Dissense

In the words of a favorite comic, something is wrong on the internet. In a previous essay, I demolished the notion that how we consume information on the internet, specifically the process of distilling and refining who we read, contributes to the “crisis” of political polarization in our country. So thorough was my excoriation of this specific correlation, one respondent imputed a “boundless libertarian optimism” regarding the internet and its uses at large. Sadly, the truth is anything but.

In fact, not only does the internet create and augment terrible trends in how we eat our info, but we don’t even notice. As we worry about “political extremism,” the internet is making us smug, slothful, sinful gluttons.

Problems at the Poles

First, an admission: polarization is a problem. To what degree and what significance, I won’t debate, but I’m more than willing to acknowledge it’s problematic at some level. The President himself, perhaps channeling this discussion, raised the issue recently in strikingly alliterative form. Said Obama: ”I do think that we now have a pattern of polarization…in part because of how the media covers politics.” Cass Sunstein, as mentioned previously, has devoted a significant number of his endless stream of publications to the subject, including most recently, a book.

The problem, though, is conversation isolation, not information distillation. You are what you say, not what you read. This is even clearer when we isolate the conflated claims of critics: the problems of vitriol, anonymity, immediacy and unaccountability. Illustrating the first of these, an email critic of particular vim once shocked Richard Dawkins by calling him a “suppurating rat’s rectum.” Vivid and disturbing though that image may be it doesn’t address our problem: consuming information on the internet.

In fact, the piddling problem of a polarized discourse points, perhaps, to perilously profound perverse pan-American patterns pulling our populace apart. Put into English, our charged rhetoric actually hints at bigger problems on The American Scene: geographic isolation, institutional decay, even the deification of the “practical science,” as our postmodern West kicks the remains of Aristotle to the curb. But none of these problems stem from political polarization, nor is the Internet a but-for cause. Thus we are compelled, inexorably, to return to the real question: what’s wrong with the internet?

What’s wrong with the internet?

Of course, I’m speaking far more precisely than the grandiose title would suggest. A better question would be, what’s wrong with how we consume information, in an internet age?

The dangers are seen most clearly if we view our diet of information in terms of virtue and vice. Modern infoconsumption combines more than one of the seven deadly into a single tempting trap. Specifically, the internet’s stream of interesting things invites gluttony, promotes pride, and induces sloth. (An aside: while I’ll employ moral terms, the concerns themselves are not merely, or necessarily moral.)

Bad: Gluttony

This complaint seems obvious: hook yourself up to the fire hose of the internet, and you’ll be a walking bag of hypernatremic bloat in no time.

As Tyler Cowen pointed out in his most recent book, human beings get a sense of satisfaction, and attach value to completion, particularly when it comes to media. Who among has not sat through 120 minutes of movie misery after realizing in the first seventeen that the film wasn’t worth the celluloid it was printed on?

We all have, and thanks to human nature, we have a predisposition to do so, regardless of our degree of cinephilia. The internet magnifies this tendency endlessly. Scanning another blog post, reading the key graf of another essay, watching the best fifteen seconds of an interview, glancing at the piece of fantastic graphic design: each gives us the same sense neurological satisfaction as another slice of bacon. Yet just as a pound of bacon a day makes the heart function go away, eating info this way can be sickening.

As with all gluttons, the act becomes divorced from the meaning and purpose, engaged in solely for its own pleasure. I read Apple news ostensibly to ensure I’m a well-informed shareholder (it forms the entirety of my portfolio, an utterly indefensible investment strategy that has proven astoundingly successful). Nonetheless, my justification wears thin when reading my 17th iPad review. Put in more highfalutin fashion, Yves Simon noted that “placing happiness in sheer naked existence is a metaphysical mistake of the first magnitude.” Finding happiness (or pleasure) in sheer naked consumption is equally mistaken.

Even when I spend an hour reading philosophical tracts or legal news (my intended profession) or discussions of how to acquire a clerkship, more often than not, I swiftly veer from actually accomplishing something into a “useful information” gourmand. The randomness of Twitter links, the purity of RSS streams, the flood of “cool” things in Google Reader’s Explore tab: the filters only deal with quality, they don’t limit the total. In unparalleled fashion, the internet pushes us to consume pieces of info for consumption’s sake.

Sadly, being a glutton isn’t the worst of it.

Worse: Sloth

What’s worse than becoming the world’s premier expert on ways to restructure your finances or the intricacies of the brilliant (insert your philosopher/theologian/suppurating rat’s rectum here)? Not doing a damn thing with it.

As Ramit Sethi loves to note, there’s a special class among the people who read finance blogs. They comment, email authors, haunt forums. But the overwhelming majority fail to do, well, anything. By do, I mean, actually apply the lessons about how to automate spending or prioritize investments of time and treasure. Why? Perversely, reading about these things seems to satisfy the imperative that would otherwise demand action. Humans take glee in creating to do lists and finding answers. It’s an easy salve on the conscience.

This problem is as old as time, but it’s magnified infinitely in an age where you can research any conceivable problem and scratch that nagging itch without taking your fingers off the keyboard. The answer to your problems is always a mouse-click away, so why worry about implementing right now?

Worst: Pride

Believe it or not, gorging yourself on information to the point of near insensibility and degenerate sloth gives rise to pride, the deadliest sin of all. Don’t take my polemical word for it: studies have shown it’s true. Most recently, as profiled in the Guardian, a pair of Canadian psychologists discovered that feeling virtuous leads directly to indulgence of vice.

The study revealed that after merely exposing consumers to green products (that is, goods branded as “eco-friendly”), people were more likely to engage in vices, specifically cheating and stealing, as well as lower levels of altruism. The participants in the study acted as if they had earned moral capital which they could spend on sin. Remember that fact: the moral calculus shifted with statistical significance merely by thinking of the possibility of doing something “good.”

This tendency damningly illustrates the worst part of our internet infofeasting: it’s not the bad things you eat that harm so much as the good. Just as the glutton won’t grow any thinner if he swallows gallons of Rasputin as opposed to Reibenbach, all the Bertrand Russells and George Wills in the world couldn’t cure what ails this process. In fact, the more a person read of people grappling with hard questions, the more self-satisfied they’d become. A better internet, with a perfectly fair and balanced discourse, would only satisfy the “don’t be a polemic” voice in the consciences of extremists.

In Conclusion

Of course, the internet is not the only variable in our personal moral equations. Nor is it the only cause of any of the problems described. Nonetheless, it touches upon human nature and psychology in a profound way that can cripple our ability to create new things, solve problems, and make moral judgments. And that’s what’s wrong with the internet.