May 28th 2025 Newsletter
A thought: Follow your curiosity to find your heart.
I’ve been thinking about what being in online spaces does to people. I listened to a podcast recently about the descent of Kanye West, I would have described him at one point as one of my favorite musicians, into a deranged lunatic shock jock. The combination of fame, posting disease, pre-existing mental instability, and trauma broke him.
I know many of us have experienced relatives, kids, parents, friends who have spiraled due to the many societal traumas of recent years combined with too much time on the internet.
I wonder if some of the dangers of the internet are not isolated to just being on the internet.
Like Kanye, you need a little bit of a toxic stew…
Traumatic life change
Lack of social support system
Access to the internet and social media
Pre-disposition to conspiracy theories
This one is complex but I think you’re more likely to fall prey to dangerous internet brain if you already have conspiracy brain.
Poor media literacy
56% of americans don’t read at a 6th grade level. I’d venture this statistic is getting worse as less people actually read.
We all develop media literacy according to the media of our generation and the internet is no different. Younger generations view the Internet as their entire life and miss the challenges created by it, older generations view it like they view TV and fail to see the bad actors lying to them.
Perhaps to really be brain broken by the internet, you need a toxic stew of some or all of the above.
That is to say, the internet is dangerous for our most vulnerable, those going through difficult times and unable to use their support system to support them.
That’s scary, man.
Basically social media makes our lows lower.
When you sit with that a minute, the hand washing that X and Meta are doing of responsibility for what happens on their platforms becomes even more disgusting. They know that they’re helping destroy lives and they do nothing.
The government could act but, let’s be real, that ain’t happening.
Maybe the first thing to do when we notice someone (or even worse, us) going through a tough time is encourage them to delete their social media accounts.
You might save some lives. Perhaps even your own.
I left that first part with two questions
What’s happening to these people who are going off the deep end?
Aside from flinging your phone into the sea and burning your social media accounts, can you avoid falling prey to online enabled insanity?
I’ve referred to this previously as posting disease, the addiction to the internet.
If you’re paying attention, posting disease is everywhere.
One example that drives me particularly nuts is people recording video of critical events at concerts and sporting events. I’m not sure these people are totally aware of what they’re doing but these people are recording or photographing events to share somewhere else rather than experiencing them. This would have been exceedingly strange to someone in 1998.
Why would someone do this?
I believe the answer is that they’re more interested in the likes, the heart emojis, on the video or picture they’re going to post on social media than they are in experiencing the thing themselves.
That’s posting disease. You stop focusing on living your life, you start focusing on reactions of others to your posts about your life. It is an addiction.
You get the high of the likes, you start chasing that high, you start worrying more about how people will react to your post rather than your own actual experience.
Social media rewards extremes, you get more extreme to get reactions. If you’ve got any of the conditions I mentioned above, this can get worse and darker, like how a drinking problem gets worse when things are going poorly in your life.
So, to question 2, I think there is a way to limit posting disease.
If you’re going to be in online spaces posting, you have to ignore the reactions.
Post tweets that you created because you like them.
Post blogs that allow you to process things you’re interested in (this is my goal here).
Post pictures that you love.
Post videos about things you care about.
I heard a professor say on a podcast recently that he did his academic work for himself so that he could better understand the world. That’s the right spirit.
Post because if you didn’t you’d be saying the same things to your dog.
If you do it for you, and make the focus what you can create not on what the crowd wants or thinks about what you create, I think you can stay sane.
I’ll be honest though, I think you’re playing with fire. I know I am.
I mentioned in a previous newsletter that Sam Altman said that kids were using AI as a life advisor. Maybe the critics are right that the human brain is melting into a pile of mush and we are all subordinating ourselves to the machine.
The optimist viewpoint is that sometimes we all need a sounding board.
Maybe your friends aren't all that helpful, maybe you aren't all that excited about digging into this issue you're facing with a parent. Why not try the generative machine to see if it comes up with something interesting?
The devil is in the details of course.
Like social media, the impact of AI on people's brains will be complex and nuanced. Especially as AI becomes more locally installed and fractured ideologically, you'll see some people start to have breaks with reality (like Kanye). People will always use tools to do people stuff, and the most vulnerable will always be the most impacted. Technology is just a tool, humanity will always do what humanity has always done.
The picture is much more complicated and nuanced than AI bad or AI good, just like social media.
I've been thinking about my own usage of social media and other than as a diversion I can think of relatively few good things it's brought to my life.
There was an era where being on social media made you different and thus allowed for more social connections but since everyone is on there now, it doesn't anymore.
I have found some genuine support via Reddit for a variety of life challenges, everything from going through IVF to buying a new raincoat. But Twitter or Facebook hasn't proven to be much more than a distraction or a headache.
Juxtapose this against AI. In just the last couple weeks, AI has helped me with coding, it created a fishing plan for my beach trip, and I used it as a sounding board to discuss a friend who's going through a mental health crisis and has been leaning on me for support. You could do all this stuff in other ways, but there is some value that AI brought to each of these situations, using the power of the Internet to provide a perspective that I found really useful. I struggle to believe that any social media site would have been able to do any of those and certainly not all of those without taking a lot more time and making me more annoyed in the process.
I would rather having people talking to a friendly Internet chat bot than the entire world that is suffering a collective nervous breakdown on social media.
Our brains are not built for how social media functions.
Talking to the AI feels more familiar, like having a text conversation with a very verbose and intelligent friend.
Rather than firing things off into space and getting a variety of inane to insane responses, you get one response that algorithmically wants to give you want you want.
I think we will see people start to drift off of social media as they see they don't have to live like this.
I'm hopeful. There will be downsides but I don't think we will be as collectively insane.
One of the goofier AI use cases is drafting emails.
With copilot, we now have people drafting long emails with AI and summarizing long emails with AI.
This isn't an indictment of AI! People use shortcuts to avoid things they don't like doing.
Maybe skip the long email next time.
On a similar note, if people are using AI to apply to jobs and companies are using AI to screen candidates, maybe the job application process is broken. Can we please try some new ideas?
Here's one for free….
Have everyone who applies for your job record a short video explaining why they're the best candidate.