The Internet Made Me Stupid

February 2, 2023

It is overly generous to say that, on the internet, one can find a wide variety of information. It is somewhat more truthful to say that, on the internet, one can find a wide variety of people arguing the same two or three talking points regarding the same two or three phenomena, regurgitated on a weekly basis for the purpose of "making one think." I have been on the internet reading the words of people who claim to be thinking since I was too young to be able to think myself, and for all that I am much stupider than anyone else on the planet, and much stupider than I could have been had I never aspired to be smart.

On the internet, memetic trends determine which subject a particular subculture will be discussing each week. This subject is then divided into two distinct adversarial positions, and then, dialectically, into a third position that bases itself on a disavowal of both. The argument morphs and transforms over the course of a week, as two becomes three, and then three becomes two, until finally, in the annals of human history, all becomes zero.

This layer of argumentation spread out over the entire internet gives a strange meaning to the term "being online." "Being online" means being too online. However, it doesn't mean someone who spends too much time online; someone can spend every waking hour scrolling through feeds and not be particularly "online" at all. "Being online" is not just surfing the web; it's about actively participating. It's about developing an emotional and intellectual investment in the discussions that occur online. It's about playing a part in what is called "The Discourse" and choosing a side in what is called "The Culture War."

I know that at least one person over sixty reads this website, so perhaps we need to define a few terms. "The Discourse" is a phrase that denotes whatever subject or collection of subjects is being talked about online at the moment, particularly on Twitter. "Engaging in the discourse" is when someone makes a tweet that proffers an opinion or observation regarding a popular topic, or, as is more often the case, makes a tweet deriding someone else's opinion or observation, often with some spicy newfangled insult that they hope their target doesn't even understand.

Subjects relevant to The Discourse also pertain to The Culture War, which is an all-consuming superstructure that subsumes many familiar antagonisms: political left vs political right; urban vs rural; rich vs poor; racial divisions; national divisions; rivalries between sports teams; people who like Harry Potter vs those who don't, etc, etc. The current idea online is that the world is divided into two extremely ambiguous and ill-defined camps that somehow straddle every one of these issues, fighting out this grand war in the metaphysical realm of the internet, much like how Angels and Demons fight it out in The Aether for the souls of mankind.

The Discourse is always related to the Culture War, because the Culture War framework can literally be applied to anything. The argument does not even need to apply to humans or human ideas: animal behaviours, physics, geological phenomena — these can all become a part of the Culture War, as long as one person disagrees strongly enough with another person on the internet.

Or rather, as long as one person appears to disagree strongly with another person on the internet. Because we must always take into account the fact that everything on the internet has the high chance of simply not being real. The event in question may not have taken place: the video may have been doctored or staged; the quotation taken out of context or simply made up. Or, on another level, one of the people arguing, or putting forth an opinion, may not be in earnest regarding what they are saying. They might be joking or being sarcastic; they might be saying something they don't mean to get a rise out of someone; they might be lying, either for their own benefit or someone else's; or they might just be high on mind-melting drugs and performing the equivalent of leaving a recording to their future self congratulating them for "escaping the time loop."

All these potentials combine to make it extremely foolhardy to take anything on the internet particularly seriously. We used to say online: "The internet is serious business," aka "The internet is srs bsns," i.e. the internet is really stupid, and decidedly not serious at all. It's somewhat passé and archaic nowadays to claim that everyone you are arguing against online is a 13 year-old boy; however, I have a feeling that this is just as true now as it ever was. Most people arguing online are arguing against thirteen year-olds, and if you're not arguing against a thirteen year-old, it means that you are the thirteen year-old.

This is the case in a literal sense, by which I mean that there are a bunch of 13 year-old boys arguing online about topics they know nothing about. Thirteen year-old boys are the ultimate nihilistic creatures. To a thirteen year-old boy, nothing is real. If they want to escape from life, they can just play a video game, and everything disappears. They have no stake in the world, and no basis for their opinions; their arguments make about as much sense as the sentences of a baby first learning to talk. (Source: I once was one.) I don't even mean any of this as an insult. Just as I don't blame a baby for speaking nonsense, I wouldn't blame any thirteen year-old boy for going online and making bad arguments. It's part of growing up. Hell, it's probably good for them, in some way.

A thirteen year-old boy arguing on the internet is fulfilling his natural purpose: arguing on the internet is an essential part of being thirteen. It's the perfect activity for him: he gets to espouse ideas that he just came up with with utmost confidence; he gets social validation from the fact that no one can tell for sure that he is thirteen; and, most importantly, he gets to annoy the hell out of adults, for whom life is a real thing and not just a weird game.

But what's really going on here, on a more metaphorical level, is that the thirteen year-old boys online are not necessarily thirteen years old. They might be forty years old, and they might not even be a boy. The symbolic thirteen year-old boy is whoever takes the argument the least seriously, whoever has the least to lose. The thirteen year-old boy is whichever party understands that when they walk away, win or lose, nothing has changed, because "the internet is serious business."

In this argument between a thirteen year-old and a non-thirteen year-old, who is the winner? Apodictically, it is always the thirteen year-old, regardless of who is right or wrong. The thirteen year-old boy wins on the basis of being the only one who understands the game. The internet is not a debate club. We're not in an Oxford auditorium here. There are no rules, and there's no reason to operate under the assumption that there are rules.

Now, this may make it seem like the thirteen year-old boy is a good position to be in. I mean, they win every time, right? And it's true that, if you're going to play a stupid game, you may as well play it in a stupid way. Of course, if a game is truly stupid, then playing it is only going to make you stupider, regardless of whether you're winning or losing.

The trouble with being the thirteen year-old boy is that it's an intrinsically dishonest position. The thirteen year-old boy is playing a character, inhabiting a persona, and this is precisely that allows them to win even when they lose. The outcome doesn't affect them as a real person, because their real personhood was left at the door. The disastrous consequences of this are apparent, and I don’t need to get into it here.

So, if the "winner" here is the thirteen year-old boy, who will slowly but surely destroy himself unless he at some point decides to grow up, the loser must be the adult who has grown up but is still arguing with thirteen year-old boys. Because even if you are factually correct, you're still wasting your time proving your correctness to a thirteen year-old boy who doesn't care.

In real life, adults don't really argue with thirteen year-olds, except at minor league sports games. This exception is caused by the incongruous circumstance of a thirteen year-old boy (the referee) being given authority over adults (the coaches/parents,) in the guise of having authority over children (the players.) While funny, this exception is not particularly important.

Normally, when an adult disagrees with a thirteen year-old, they shrug it off as a result of immaturity, or send them to their room. Maybe, if they're a teacher or a relative, they will attempt to humour the thirteen year-old in order to help the thirteen year-old develop their critical thinking skills. Importantly, they do not become emotionally involved in proving the thirteen year-old wrong.

This phenomenon of an adult arguing whole-heartedly with a thirteen year-old boy is a natural result of the anonymity or pseudonymity (living under a fake name/persona) inherent to the internet. In real life, you tend to know who you're talking to, and can temper your emotional and intellectual investment accordingly. If you're talking to a friend or colleague about an intellectual subject, you may choose to set your emotions aside. If you're talking to a friend or loved one about an emotionally charged subject, you will argue in earnest, with the understanding that the other side is also arguing in earnest. This emotionally charged subject may seem somewhat trivial to the outside observer; for example, a couple may argue about whether it's okay to leave one's socks on the floor of the bedroom. This might not seem to be worth screaming about, but we have to consider that there's often more going on here than meets the eye. The sock on the floor is not only a sock on the floor, but a symbol. To the sock-on-the-floor-disliker, it is a symbol of slovenliness or carelessness, which itself may imply a certain disrespect for the household or the sock-on-the-floor-disliker themself. To the person leaving the sock on the floor, this attack on their sock placement may be taken as a personal insult, or an example of the sock-on-the-floor-disliker blowing things way out of proportion. In the end, they're arguing about something that feels important to them. Arguing about symbols may not feel Real, but it is in fact the Realest thing one can do.

I lingered on that example in order to indicate exactly what isn't happening when two strangers argue online. Even if the topic is important to one or both of the online arguers, they have no way of assuring that this is true of the other, or that the other has any interest in making this discussion beneficial to anyone. When two people in a relationship argue about a sock on the floor, what is at stake is the relationship itself: they must agree on at least some level about these trivial matters in order to stay together, and if they can't, it's over. That's a big deal. That's meaningful. That's developing a human relationship, even if that development eventually leads to its destruction.

Now, it may seem like I'm making a big deal out of nothing, and that's exactly what I'm doing. The fact that adults and thirteen year-olds go online and argue with each other is not that big of a problem in itself. Yeah, it's a waste of time for the adults involved, but people are free to waste their time if they like. They can choose to stop arguing with thirteen year-olds at any moment.

The problem at hand is that there is a bigger loser here: a hidden, ultimate loser lurking in the shadows of all these arguments. And this loser is you and me: the person reading an account of an adult arguing with a thirteen year-old boy. There are far more of us than there are thirteen year-old boys and the people arguing with them, combined. More, by a frankly terrifying margin. And it is us, more than anyone else, who have destroyed the internet.

An adult sitting in the stands at a minor league hockey game watching an adult coach argue with a thirteen year-old referee can recognize the absurdity of the situation. However, online, it is easy to make the mistake of taking an argument somewhat seriously, by assuming that the two parties are operating in good faith. When one becomes accustomed to this style of argument, where both parties are unknown quantities with zero inherent respect for each other, it's easy to start conceptualizing the world via the framework of a Culture War that is steadily dividing the entire world into intransigent factions. This framework may even bleed into one's own thought processes, as you construct absurd strawmen in the opposite camp to test your ideas against. By creating strawmen arguments, what you are essentially doing is inventing a thirteen year-old with which to argue, thereby making the thirteen year-old boys of the world entirely redundant, leaving them more time to play video games, which is in fact their ultimate victory.

People who believe in good-faith debate as an ideal are continually frustrated by the internet, because the internet actively makes people stupid and fundamentally worse at conversation. Everyone on the internet is a strawman, and no matter how many characters you allow each post to contain, this will always be the case. Arguments only mean anything when the two people arguing mean something to each other, as people. As a person in your family, your circle of friends, or a member of your community. This is simply not the case with most people you encounter online. And this leads to arguments that are not two people talking to each other, but two people using each other to signal something to a third party: the audience reading the argument. It's like watching two politicians argue on TV. Even if the politicians believe that they believe in what they are saying, there is much too convoluted a tangle of irony and cynicism and public spectacle for any of it to mean anything.

We don't watch politicians argue on TV in order to learn anything. We watch because it's entertaining. It's kind of fun. Much of the original culture of the internet, including the ironic idea that it's "srs bsns," was founded on the fun-ness of watching two people argue online, with the ultimate joke being that both sides are wrong by virtue of choosing to enter into an online argument. The fact that you can't tell who's the adult and who's the thirteen year-old boy is a part of the fun.

It seems to me that the only healthy way to engage with the internet is as entertainment, and a particularly vapid form of entertainment at that. However, recognizing the vapidity and inanity of online arguments doesn't actually save you from internalizing their essence. It's so easy to become wrapped up in the miasma of online argument as vapid entertainment only to find later that you have accidentally become emotionally involved in a whole new way: that you have developed a sincere hatred for the internet, and see its fakeness and stupidity as a genuine problem that needs to be solved. But this itself is just another form of taking the internet seriously! It is taking the very unseriousness of the internet seriously.

This is the state of most cultural critics, and in fact many of those who so decry the internet and the Culture War. They yearn for a better future for the internet, lament a fake past of the internet, or simply despise the internet as a concept. They hold the internet responsible for a whole series of problems that existed long prior to the its development: problems that are actually problems from the Real World that were devoured by the internet and spat back out with a new watermark.

This is the third position that builds itself upon the disavowal of the other two. This disavowal may seem freeing, but in fact this disavowal only makes the internet serious once more. Nietzsche wrote, "He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself thereby, as a despiser." This despiser also esteems himself as a despisee, i.e. someone worthy of being despised. In the same way, the man who disavows the internet as fake and stupid himself esteems the internet as something worthy of being called fake and stupid.

All three sides here are in trouble. What we are seeing is not a Culture War; it's just a bunch of people arguing online. It's people arguing online in Real Life. Taking place in the real world does not make an online argument any less online; however, what it does do is highlight the absurdity of the entire situation.

As Don Jolly once said, "There's no war but flame war." And the only reasonable reaction to a flame war is to sit far enough away that you don't get burned. As the flames get higher, they beckon; they entice you with their colourful dance. Rather than backing away, you approach, you get drawn into the flames, and then... You're in Hell!

The fact that I feel compelled to write this essay at all proves that I have allowed myself to submerge too deep. It is proof that for all I have learned through the internet — all the books I have been introduced to, all the interesting facts I have digested, all the artworks and ideas I have been shown — I have paid a dear price. As a lonely young man, it was only natural that the internet would become my home, and it was only natural that I would shape myself to fit within it. Now, as I attempt to break free from the way my mind has been melded, I find that I have missed so much, that I have spent so much time and energy engaged in virtual trivialities to the detriment of my well-being.

It sometimes feels that with each essay I write, I am marking a new beginning. That I am eternally casting off the old ideas and clothing myself in the new. With each step, we emerge at a new level in the development of Balckwell, and the start of a new journey. And thus we say,

BALCKWELL RISING!!!!