Isn’t it great to have the world’s largest brain in your pocket?

Google anything. You’ll have an answer to the most obscure curiosities in milliseconds.

Message anyone. You’ll know what your friends and family are up to in the time it takes to tap a few keys on your phone.

Look at everything. Is that spearmint or poison ivy? Take a quick picture and let the internet settle the question like a boss.

Wow, we’re a lot more plugged in to the collective intelligence of the human race than we were back before the digital revolution! By now we must all be raging geniuses, right?

You’d think so, wouldn’t you? And yet here we go from day to day, not only still being stupid, but suddenly capable of spectacular stupidity – stupidity on a scale that causes national crises with the regularity of rain.

So what happened? Why, with more information at our disposal than ever before, are we so fucking dumb?

I have a few likely culprits.

The Like Button

To begin with, what does it mean when you click that thumbs up or tap that heart? Are you telling the original poster that you really appreciate the content? Are you telling all your friends this is the kind of stuff I like? Who are you talking to when your vocabulary is the like button?

Well no matter what you think the answer is, there is actually one and only one answer: you’re talking to an artificial intelligence.

The raisson d’etre of the like button is not for you to communicate with people. It’s for you to communicate with an algorithm. No matter what you think you’re saying or to whom you think you’re saying it, what you’re actually doing is training an AI to recognize what you like.

What’s wrong with that?

Because you don’t get smarter by seeing piles of things you already know. Instead you get dumber – you start to think that you know things you don’t actually know. Your opinions start to feel like facts because your world starts to look full of people who agree with you. You become less capable of dealing with having your opinions challenged, and you start to think you’re a genius.

Hyperpolarization

Once the internet gets a good feel for the content you prefer to see, it’s not long before you’re hopelessly trapped inside an echo chamber of similar opinions. So what happens when someone inside your bubble starts posting content you disagree with?

You make fun of it, of course.

The simplicity of memes and short form content like tweets is optimized for 24 hour verbal sniper fights. We don’t have time to talk. More importantly, the people who are reading our smarmy online comments don’t have time to listen, and we have to give our audience what they want, right?

Discourse on the internet has degenerated into a pissing contest. Who can come up with the most effective 30 second zinger? The inevitable result? The most popular content (and thus the most visible content) is the stuff in which we hate each other and have ridiculously firm opinions that can’t be swayed.

As long as the internet remains ad-based, this problem isn’t going away. Gone are the days of enlightened discussion, replaced by the certainty that you are the one true thinker and the world is neatly divided into people who strongly agree with you and those who passionately disagree. And since your arguments garner way more engagement than your attempts to take other people seriously, you’d better believe that ad-based social media platforms would rather see you utterly polarized than quietly getting along.

Instant Gratification

Nothing says you’re special quite like those first two hundred likes on your latest selfie, am I right?

With millions of people vying for your attention every hour, are you personally more likely to click like on a short, easy to take in post like a photo or a long, well thought out dissertation on the importance of secularism to preserving the cultural heritage of a diverse population?

Right.

So why are you so convinced that you’re special when a lot of other people click like on your post?

I mean, congratulations. You’re at the top end of the bottom of the barrel: the short form bullshit that people are willing to give some attention while they’re scrolling through their news feeds. But thanks to all those hearts and thumbs up you’re convinced that you’re a legend, and you keep striving to produce content that will get you even more hearts and thumbs.

Effectively appealing to the lowest common denominator is the secret to maximizing your likes and faves. It is not the secret to creating intelligent content. But who cares, right? I mean, look at all those likes!

Cultivation

Ah, pretty girls. The internet is just loaded with them, isn’t it? Not just girls, either, but heart stopping sunsets, clear blue skies, kittens with blue eyes that make you just melt inside…

Life is so damn beautiful.

I mean, except for the parts that aren’t. Like the power lines that got PhotoShopped out of that sunset, or the fact that the kitten’s eyes were really more gray than blue before you popped that filter on the photo. And how many selfies did you take before you chose the one you posted? Is that profile picture really what you usually look like, or is it the most flattering one you could find?

Living online means we live in a carefully cultivated version of reality that highlights only the best of everything. You are immersed in a daily feed of unreality that has steadily eroded your appreciation of actual beautiful moments because they look different than the photos you’ve seen.

Not all women have D cups and a thigh gap. Not all sunsets are on the other side of a lake with a mountain in front of them. And not all kittens have eyes like jewelry.

Curated reality is damaging your acceptance of actual reality.

Clickbait

You know what advertisers love? They love engagement. And you know how they measure it? They measure it in clicks.

Clicks are money, friends. Any platform selling ad space wants you to click. It instantly adds +1 to an authoritative looking tally on someone's spreadsheet in an office in Silicon Valley.

They want content creators to optimize for clicks. They don’t care much about what you do after you click, so the actual content doesn’t mean much. Once you click, they’ve got your +1.

Nope, just make sure you choose a good feature photo and write a headline that gets people to click. Once the platform determines that you get a lot of clicks, they can repackage that tally as “reach” and get people to pay them for ad space to get in front of all those +1’s.

And since quality is secondary to quantity, guess how quickly intelligent content travels around the internet?

Democratization

Ever notice how many writers, photographers, musicians, models, actors, talk show hosts, indie game developers, and artists there are on the internet?

No, I don’t just mean the good ones. In fact, I’m talking specifically about the bad ones. The ones who never could have called themselves writers, photographers, musicians, etc. back before the internet.

Many people are old enough to remember the world before the digital age. Artists struggled in obscurity for decades back then, and many never made the cut at all. With the advent of the internet, something wonderful happened. We all got a shot.

At, like, everything. Even if we suck at it.

The result is pretty predictable. Photo sharing sites overflowing with shitty photos; web publications churning out poorly researched garbage once an hour; modeling websites full of terribly lit mirror selfies of girls who don’t actually know what a model is supposed to do.

Finding anything worth consuming on the internet is becoming more of a chore than it’s worth. Younger people these days might be inclined to think that this is just the normal order of things, but believe it or not the various industries of the arts used to have an expertly crafted editorial process that ensured, for the most part, only high quality content ever got put in front of your eyeballs.

Then technology democratized it all, and we were forced to learn the hard way that just because we can give everyone an opportunity doesn’t mean everyone deserves one. We literally made it too easy. We threw the door wide open, and idiots ran through in swarms.

Like a Grimm fairy tale, the story of the internet comes with a moral at the end. With great power comes great responsibility. Unfortunately, the tech giants are in no hurry to own that responsibility because the insurgency of stupidity is good for their share values. Large audiences are more valuable than educated ones.

What we’re left with is an out of control epidemic of stupidity that doesn’t seem to be going away. Out of all the things that the internet has been responsible for, this is actually the most transformative, and it’s not to our credit at all.