Why?

The great irony of the modern age is that we are adrift in a sea of digitalised knowledge and there’s not a drop to drink. Not because the waters of education are too salty, but because there isn’t a taste for learning to quench.

Each of us hold in our hands more knowledge than any one scholar can hope to work through in their entire lives, yet we use it to encase ourselves in a tomb of echo chambers, overstimulation, and shallowness.

That’s not to say novelty and entertainment is without value. The arts are just as much a casualty of disinterest as the sciences. New, exciting, unique artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers are desperately trying to reach out and offer you novel and original experiences. At the same time, more and more seminal masterpieces are being added to the public domain every year, affording more people free access to such iconic works both for their amusement and to add to their own creative endeavours. Yet not only are new creatives struggling to garner attention, but there’s an entire generation of their would-be audience who have deemed anything outside their narrow window of acceptance as “cringe”.

How did this happen?

Part of our struggle to understand this lack of interest in learning or trying something new comes from how little we appreciate just how much information is out there. Just because we built the Internet doesn’t mean we are best to navigate it. Afterall, the Internet is just a network of billions of servers, computers, and lines of code talking to each other. While there may be only a handful of sites that we regularly visit and use (Google, Amazon, Facebook, TikTok), the overwhelming majority of the Internet is made up of hyper-specific forums, academic portals, and unpublished websites. My father used to be subscribed to a magazine dedicated solely to telling you about new websites, whether they were for online games, fandom news, or novelties like pictureofhotdog.com (yes, that is a real website).

The Internet is so vast that criminal services are conducted out in the open on the “Dark Web”; parts of the Internet so hidden you would never stumble upon them by accident. The “Dead Internet” theory hypothesises that the Internet is so big that most of it is the result of AI chat bots talking to each other non-stop.

There is simply too much to expect any one person to reasonably wade through. And for what? Maybe seeing something mildly interesting?

The irony is only further compounded by the fact that a well of scientific literature is forced to stand alongside opinions and “hot takes”. While there is merit to communicating your impressions on current events, media, and life, there emerges a false equivalency that an opinion is just as valuable, if not more so, as the topic’s expert.

If you open social media and see two posts, one saying vaccines are safe and the other saying they aren’t, without any further investigation or critical analysis, how is anyone to decipher which is true? Both are presented side by side, both seem creditable, and both are new to you. Best go with the only logical answer; what do you think is true?

Psychologically, it’s very comforting to think you have all the answers. It’s very rewarding as well. Social media, once meant to be a place of connections and mutuality, has become a platform of one-person spitting hastily typed out waffle, spelling mistakes and all, being praised with likes, subscribers, and sponsorship deals. Social media, podcasts, and short form content are dominated by conspiracy theorists, “Alpha men”, and sensationalist bigots who have built careers off baseless claims and the weak defence “I’m entitled to my opinion”, caring more for their right to speak than what they’re saying. Social media is anything but social now.

If this is how influencers think, imagine how the influenced think.

Of course, who has time to think nowadays? Despite improving technology and productivity, the average person seems busier than ever. Between work, school, children, errands, appointments, bills, and mild inconveniences, who has time to stay up to date with the news, or research politicians for an upcoming election, or listen to an author being interviewed about their work?

Most people’s lives are dictated by a simple mantra; just do it. Nike may own the slogan, but when your boss is ranting about deadlines, customers are screaming their orders, the kids are crying for McDonald’s, and you only have ten minutes to run to the shops, it might as well be your personal motto for how you get through the day. Just do it. Life is already hard enough without giving yourself homework, especially if it won’t make things easier. At the end of a long, hard day, when you just want to grab a drink, your phone, and your blanket, why not also grab an oversimplified news headline, an easy to remember political slogan, or an out-of-context soundbite to make things easy on your weary head?

The truth is exhausting. It’s upsetting. It’s maddening. Learning about genocide, about preventable but prevalent diseases, about the lived realities of other people is extremely distressing, especially when you must accept the fact that not only were you unaware and wrong about these matters, but that it makes living with such overbearing knowledge draining. Who can live like this when it doesn’t solve the real problems we face?

Sometimes, curiosity does more than just kill the cat.

Curiosity has become an atrophied muscle. Whether it is a cause or a result is unclear, but, in either order, it’s accompanied by ease. Our most productive and progressive advancements as a species has been in pursuit of ease. How do we make agriculture easier? How do we keep records easier? How do we decide laws easier? With the industrial and digital revolutions came the zenith of this pursuit for ease; automation.

As things became easier, there was less of a demand for competency. A machinist was needed to assemble one car. Now a line of robots can roll out thousands by the day. An army of phone operators connected the world. Now robocalls from around the world are leaving messages on seldom checked answering machines. Once you needed to type in a sequence of commands just to activate your computer. Now toddlers can navigate tablets multitudes more powerful than those computers.

The two major developments in eliminating human intellect in our lives have been algorithms and AI. Remember the pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine posts I mentioned earlier? In practice, only of one those posts would be presented to you, the more sensationalist one, based on a number of calculated factors in an effort to keep you engaged on the platform. Now realise, with the use of AI, that same post may be completely fabricated, designed in such a way as to make you not only accept the “information” as true but to also share it with others.

It's almost cruel to expect people to be aware of systems of control that are designed to never need explaining. When there is no need for you to know better, how can you?

The results of this tidal wave of disinterest are even more destructive than the causes. While higher education and academia have always been plagued by elitism and classism, it is the rise of anti-intellectualism that has forced experts onto equal footing with the loudest, dumbest, and most self-centred individuals with followings in the millions. It has created a generation so devoid of curiosity and experimental vigour that they have coined the term “rotting” to describe the quiet, nihilistic acceptance that their leisure time will only ever be spent mindlessly consuming soulless, AI slop. In a world where there is no curiosity for the truth, censorship and propaganda have reached unparalleled heights, conflating fact and fiction unchallenged.

But worst of all, what about our humanity? While we have books, records, archives, and journals, both digital and analogue, to answer any query we may have, when we do choose to exercise our pitiful brains, nothing can surpass the wealth of knowledge one gets from asking another human being, who, through virtue of simply existing, deserves to be heard, questioned, considered, and learnt from. Perhaps they are a master in a field. A witness to a defining historical moment. A demonised demographic yearning to be heard. Or perhaps simply an acquaintance you wish to know better.

Whatever the case, humans are simple and always enlightening when given the chance. Yes, it’s hard. Scary. Sometimes fruitless. Often boring. Why bother? Why not?

#HI