Why is the Internet so terrible?

I think one of the premises of the Enlightenment was that if you gave everybody free and transparent access to information, people--being endowed by their Creator with the power of reason--would act in their rational self-interest and the aggregate result of an informed populace making rational choices would be awesomesauce. I think that what we discover in the Modern Age, much to our chagrin, is that people aren't so much rational as we are bundles of cognitive and perceptual biases. 

 

So when you give people unfiltered access to a firehose of pure information, what happens isn't that we make lots of reasonable informed choices; what happens is that we latch onto and amplify the information that confirms and reinforces our beliefs and/or the information that comforts us, and then we make our choices from there. 

 

Which leaves us in a very awkward position. We could admit that people are basically terrible^† and the philosophical frame that has animated Western Civilization and provided the foundation for our political and economic systems for the last several hundred years was based largely on wishful thinking.  Or we could blame the relatively new tool that finally gave everyone the unfettered access to all human knowledge and instantaneous communication that we all thought we wanted and thought would make a more democratic and humane world.

 

 

 

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^†People are also wonderful.