These days, media has changed a lot. For one thing, the news cycle is continuous. For another, it’s remarkably granular. Things that would never have gotten into the news at all, much less outside the local news, can be pulled from every corner of the country and fed into the attention machine, thanks to smart phones as both gathering and delivery systems. It’s like having the entire country under surveillance. And anything bad that comes up anywhere we can feed to the hungry populace.

Another effect of the changing media is that a lot of reporting and editorializing is done by non-professionals. The anonymity of the internet and the speed of the news cycle means you’re usually just getting a “hot take” that was done from a distance, and no one suffers any consequences if their facts weren’t quite accurate (which is often the least of its problems). You get armchair journalism that doesn’t cost anyone anything. You read a bit about something and shoot off your mouth a bit and move on to the next thing elevated to your attention. And the environment favors those who can churn out the most provocative ve content the fastest, so shallow provacteurs of all stripes are the primary beneficiaries and gain platforms they might otherwise have never had in previous years.

The culture of safetyism arose during the formative years of the media transformation. Before the age of smartphones. It changed and transformed over time into a new kind of phenomenon, or maybe not a new phenomenon but one with a remarkable new level of reach and influence. The ability of every person to carry a constant stream of emotional/moral narratives around with them allowed the existence of people to be defined by them (and by people and events at a much greater remove from them than ever before) in a much larger proportion to their daily life and their experience than was ever possible. You can live your mental life inside the structure of the new media. You can do the majority of your significant information gathering, thinking, discussing, reacting, and responding all within the confines of the digital world (or a part of the real world that has been heavily conditioned and informed by it).

That’s a new thing. That’s a change to the structure of how people learn and think and reason and react and evaluate all kinds of things about the world. It’s an entirely different rulebook and ecosystem. And we look at our world and wonder what’s happened to it, what has changed, how things got to be the way they are. And the answer is so plainly right in front of our eyes. It’s just something we did to ourselves. Maybe almost inevitably, considering what people are like and considering how the changes in technology and media have changed the way our innate architecture operates. People stare at the world through their phones and are so stimulated and aroused to anger and fear and concern and outrage. And they wonder how the world got so bad so fast and why they seem to be helpless to do anything about it, despite the amount of emotion they spend against it.

And they never seem to consider that the mechanism, the entire ecosystem, may actually be part of the problem. That at least part of the source of so much misery may actually be the very system by which they become aware and seek to confront it. That just by participating they’re actually driving things deeper and deeper into the problem.

The problem with the internet and social media especially is that it favors a particular category of information. Moral/emotional content. Not just one or the other, but both. Research shows that sharability correlates with moral/emotional content. And a quick list of the most viral words you can use reveals that almost all of them are centered around expressing or provoking concern, outrage, fear, anger, contempt, and disgust. As Yoda said, they’re not stronger, but they are quicker, easier, more seductive. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. And the narrative of the fight is the easiest one to quickly market in an environment where you may only have a single headline to gain the interest of a potential reader (and maybe only a few sentences to make your point). It’s hard to stand out in a sea on content, so you need to make your content and pithy and demanding of attention as possible.

I’ve read a few good books on the subject of how the way we receive information and the way we process information don’t line up properly. It’s a tricky subject, because the issue isn’t whether the data is correct, the issue is with how the data is gathered and how it is interpreted and acted upon (or reacted to) by people. That makes it very hard to argue with either the fact or people’s very strong feelings about them. And the urgency people feel in hearing it all justifies the work of the “journalists”, commentators, editorializers, pundits, and so on. It proves that people want to and need to hear about it. And they dig and dig to find anything else that will feed the narrative they’re marketing to, the story, the scandal, the danger, the outrage.

The problem with the way information, especially moral/emotional information is exchanged today is that it corporatizes it. I don’t mean that it reduces it to a means to make money, although money does get brought into it. Keeping your channel afloat means drawing views, and views mean revenue. Even if you aren’t in it for the business (and so many people and entities in the environment are), you’ll soon be in business even if you didn’t intend it, or have to be if you want to keep making an impact. The system is awash with money, it’s a fully commoditized process. The temple court is full with the tables of the merchants and money changers.

But, no the money isn’t what I mean. And this isn’t a criticism of corporations. They can be very useful and productive and powerful. But they come with certain structural challenges that just arise whenever you crate a social machine of that nature. And although we have some awareness of what those dangers are when it comes to big business, we’re less aware of how those dangers arise in the context of the social machine that is modern media and the trade in moral/emotion narratives.

So what do I mean by saying that this structure corporarizes moral/emotional information? Well first off, it pools power while removing those who wield it from the proximity of the things upon which it will be used. We all know the stereotype of the big corporate manager who doesn’t really know the people in their company and doesn’t care about them, maybe doesn’t even know what’s going on, they get reports and data drawn from across this huge company and make big decisions about how things are and what needs to be done. And they can fire hundreds of good people without ever needing to see them or work with them. They have access to a huge pool of data and collective power, and they can wield it to great effect. But they also do so with a lot of anonymity and I personality and distance that’s very different from, say, a small family business. Your bosses don’t know you and don’t care about you, except as an abstraction (a good or bad worker), and deal with you as an abstraction rather than as a person. The world they look over is so big, they can’t really bother (and realistically have no time) to consider small details about the granular realities of individual employee’s work. They just care about the numbers.

Social media has essentially turned us all into big corporate vice presidents of our own media moral/emotional media empires. We gather the numbers from across a vast swathe of people and places specially selected for our attention. We don’t know them, we’re not concerned with the details, except those that serve our bottom line or harm it, we don’t have to work with or live with any of the people. And the kind of power we wield is at a great, impersonal distance from its objects. It’s very different from the kind of intimate knowledge and experience and authority we have when dealing with, say, ourselves in our daily lives, or the way we treat our families, our kids, or our coworkers. It’s also different from the of efficacy we have in those situations. We’re embedded and invested, and we also have skin in the game. We can’t make sweeping or casual pronouncements or actions against others without some real cost to ourselves. In the corporate world, and in the world of modern media and social media, you don’t have to worry about any of that. You can safely make all the easy judgments and shoot all the arrows you like at people you’ll never meet. Having tangible risk and having a tangible investment in the lives of people around you but over whom you may have little control (neighbors, family, coworkers) affects how you will behave. It affects the information you get, how you interpret it, how you act on it. Moral/emotional content may arise less often or more often, it depends on your life and the lives of those around you. Statistically, it will probably be less extreme on average than whatever content get presented to you through the media. My average day tends to be pretty banal and involves a lot of basic things like work and errands and taking care of my kids and having various mild encounters with other people doing the same things. But somewhere in this nation of 350 million, there’s something crazy going on. And thanks to the immediacy of internet media, I can be right next door to it. Every single day. And that freaks me out. And that means I need to find out more about these dangers, seek them out even more, ferret them out, get fed more examples. And the world of experience and the amount of new channels for gathering and disseminating information are so big that they will be able to capture whatever it is I’m looking for. They probably won’t capture much more than what I was looking for. All those fine details and humanizations and especially perspective (all the extra stuff that isn’t part of the data that I was selecting for) gets left out.

The problem is, much like the so-called “junk DNA”, all that extra fluff that in previous times ande of the bulk of our daily information stream was actually pretty important. The junk DNA affects how the coding DNA is expressed. And it’s the same with all that baseline banal information. You mind is set at a level where it expects to have a certain reach for daily information gathering, gauges the general state of things based on the baseline values of what’s going on around you (95% pleasant, banal interactions focused around everyone’s daily lives), and judges the overall need for arousal and stress levels and reactions by those measures. Your mind is a bit like an ant colony. They receive information that provokes chemical signals from the ants, that provoke responses from other ant, or even from the whole colony. Most of the time it’s things like “there’s food over here, why don’t we get it” or “I need help carrying this thing”, but sometimes it’s “there’s a whole bunch of fire ants about to eat our whole colony alive”. It is possible for the whole colony to be going about their business peacefully or for the whole colony to be aroused for battle and be weaponized, depending on whether the chemical stimulus is there. We humans have stress reactions and fear reactions that affect our thoughts, our attitudes, our reactions. They affect how we see other people and how we respond to stimuli. They weaponize us. They weaponize out normal, working mental structures and instincts and ways of processing and responding to information.

So what would happen to the ant colony if you gave every ant in that colony a little chemical emitter that passed on the signals from every ant in the entire city, so long as it passed a certain threshold of urgency? What would happen to the colony? Well, first off, messages of a certain urgency would be favored and would quickly dominate. You would see a lot of upset ant running around like crazy. All the little subtle information, all the locally meaningful signals, would be drowned out and lost in a sea of urgency. There would be a lot of distress with a lot of unclear unfocused action. Ants would be going nuts about perceived threats that, while real, were not relevant to their individual situation, and were not representative of the general stage of things and the attitude they should take to it. They would probably get a lot less of the real day to day work done, and even if they did would be terribly stressed, because their emitters would be telling them they were in a sea of danger and enmity. They would have a very hard time sorting out when they really were in danger too. They would have a hard time figuring out what they actually needed to do for their actual colony, because their means for gathering important information and exchanging it and reacting to it had been radically altered. They would likely become quite obsessed about the signals coming from their emitters, so urgent and constant, and would miss out on what was actually, quietly happening around them. And if there was anyone who had a way of profiting from their attention to engagement with their little emitters, you can bet this would all be to their liking. Would the eggs get hatched, would the food get gathered, would the colony prosper from their new knowledge and connection? How would it affect their relationships with world around them, with other colonies? Remember, nothing they’re hearing is false. All we did was alter the scope and means for how their signals are gathered and distributed. We didn’t change anything about them or about the world itself.

In fact, that’s the problem. We radically altered how we gain and process information, but we didn’t alter ourselves or the world much and how they work. We’re onto just starting to catch on that we may not be able keeping up with our own cleverness and the ways we’re changing the world. We’ve changed the environment around us drastically, in both physical and mental spaces, and it’s hard for us to adapt to it because our instincts and mental and emotional structures, our means for assessing and drawing conclusions about the world around us, were made for a very different process. We keep wondering how people changed so much, or how the world changed so much. But the truth is, people haven’t changed, and the world hasn’t changed in its nature either. What’s really changed is the medium between them, the way that we access and understand and react to the world and ourselves. We sort of took for granted that the pipeline itself was a neutral entity, and what it was carrying was what was changing or what was receiving it was changed. But I think we need to seriously consider whether the pipeline itself, how it works, is not a neutral matter. It isn’t of little substantive significance how it works. It’s not just that it’s a little faster moving or draws from a broader reservoir, or that it does it in a slightly different means. It’s a massive change to the whole landscape of human interaction, and one we were not entirely prepared for. At the least, all it took was the right circumstances for it to have some major unforeseen results. Because we didn’t understand the inherent risks and challenges and distortions. We were already living with some version of them, in a lesser form, before, in fact we have been for ages. We just took it so much farther than anyone had ever dreamed, to impossible to imagine places.

But surely, we say, it’s better to know? Better than to stick our heads in the sand? Surely there are vast challenges that present themselves collectively, before which an individual focus seems almost selfishly and unjustly myopic? And to that I would say, certainly, there is a place for such long-view insights into the broader dangers and problems that beset the world. But, I don’t think that’s how humans were designed. And I think the foundation of any approach to our problems needs to begin with an understanding of who we are and where we actually have efficacy, authority, understanding, investment, restraint, and power. And I think the foundation of all of that is first and foremost, in the individual. In our own lives. And next in our family. And next among our close coworkers and neighbors and among other who labor beside us in our community. That is the foundation of our strength, as well as the battleground of our nearest dangers. Our greatest threats and dangers lie much closer than Washington or New York or Hollywood or red states or blue states. Our greatest dangers and our greatest responsibilities lie within the scope of our own hearts and minds. And if we lose sight of that, and if we lose sight of the colony around us, there’s little hope for us us accurately or effectively grasping or addressing the problems that beset the world. In the end, all those problems have to be faced by actual people. And if they are good people, strong people, wise people, they will face it well. If they are confused, if their perceptions are distorted, their reactions misaligned, then they will not be able to accurately and successfully judge what the problems are the need dealing with or how they should be dealt with. A treatment is only as good as your diagnosis, and if your diagnostic machine has been severely altered, then you’re going to get all kinds of readings that will likely cause you to exacerbate rshtet than curr the problem. It’s also simply the case that humans aren’t gods. They have a limited amount of meaningful knowledge they can achieve in any given area or situation, a limited number of meaningful relationships they can maintain, a limited amount of energy and time, a limited amount of insights and abilities. And the world has a vertusoly limitless amount of problems for people to throw their efforts and emotions at. People need tangible, personal, situations over which they have some measure of tangible personal control and efficacy. Otherwise they get depressed, jaded, angry, resentful, impatient, and judgmental.

Our media environment (and the moral/emotional narratives that drive it) is basically teaching us that the world is constantly attacking us, and that we need to always be seeking out our enemies and responding and attacking back. It’s driving us toward war, not peace. And war for all good causes, all for things we really care about, all dangers that we really in some way face. What would you expect of a generation raised in such an environment? Is it any wonder that they’re suffering from terrible anxiety and symptoms of depression, anger, and mental distress? Is it any wonder they feel the need to shut down the alarms that rouse them and seek safe spaces? That they turn themselves into warriors against a world around them in which they see constant threats and evils? That they feel righteous and justified in the crusade? That those who question them are spurned as traitors and supporters of death and tyranny, as callous deniers with their heads in the sand, sleeping fools who houses are burning? Awake and see the world burning, is the message on everyone’s lips, regardless of where they stand or where they think things should go or are heading. Wake, be aroused! Wake up to the world of fire and war and revolution around you?

And what should we expect of such a revolution, wherever it proceeds from, whichever side prevails? Wisdom? Peace? An accurate and subtle understanding of the problem and how to fix it, avoiding any excessive and misguided consequences? When the corporate fixers come in from outside to cut the fat and reorganize the company, do we expect to see it all go peacefully and perfectly, with no one harmed? Or will this revolution simply be followed by another, as each new CEO passes through, testing their theory, taking apart the company and disrupting the work, only to have someone new take their place and do it all over again when they fail the next year? Will anyone learn anything from such a process? Or simply complain that the strategy was not tried properly with enough commitment and zeal, or it was ruined by the swing to a different strategy, or it was this or that person’s fault. Will chasing the need to defeat the other strategies inadvertently ruin the ones we pursue, and our confusion push us to just blame the others all the more? When do we have to admit that our efforts are simoly not working and not making the problem better, but worse. And not because the world or the people were trying to fix are so awful, but because we don’t really understand or know how to treat the problem? How much of our frustration belongs at the feet of our own misguided process?

So where do we go? Is the new media simply so dangerous and distorting that we should drop it altogether and give up on the knowledge and communication it brings? If it’s taking us away from our proper focus, if it’s endangering our fundamental basis for understanding and reacting to our lives, than I would have to say yes. For the young, almost certainly. It seems to be too dangerous for their minds to expose them to it. Unfortunately that’s who embraces it and desires it and is affected by it the most. At the least we need some distance. We need a break. We need to pull back so we can get a different kind of perspective. We could all use a vacation to get inside our own lives a bit more. The world has changed. People have changed. Because we changed the conditions for how those things communicate. I’m not sure that we can turn back the clock. I’m not sure many people will want to. And it would be terribly hard to give it up, something that not long ago we never imagined we can hardly imagine living without. This is a feeling that requires further analysis, and I cannot say what it means or what I should take away from it. It’s precious, it’s addictive. Is that because it’s so good or because there’s something dangerous about it? Both maybe? And can it be managed? I don’t know yet.