“let the discourse rage without you”

Joan Westenberg covers a lot of ground in the post the discourse is a distributed denial-of-service attack. I will try to summarize and highlight what I found of importance.

A DDOS is an attack on a web server in an attempt to overload it so it can no longer function. The case that Westenberg refers to is one where thousands of internet devices — not necessarily computers — were pointed at the website of security expert Brian Krebs. As a side note, I would recommend Krebs’ Mastodon feed.

Westenberg goes on to show that the online social media space has become a massive distributed denial-of-service — for our collective brains. There is so much information — not all fake news but a lot of false information shared by people — that vies for our attention and we cannot cope with it.

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. 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.

“I’m not saying the topics are unimportant. I’m saying the structure of the discourse prevents us from thinking well about even the most important topics,” Westenberg states. Even experts fall victim to the DDOS discourse. They try to provide nuance but the cannot get attention so they have to dumb-down their statements to get any traction or just go offline.

I’ve watched this happen to people I know. Intelligent, curious, open-minded people who got deeply involved in online discourse and gradually, imperceptibly, became incapable of the exploratory thinking they used to do. Their opinions calcified. Their curiosity curdled into suspicion.

Westenberg’s comment on the revival of tribalism caught my attention as that was the topic of my last post — a reversal to tribalism.

My argument is that the current structure of public conversation has the same effect on human cognition that a botnet has on a web server. It’s simply exhausting you. And an exhausted mind defaults to heuristics and tribal allegiances, aka whatever position allows it to conserve the most cognitive energy.

In the online space, everything is happening at the same time and something new — and probably interesting/exciting/frustrating — is coming along immediately. It’s doom-scrolling all day long. The final advice Westenberg gives reflects what I counsel in using the PKM framework. Take time to make sense.

Find some topic you care about. Just one. Resist the temptation to have takes on everything else. Let the discourse rage without you while you spend weeks or months actually understanding something. Read books about it, not takes. Talk to experts, not pundits. Follow the evidence where it leads, even when it’s uncomfortable. Change your mind when you find you were wrong. And when you finally have something to say, something you’ve actually earned through careful thought rather than absorbed from the tribal zeitgeist, say it clearly and then step back.

Mimi & Eunice