Cargo Cult Civilization

STOP.

DO NOT READ FARTHER. BREATHE.

I dare you to read this ENTIRE essay, top to bottom, without stopping. Without checking your phone. Without opening another tab. Without returning to the feed.

If you struggle to do that, this essay is literally ABOUT YOU.

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” - John Culkin, on Marshall McLuhan

I need to say something dark. You probably already know this about me. But this is a little different, and I’m honestly kinda hesitant about standing on this rooftop. But here we are.

Your feed is not wasting your time. It’s not distracting you. It’s not even “addicting” you, though that’s closer.

It’s replacing your cognitive machinery with something else…

Something that feels like thinking. Quacks like thinking. Produces opinions and reactions and a sense of being informed. But it isn’t thinking.

And a population that can’t think (not “can’t think slowly,” not “thinks poorly,” but can’t think, period) is maximally controllable.

That’s the whole shootin’ match, not a sideshow.

Most writing in this space offers one of three frames. I propose a new one.

The moral frame: People are lazy. Shallow. Weak-willed. They should put down their phones and read a book. This is the boomer scold, the “kids these days” energy. It’s also wrong, also useless. The same degradation is hitting lawyers, professors, executives (people with demonstrated capacity for sustained cognition). This isn’t a “moral failure” distributed randomly across a population. It’s something else.

The psychological frame: Dopamine hijacking. Addiction. Variable reward schedules. Compulsion loops. This is more sophisticated, and probably partially true. But it’s description, not mechanism. Calling it addiction tells you what’s happening without explaining why it works so universally. Lots of things could theoretically be addictive. Why does this one hit so hard, so uniformly, across every demographic?

The political frame: Manipulation. Propaganda. Power. Dark psyops designed by sinister oligarchs to control the masses. Also probably partially true? But even the so-called elites are being optimized. I’m gonna bet that Zuckerberg doomscrolls too. The engineers building these systems report the same attentional collapse. If it were purely about political power, the powerful would be innoculated, or at least aware. But they don’t seem to be.

None of these frames are wrong, exactly. But, they’re insufficient. They’re describing the symptoms, not the disease. Here’s the frame that actually explains it:

This is not about psychology or ideology. It is energy minimization in a biological system.

Your brain is roughly 2% of your body mass. It burns roughly 20% of your energy.

This is not a metaphor. This is physics. Thinking (like, real thinking, what Kahneman called “System 2”) costs metabolic resources. The brain is a miser. It treats executive control like a scarce emergency reserve, not a daily driver.

Your brain and mine evolved to minimize unnecessary work. When food was scarce, every calorie spent on cognition was a calorie not available for killing food or competing predators. The brain that defaulted to heuristics and saved deliberation for special cases won the competition over the brain that pondered everything. We are the descendants of the former.

Things that are cheap: barely-considered opinions based on biases; knee-jerk inductive reactions; surface-level pattern-matching. Expensive things: deduction; reasoning; analysis. Holding contradictory ideas in mind while you work through them is extremely expensive. Other things being equal, the biological system will take the cheap path. Because it’s optimized. Millions of years of selection pressure, relentlessly favoring metabolic efficiency.

The feed didn’t invent the cheap path. Evolution did. The feed just paved it, lit it, and lined it with dopamine and like buttons. The algorithm finds your minimum-energy cognitive path and makes it wicked easy.

It’s exploiting human nature. No, worse: it’s arbitraging human nature. Identifying the pre-existing biological vulnerability (the preference for cheap thrills over expensive reasoning) and exploiting it at civilization scale.

“Here,” says the feed. “Have opinions without the metabolic cost of reasoning. Have engagement without the caloric expense of thought. Feel informed for free.”

Thinking is a luxury good now. The feed is a gas station with twinkies and high-fructose sodas.

You’re not just being trained to avoid thinking. You’re being trained to prefer not thinking. Because not-thinking is cheaper metabolically. Like the natural order of things. Your brain rewards you for conserving energy. The feed just learned to trigger that reward on demand.

The asymmetry is breathtaking. You have but one tired ole’ human brain, running on evolutionary firmware from the Pleistocene. The algorithm has all fucking GPUs in space, A/B testing at planetary scale, and a perfectly optimized map of your specific minimum-energy paths.

Adam Gazzaley’s research on attention makes the mismatch stark: humans are constitutionally poor at filtering irrelevant information. We evolved in environments where novel stimuli were rare (squirrel!) and usually important (try to eat this?). The feed exploits this gap, amplifying distraction beyond any evolutionary coping threshold.

This is not a fair fight. It’s not a fight at all. It’s farming.

Marshall McLuhan told us in the 1960s: the medium is the message. The form of communication matters more than its content.

Print culture, boring old fashioned linear, sequential, requiring sustained attention, created an environment where expensive cognition was unavoidable. You couldn’t get the reward (the information, the story, the argument) without doing the work (sustained, sequential attention). The medium forced the metabolically costly path.

This trained the cognitive infrastructure for the Enlightenment. Rationality, argument, evidence. These weren’t human defaults. They were built by an environment that made the expensive path mandatory. Old-school reinforcement learning.

Electronic media, McLuhan warned, would reverse this. It would blow up the linear path. Retribalize. Return us to something older and more reactive. He didn’t live to see the algorithm. He didn’t know the feed would personalize the cheap path. But he saw the shape of it coming.

The feed isn’t delivering bad content. The feed is the damage. The structure of scroll-react-scroll creates an environment where the cheap path gets the reward. The medium trains cognition for short loops, variable rewards and diffuse, weak attention. It literally doesn’t even matter what you’re scrolling past.

Cognitive neuroscience distinguishes between attentional systems that merely orient to stimuli and those that exert executive control. The feed relentlessly trains the former while starving the latter. This isn’t distraction. It’s substitution.

Every scroll is a rep. You’re training something. The question is what.

Here’s what the feed actually instills:

  • React, don’t reason
  • Sort (into tribe, into outrage bucket, into like/hate), not analyze
  • Pattern-match against cached takes, don’t test your existing biases
  • FEEL like you’ve thought about something because you have an opinion about some random fucking thing you scrolled past for a half second

That last one is the kill shot.

The simulation of thinking is so convincing (to the supposed thinker!) that the absence goes unnoticed. You scroll past a headline, feel a flush of reaction, register a position, move on. Something happened. It felt like cognition.

It wasn’t.

This is the horror I keep returning to: the feed is training humans into the same failure mode I pointed out in frontier AI models.

Transformers don’t reason. They perform reasoning. They learned the statistical shadow of logic, the cargo cult that correlates with correct answers, without the underlying structure. Change the variables, preserve the logic, and they collapse. They learned the finger pointing at the moon, not the moon.

The feed is doing this to YOU.

Sorry, friend. You don’t reason about the news. (Truth is: most of the time I don’t either. It’s usually too complex for the time I’d need to truly understand it and reason about it.)

You perform reasoning about the news. Like a bad off-broadway actor.

What are you really doing? You’re just pattern-matching against your tribe’s cached takes, feeling the hot flush of opinion, and moving on. The output looks like a considered position. It’s actually just… pantomiming.

Stimulus in. Response out. NO COGNITION TO SEE HERE.

Hannah Arendt warned us about this, though she was diagnosing a different catastrophe. Her insight wasn’t about malice or stupidity; it was about thoughtlessness. The inability or refusal to engage in reflective judgment. She watched ordinary people participate in atrocity not because they believed in evil, but because they had stopped thinking altogether.

The feed is milspec thoughtlessness.

No ideology required. No coercion necessary. Just the systematic atrophying of the pause between stimulus and response.

Sigh, but really, it’s worse than that. The feed isn’t just replacing thought with reaction. It’s providing zero-cost counterfeits of every expensive human thing.

Thinking costs metabolic energy. Opinion is free.

Community requires presence, vulnerability, maintenance. Parasocial belonging is free. Smash that like button. Like and subscribe, bitch. You’re part of something now.

Introspection is painful, slow, uncertain. Sharing a “deep” post is free. There. You’ve done the internal work.

Growth takes years of effort and failure. Upvoting someone else’s insight is free. You’ve internalized wisdom now.

Identity is constructed through trial, error, and lived consequence. A curated profile is free. You are who you post.

Dialogue risks being wrong, being changed, being vulnerable. Dunking on the outgroup is free. You’ve engaged with opposing views.

Every calorically expensive human endeavor now has a cheap simulacrum that triggers the same reward pathways.

And here’s the trap: you can’t tell the difference from the inside.

You feel like you’ve connected. You feel like you’ve thought. You feel like you’ve grown. You feel like you belong. The neurochemistry is real. The dopamine hits. The sense of satisfaction lands.

But nothing happened.

No actual connection. No actual thought. No actual growth. Just the sensation of these things, stripped from the substance of these things.

Bernard Stiegler saw this coming. He warned that industrial systems would not merely capture attention but expropriate the very capacity to form it. Not just distraction, but the proletarianization of the mind itself. It’s a loss of the ability to individuate, to become a self-determining entity through sustained attention and memory.

What he theorized, the feed operationalized. We are not merely distracted workers. We are dispossessed thinkers.

I think the “Who does this serve” question is unavoidable.

If this were primarily political (manipulation, propaganda, power) you’d expect to see intentionality. Conspirators. Some “concept of a plan”. I’m not saying it isn’t political (it is), just that it’s not political in essence.

The thermodynamic reference frame suggests something different. This isn’t primarily about anyone’s intentions. It’s about what a system optimized for engagement inevitably selects for.

The algorithm doesn’t care about control. It cares quietly ardently about engagement metrics. But a population optimized for engagement (minimum-friction reaction, cheap dopamine hits, stimulus-response without cognition) just happens to be maximally controllable.

Just plain old selection, not a tin hat conspiracy. No moustache-twirling villain designed this outcome.

A population that can’t think is:

  • Maximally extractable (impulse purchasing, emotional spending, chronic dissatisfaction driving consumption)
  • Incapable of coordination against power (can’t sustain attention on policy, can’t read long-form arguments, can’t organize)
  • Unable to notice the difference (the simulation feels like the real thing)

A population that can’t think doesn’t need to be coerced. Just keep it fed.

Not because we’re stupid. Because the cognitive machinery that would intervene between stimulus and response has atrophied - optimized away. We’re not being manipulated. We’re being piloted.

Weird thing is, we’ll defend the feed. Because it’s become the source of our opinions, identity, sense of being informed. Take it away and we don’t feel liberated. We feel angry and erased.

Herbert Marcuse diagnosed this trap in the 1960s: systems can generate needs that sustain the system itself. Satisfaction becomes a mechanism of control. You don’t feel imprisoned because your needs are being met. However, the needs themselves were manufactured. The feed doesn’t just satisfy your desire for connection, information, and belonging. It produces that desire in a form only the feed can satisfy.

The cage itself is selling cages as keys.

Who can afford to opt out? Tech executives send their kids to fancy schools that ban screens. Screen time limits are a status signal. The cognitive degradation is regressive. The people shaping the feed aren’t stuck in it.

Carl Sagan, 1995. Before smartphones. Before social media. Before the algorithmic feed:

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

Almost without noticing.

That’s the simulation of thinking. You don’t notice the slide because you still feel like you’re thinking. You have opinions. You have reactions. You’re engaged. Informed. Active.

You’re just not… reasoning.

Sagan saw it coming. He just didn’t know the delivery mechanism.

Neal Stephenson, two decades later, depicted the destination. In Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, vast stretches of America (he calls it “Ameristan”) have become epistemically unreachable. Not because the people there are stupid. Because they’ve marinated in algorithmically-curated alternative realities for so long that shared truth is no longer possible. The internet becomes “the Miasma”: useless for information, flooded with generated garbage, optimized for engagement over accuracy. A place where you can only find out what you already believe.

The brutal class dimension: the wealthy employ human editors to curate reality for them. Everyone else swims in the raw Miasma. He wrote it as science fiction. Seems more like a documentary now.

Now we come to the dark and sad part. Me on the rooftop. The part I’m shy about.

This isn’t the end of capitalism. It can run on controllable doomscrollers. Capitalism might prefer it.

Modernity will not survive this.

All of western civilization’s vaunted Enlightenment Project™ presupposes a subject capable of reason:

  • Democracy assumes citizens can deliberate
  • Science assumes minds that evaluate evidence
  • Law assumes subjects who weigh arguments
  • Markets (classical sense) assume rational actors
  • Rights assume a self that can form and pursue its own conception of the good

The whole enchilada. Every institution we inherited. Built on one foundation: those hairy apes can think.

But thinking is expensive. And we’ve built an environment that makes it unnecessary.

Modernity was a temporary exhibition, enabled by technologies (print, institutions, education) that forced the expensive path. Made deliberation mandatory. Created environments where you couldn’t get the reward without doing the cognitive work.

The feed reverses this. It’s an environment optimized to let you skip the work while still getting the feeling of reward.

Remove the necessity of thought, and you don’t get a worse version of modernity. You get a cargo cult of modernity. Elections without deliberation. Courts without reasoning. Science without the capacity to evaluate claims. The forms persist. Theatre continues.

But the thing that made it mean something has been hollowed out.

What replaces it isn’t pre-modern. Not a return to kings and priests and tradition. It’s something new. Something we don’t have good vocabulary for yet. Well, speaking for myself, I don’t. What are we now? A population of biological terminals. Receiving inputs. Punching the “buy” button, producing likes and subscribes. Predictably. Flickers of cognition are all that’s left.

Modernity was the bet that humans could self-govern through reason.

The feed is the house, making the odds. Physics is on its side.

Thursday afternoon. My son is doing homework.

Laptop open to the assignment. Phone next to it. Textbook somewhere (?) under the chaos.

I’m in the vicinity for about 10 minutes, and I’m like some livingroom birdwatcher.

He seems to read. Reads a sentence. Two, maybe. Glances at phone. Reads another sentence. Glances at phone. Picks up the phone. Thirty seconds. Puts it down. Rereads the same sentence.

He’s not stupid. Not lazy. Sharp kid, good student. Good human.

His attention has been shattered into fragments too small to hold a single thought.

I want to be angry at the phone. At the apps. At the sociopaths optimizing engagement metrics in Menlo Park.

Then I notice: I’ve checked my phone three times while watching him. Without deciding to. Without realizing it until after.

We’re both in it. The only difference is I remember what it felt like before.

He doesn’t.

Apropos Stuff

Philosophy & Critical Theory

  • Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963); The Life of the Mind (1978)
  • Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962)
  • Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society (2010); Psychopolitics (2017)
  • Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man (1964)
  • Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time series; The Age of Disruption (2016)

Cognitive Neuroscience & Psychology

  • Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010)
  • Gazzaley, Adam & Larry Rosen. The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World (2016)
  • Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)
  • Posner, Michael & Mary Rothbart. Work on attentional networks and executive control

Biology & Predictive Processing

  • Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error (1994); The Feeling of What Happens (1999)
  • Friston, Karl. Work on the Free Energy Principle and predictive processing

Media Theory & Cultural Criticism

  • McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962); Understanding Media (1964)
  • Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
  • Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World (1995)
  • Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019)

Science Fiction That Reads Like Documentary

  • Stephenson, Neal. The Diamond Age (1995); Anathem (2008); Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (2019)

Contemporary Shizzle

  • Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation (2024)
  • Internal Facebook/Meta research documents (leaked 2021)
  • Gloria Mark. Work on attention fragmentation and context-switching