The Discourse is a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack, an especially cogent piece of writing, well worth close attention. These are the passages that spoke especially to my reading:
...the botnet is the discourse itself ...our collective attention...an exhausted mind defaults to heuristics and tribal allegiances, aka whatever position allows it to conserve the most cognitive energy.
...the structure of the discourse prevents us from thinking well about even the most important topics.
...The discourse takes the most important problem of our time and converts it into an infinite series of tribal skirmishes, each of which generates heat and engagement while bringing us no closer to answering any of the actual hard questions.
The discourse doesn't help us think about things. It helps us perform thinking about things, which is a different activity entirely.
...the gatekeeping function has now been distributed across millions of individual users, each of whom can boost any piece of content into viral prominence if it happens to resonate with the right combination of tribal anxieties and engagement incentives. The feed is infinite, and every slot in the feed is optimized to make you feel something strongly enough that you'll engage with it. Outrage works, and so does fear. Disgust works, and righteousness really fucking works. Nuance and careful reasoning don't work at all, because by the time you've finished a thought that begins with "Well, it's complicated..." someone else has already posted a much simpler take that makes people feel validated, and the algorithm has moved on.
...There is a critical distinction between having a position and understanding a subject. Having a position involves knowing which side you're on and being able to articulate a view. Understanding a subject involves knowing why the question is hard, what the best arguments on various sides are, where the genuine uncertainties lie, and what evidence would change your mind. You can have a position on something without understanding it, and you can understand something without having a confident position on it.
The discourse is great at generating positions. It's terrible at generating understanding. In fact, it actively undermines understanding. Understanding involves sitting with difficulty and ambiguity, while the discourse rewards confidence and clarity. Understanding involves admitting what you don't know, while the discourse punishes uncertainty as weakness. Understanding involves engaging with the best version of opposing views, while the discourse treats opposition as either stupidity or malice.
...When many ideas compete for limited attention, the ideas that are best at capturing attention win, and those that aren't good at it die out. This creates selection pressure toward attention-grabbing content, which tends to be extreme, emotional, simple, tribal, and visceral. The ideas that survive aren't the most true or useful. They're the most viral.
And virality, it turns out, has almost nothing to do with truth or usefulness.
...False information is more novel and surprising, so it generates more engagement. False information is often designed (or evolves through memetic selection) to be emotionally compelling in ways that true information isn't. The truth is boring, complicated, inconvenient for everyone's narrative, and resistant to simplification. Lies can be exciting and simple, perfectly calibrated to make your side look good and the other side look bad.
False information spreads faster because it's easier to process. It fits neatly into existing mental categories. It confirms what we already believe. It doesn't force us to update our models of the world or sit with uncomfortable ambiguity. True information violates our expectations and takes cognitive work to integrate. When attention is scarce and cognitive bandwidth is being DDoS'd constantly, we don't have the resources to do that work. So we default to whatever is easiest, which is usually wrong.
...One of the main functions of experts in a healthy epistemic ecosystem is to compress information. A good scientist knows a lot of facts about X, but more importantly they know which facts matter, how different pieces of evidence fit together, and where the genuine debates are versus where there's solid consensus. When you ask an expert a question, you're essentially borrowing their cognitive labor. They've already done the hard work of understanding the subject, so you don't have to.
But the discourse hates expertise. Or rather, it puts experts in an impossible position. To engage with the discourse, an expert has to compress their nuanced understanding into takes that can compete with the confident nonsense being spouted by random accounts with anime avatars. This compression loses most of what makes expertise valuable in the first place. The expert ends up sounding just as confident and simplistic as everyone else, because that's the only way to be heard. Meanwhile, the expert's nuance and uncertainty get interpreted as weakness or evasion. Why won't they just give us a straight answer? Probably because they're captured by some special interest, or because they're part of the establishment cover-up, or because they're just not very good at their job.
This creates a vicious cycle. Experts withdraw from public discourse because it's frustrating and unrewarding, which leaves the field to confident non-experts and degrades the quality of public understanding, which makes it even harder for experts to engage productively when they do try to participate. The result is an environment that's actively hostile to expertise while claiming to value science and evidence.
...In computer science, there's a concept called the halting problem: the impossibility of writing a program that can determine, for any arbitrary program and input, whether that program will eventually halt or run forever. Alan Turing proved in 1936 that no such algorithm can exist. The halting problem is undecidable.
The discourse has something like a collective halting problem. Every controversy generates commentary, and that commentary generates meta-commentary. Where does it stop? When is a topic resolved? When can we move on? There's no algorithm for this. The discourse doesn't halt. It just continues until something newer and shinier captures our attention, at which point the old controversy doesn't get resolved so much as abandoned. The underlying issues remain, waiting to resurface the next time something triggers them.
This is why the same arguments keep happening over and over. We never actually resolve anything. We just get exhausted and move on to the next thing, and when the topic comes back around, we're exactly where we started, having learned nothing in the interim. The discourse isn't a process that converges on truth over time. It's a holding pattern. We circle endlessly without ever landing.
...Walter Benjamin wrote in 1936 about how mechanical reproduction was changing our relationship to art. A painting in a museum had an "aura," a sense of presence and authenticity that came from being in the presence of the original. Mass reproduction destroyed that aura. Benjamin thought this was mostly a good thing, democratizing access to culture. But he worried about what would be lost when nothing felt special anymore, when everything was just a copy of a copy with no original left to anchor it.
Every thought, every argument, every position now exists in thousands of variations, all slightly different, all competing for attention, all copying and remixing each other. There's no original anymore, no authoritative version, no canonical text. Just an endless proliferation of takes, each one slightly tweaked for maximum engagement. The aura is gone. Every idea feels like a retweet of something you've already seen, because it probably is.
...the feeling of being overwhelmed, of never being able to keep up, of having strong opinions about everything and confident understanding of nothing, is not a personal failing. It's a predictable response to an impossible situation. Your brain is being DDoS'd, and the fact that you're struggling to think clearly under that onslaught is evidence that your brain is working normally. The servers aren't broken. They're overloaded. And until we figure out how to reduce the load or increase the bandwidth, the best any of us can do is recognize what's happening and try, when possible, to step away from the flood long enough to do some actual thinking.
Find some topic you care about. Just one. Resist the temptation to have takes on everything else. Let the discourse rage without you while you spend weeks or months actually understanding something. Read books about it, not takes. Talk to experts, not pundits. Follow the evidence where it leads, even when it's uncomfortable. Change your mind when you find you were wrong. And when you finally have something to say, something you've actually earned through careful thought rather than absorbed from the tribal zeitgeist, say it clearly and then step back.