Your brain is under attack by the discourse itself.
In 2016, a botnet called Mirai took down security journalist Brian Krebs’s website through sheer volume. Hundreds of thousands of devices were all demanding something at once until the servers simply gave up. That’s what’s happening to your capacity for thought.
Every day, the infinite scroll serves up a new outrage requiring your immediate opinion: climate change, AI, immigration, whatever the President did. The discourse doesn’t need to trick you into thinking badly. It needs to make sure you never have time to think well.
In this video, I explore how modern public conversation has become a cognitive DDoS attack, exhausting your mental resources until you default to tribal heuristics and pre-packaged takes. I look at why false information spreads faster than truth, why expertise has become impossible to communicate, why we have endless opinions but almost no understanding, and why the same arguments keep happening forever without resolution.
Remember:
The feeling of being overwhelmed is a predictable result of an impossible situation. It’s not a sign of personal failing…
References:
William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890)
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936)
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
Subscribe for more essays on technology and culture!
