We’re accelerating toward a culture where people take everything on the internet literally and it’s fucking terrifying.
I’m not talking about your aunt who believes every Facebook post about how microwaving your phone charges it faster.
I’m talking about a wholesale collapse in people’s ability to detect nuance, context, sarcasm, hyperbole, or any communication more sophisticated than a traffic light. (And even then people don’t even know what the amber light signals…)
Everything is literal now. Every joke needs a disclaimer. Every exaggeration gets fact checked by someone who genuinely can’t tell the difference between “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse” and an actual plan to commit equine cannibalism.
And it’s getting worse.
But my eye is twitching…
Why?
Look what’s happening in the tech industry right now.
We’ve got AI chatbots that can’t understand context. Social media algorithms that treat everything as equally true or false with no room for interpretation.
Content moderation systems dumber than a box of rocks that ban you for obvious satire while letting actual harmful shit slide through.
We’re building technology that reinforces literal thinking.
That trains people to communicate in the most basic, unambiguous, lowest common denominator way possible because anything else gets flagged, misunderstood, or turned into a viral outrage mob.
The platforms are training us to be stupider. And we’re complying.
People don’t read anymore.
They scan for keywords to get mad about. They don’t interpret or anything they just react. They don’t think they pattern match against whatever tribal checkbox they’ve downloaded into their brain meats.
Critical thinking is dying. Reading comprehension is circling the drain. The ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time without your brain short circuiting? Practically extinct. (Insert every type of political view)
And I don’t know how to fix it.
I really don’t.
You can’t educate your way out of this when the infrastructure itself is built to reward smooth brain takes and punish complexity.
You can’t argue someone out of literal thinking when they’ve been trained by the algorithm and conditioned to see everything in binary.
Part of me wants to say “read more books” or “get off social media” or some other obvious advice that roughly zero people will actually follow.
But that’s pissing into the wind at this point.
And we all know that this was no accident.
Literal thinkers are easier to manipulate.
They’re easier to advertise to.
They generate more engagement because they get mad faster and argue longer.
They’re the perfect user base for platforms that make money from keeping you scrolling.
Tech companies have accidentally or maybe not so accidentally, created a financial incentive to make everyone dumber.
And it’s working.
We’re watching human intelligence get optimised for engagement metrics in real time, and the results are about as depressing as you’d expect.
I keep thinking about solutions. Education reform? Good luck. Media literacy campaigns? Who’s gonna pay for that? Regulation? Have you met any congress across the main countries? They can barely operate a PDF.
The only thing I can think of, and I’m not even sure this works, is to be aggressively, obviously human in your communication.
To use nuance. To be complex. To refuse to dumb yourself down for whatever flavour of the week bullshit is getting peddled.
Will it reach fewer people? Probably.
Will some of them misunderstand you and get mad? Definitely.
But maybe you’ll find the people whose brains still work. The ones who can still read subtext and appreciate a well placed metaphor. The ones who haven’t been completely lobotomised by their feed.
And yeah, I said lobotomised. Because that’s what it looks like from here. A generation getting their critical thinking surgically removed by apps designed to make them dumber and more reactive.
Except we can’t bring back actual lobotomies to fix it, because apparently that’s “unethical” or whatever.
So here we are. Watching the collective IQ drop in real time. Building technology that makes it worse. And I’ve got fuck all for solutions except “don’t participate in your own intellectual demolition.”
Not exactly inspiring stuff.
But if you’ve read this far and understood that I’m not literally advocating for lobotomies, congratulations. You’re in the minority now.
Welcome to the resistance. There’s dozens of us.
Stephen Walker.