Culkin: We shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us.
It wasn't McLuhan; it was his friend, and it highlights a key process: what we repeatedly interact with changes us, subtly or not.
“Tools” is vague and over-general; essentially, they’re anything we use to get a task done. Tasks include “communicating with friends,” “learning about current events,” “gaining social status,” or, very basically, “entertaining ourselves.” Today’s tools are not just the internet, but its manifestations -- access to anyone and any information, anytime, anywhere.
It’s an awful abundance; we don’t naturally know what to do with it. It’s highly analogous to how the caloric abundance of the past 70 years has corroded the metabolisms of most Americans.
Our Swiss Army knife for modern time-use is social media (including TikTok and other short-form video from out-of-network creators). Social media itself is not evil; the companies (at least U.S.-domiciled) aren’t intrinsically trying to harm us. They made new tools, and those tools, as Father Culkin said, ended up shaping us -- specifically our minds. Social media (Twitter, FB, IG, TikTok) delivers an infinite feed of information in its most reduced form: memes. Not jokey JPEGs, but irreducible bits of information/ideas, the way genes are the irreducible bits of life. Yes, genes have nucleotide building blocks and a double helix, but their sequence -- like letters in order -- is what makes life possible. Similarly, memes have words and grammar but convey the kernel of an idea, the core of information. They make knowledge possible. Just as 30,000 genes thrown together won’t create a human, 30,000 memes thrown together won’t create knowledge. A human arises from a symphonic sequencing of genes turning ON and OFF at different times in ways we don’t fully understand -- delicate, nuanced, beautiful. A coherent process weaves genes into a whole that seems impossible if you only look at the parts.
Knowledge/thought is similarly not just 30,000 bits of info smashed together. It is a building and weaving of memes into a coherent whole. It’s a deep, conscious-and-unconscious process of making meaning from the bits. You must build connections, stack one related idea on another to climb toward understanding and mastery -- to get to a place where the complex picture can be conceptualized and, with deep understanding, acted upon. That is knowledge. But social media at its core does the opposite. By delivering incoherent tidbits -- disconnected, ceaseless memes -- we collect unimaginable bits but don’t collate, process, or weave them into a coherent narrative. In fact, we’re training ourselves not to think deeply at all; our tool shapes us to jump from idea to idea rapidly and frequently, and to avoid feeling nauseated or vertiginous while doing it. We strengthen circuitry for switching (sort of), making our minds more nonlinear, nonsequential, and less able to link ideas, build a foundation, or erect a coherent structure of thought.
Social media (and specifically SFM) doesn’t intend to disassemble linear thinking, but it’s a clear consequence of the medium’s random deluge of disconnected memes layered incoherently in our minds, never woven into a whole.
There are understandable things SM does to juice retention numbers. Yes, algorithms promote content that maximizes engagement/time on site. That’s just the business model. It isn’t nefarious; it’s the CEO/board’s fiduciary duty to optimize results within the law. Humans respond to perceived threats with fear and engagement; same with in-/out-group tribal conflict. Moral or intellectual superiority battles engage us, but that misses what atomized, incoherent streams do to our capacity to think.
TikTok takes the problems of SM and supercharges them. Setting aside arguments about First Amendment protections despite CCP control, it can -- and likely has -- been used for propaganda. I see no clear rationale for letting this app operate as-is in the U.S. But it is and likely will continue to be operating; it must be understood, and we can even try to use it for good by making people aware of its harms on the app itself. Again, the fractured flow of discontinuous ideas coming sequentially in highly attractive, manufactured clips makes our minds friable and jumpy. Dance videos, cooking, clothing, gossip, gaming, celebrities, makeup, shopping, exercise -- whatever. In our brains these memes are stored as packets of information, but in post-processing there’s no there there. We aren’t weaving anything into coherent, overarching knowledge or thought. We are fragmenting our brains by temporally jamming incoherent pieces next to each other in our minds.
On a hard drive, fragmentation occurs when there isn’t enough contiguous space to store a file in one place. The file is broken up and stored in multiple places; reopening slows because the read/write head hops around to access the whole file. Defragging consolidates files to improve access. The parallel with SM is direct. Instead of one large pool stored contiguously, SFM packs disconnected information into memory -- even more harmful to mental coherence. True, fragmentation on a disc slows retrieval but preserves the whole; with SFM, what even is the whole? We amass a prodigious number of factoids, far more than our offline ancestors, but storing them willy-nilly makes accessing a coherent whole extremely inefficient, if not impossible.
This is why we’ve turned into a “vibes” culture. We can’t articulate why we feel a certain way; we just have a visceral, hazy sense. There are no first principles on which to build a reasonable perspective. After taking in so many disparate memes without a thread, we can only gurgle and growl when our gestalts are challenged. We feel like we know a lot when we’ve merely collected atomized ideas, never synthesized into a coherent whole.
I used to be there. I would wax rhapsodic about access to minds I never would have been privy to via Twitter. I could see what Marc Andreessen thought or a random, brilliant anon. And Twitter/SM really is a goldmine of information -- just not of more knowledge. Despite seeming contradictory, information does not necessarily lead to knowledge. One must play with and process information, fit it into mental models, and surface what’s incongruous with prior thinking.
A subset of people do this -- some consciously, most accidentally -- translating the firehose into useful knowledge. Ben Thompson of Stratechery comes to mind as a self-described Twitter/X addict, but he has spent hours per day for a decade-plus forcing himself to think deeply and write his own thoughts after sampling this infocesspool. Processing -- the critical element that turns X from atrophying to amazing -- can slip away easily. You can get busy at work and convince yourself you’re still getting 90% of the benefit if you read SM but don’t pause to synthesize. Processing is essentially defragging in real time. Skip that -- as most do -- and you get none of the benefit and start undermining your faculties the instant you passively consume. It doesn’t feel like it at first or even for a while. You’re still interested, semi-engaged, reading ideas you’d never be exposed to otherwise. Surely this is better than not being exposed at all…right? Wrong. That argument leads to vibes, irrational belief systems, and fragmented minds incapable of deep thought.
The instant we argue it’s better to read novel ideas even if we do nothing with them, we’ve lost the thread of individual thought. The purpose of information is synthesis into knowledge and action. Information for its own sake is fool’s gold, particularly nonsequential, meme-length information. A gene that codes for a protein making muscle fibers 10x stronger is worthless if never expressed and harmful if expressed in the wrong place at the wrong time. Imagine delicate ocular muscles suddenly overwhelmed by a 10x stronger lateral rectus. Both eyes would jerk outward, giving a disconjugate gaze and making binocular vision impossible. All because one novel gene wasn’t harmonious in its milieu. We care about what genes ultimately allow us to do. We should care about what memes ultimately allow us to do. And if they’re ingested via SFM, memes don’t expand our thinking and action capacity; they reduce it.