of this quote from legendarily cranky musician and sound engineer Steve Albini:
“To the extent that I could care about that, I would say yes,” he [Albini] replied. “I’ve lived my whole life without having goals, and I think that’s very valuable, because then I never am in a state of anxiety or dissatisfaction. I never feel I haven’t achieved something. I never feel there is something yet to be accomplished. I feel like goals are quite counterproductive. They give you a target, and until the moment you reach that target, you are stressed and unsatisfied, and at the moment you reach that specific target you are aimless and have lost the lodestar of your existence. I’ve always tried to see everything as a process. I want to do things in a certain way that I can be proud of that is sustainable and is fair and equitable to everybody that I interact with. If I can do that, then that’s a success, and success means that I get to do it again tomorrow.”
I am thinking that “life goals” are different than projects which can be accomplished. I can see that some people might ask “without goals how can you plan?” I think we’re talking about life goals. And I agree with you. It’s not healthy to try to control your life the way you would control a project. IMO the best life is lived with attention on how you live it rather than what you’re accomplishing.
“Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” ― Dolly Parton
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Agreed! In my own case, I’ve tried to notice what actions take me to a better place and then lean into those. And though I can’t justify it, I’ve concluded that focusing on the welfare of others tends to improve my own situation. Plus it’s enjoyable and rewarding! What other reasons do I need to spend my time on that?
I really learned a lot from Joan’s essay. Here in the US we get a lot of “flood the zone.” Creating of issues just to keep other issues from getting dealt with. It reminds me of a lyric by Elliot Smith: “she solves problems with bigger problems.“
AI slop and advances will exponentially inflame this situation.
I have been a software developer all my life, and now that I am old, I can no longer find work. So I have only very recently started refocusing my time on writing music. I learned how to go into the mental state of “flow“ a long time ago. Now I no longer need a warm-up or transitional 20 minutes to get there. There can be email notifications, CNN blaring on the TV set, curiosity about what my friends might be up to on social media, etc., etc., but I can peacefully and contentedly focus on my art. I still worry about what is going on in the US and occasionally post somewhere my alarm.
I do use The New York Times as my curator for news, With that I am content to let the rest go.
Thank you again, Joan
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