justin․searls․co
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Searls of Wisdom for April 2025

Remember April? April was a month in a long line of months that left me (and, one presumes, a lot of people) asking themselves, "how did we end up here?" Well, that's what you have this weird newsletter for. And we'll get to that, I promise.

In terms of stuff I did since last time we chatted:

I also started a vlog. Right now it just lives in this album in my Photos library, but initial reviews are unanimously positive!

I started a vlog

As I start writing this, I'm sitting on an A350 bound for Tokyo, and the flight attendant just announced we won't have WiFi over the Pacific, because Viasat or whoever hasn't launched their latest satellite yet. As a writer and programmer whose greatest impediment to creative output is the risk of distracting myself on the Internet, learning that I would be forced offline for 13 hours triggered a familiar relief. My body softened. Maybe I'll actually get some sleep. If I play my cards right, I might manage to write one whole e-mail between now and when I land. [Update, 19 days later: I did not.] In any case, being kicked off the 'Net for a few hours once in a while can be restorative.

In fact, as luck would have it, one answer to the question posed at the outset ("how did we end up here?") is also, more or less, "because Internet." So today, let's talk a bit about the World Wide Web and how tangled in it we've become.

In a world experiencing an unprecedented degree of economic volatility, fifty-fifty ideological polarization, and routine technological upheaval, there's at least one trend line moving in a clear and consistent direction: people across the world increasingly agree things are bad and getting worse.

Why is this? And if everyone feels that way, why does the prospect of leveraging that unanimous sentiment into effecting positive change feel more hopeless than ever? How can it be that living standards have never been higher and public sentiment has never been lower?

The answer eludes us because it is the water we swim in. Or, rather, the Information Superhighway we ride on.

People are so accustomed to today's global and instantaneous exchange of information that we seem to suffer a collective amnesia as to how recent an innovation it is. One reason it's sneaked up on us is that information is inherently invisible, so the most successful information technologies penetrate our minds with minimal disturbance to our environment. In fact, the world mostly looks the same as it did forty years ago. And while it would make for rather dull cinema to consider that Marty McFly could totally get by wearing his 1985 wardrobe in 2025, at least he wouldn't have to worry about whether his hoverboard would work over water. We may not have gotten the flying cars we were promised, but at least we can hang our hats on how much friction we've eliminated from payment processing.

An elder millennial's history of the Information Age

Every year or so, I find it clarifying to take a few moments to reflect and look back at the progression of the Information Age over my lifetime. We've come a long way:

  • Forty years ago, my parents had a black-and-white television connected via coax to an antenna mounted on our house's roof. I have dim memories of nightly news broadcasts glowing through the curved glass of Dad's then-massive 30" CRT television; the static causing the anchor to dance and flicker like a flame. We got an hour of news each night from any of three sources (well, four, since we were within range of Canada's CBC over VHF), and each covered the same mostly local, mostly mundane topics in a format that was mediated by longstanding journalistic norms
  • Thirty years ago, they upgraded to a color TV and basic cable service, which brought with it access to CNN. The news now came to us 24/7. Its coverage was national rather than local—blanketing dozens of media markets would have been cost-prohibitive—and this surely accelerated the nationalization of partisan politics. But CNN's novel format was dull and unfocused as producers struggled to figure out how to fill so much airtime. My family also had a 14.4 kbps dial-up modem and an America On-Line subscription that charged us by the minute—neither of which posed a problem, as there was so little to do on the World Wide Web. Still, for the first time, we could reach out and retrieve information on demand, even if it was limited to outdated and uninteresting marketing fluff hidden behind AOL Keywords
  • Twenty years ago, our Comcast service was upgraded to include broadband Internet. Publications now had real websites and computers had real browsers. When news was breaking, I'd visit my favorite bookmarks and repeatedly mash F5 to receive updates. Information could finally travel instantly across the globe, but distribution depended on the initiative of individual users to search and surf for it. A smattering of self-hosted weblogs emerged as noteworthy upstarts, but media as actual people experienced it remained unchanged—monolithic outlets mediated news coverage at the whims of enterprising editors and eccentric billionaires, just as it always had
  • Ten years ago, we were all glued to our phones. Incredible as ubiquitous wireless connectivity was, the chief innovation of the era was the disintermediation of information. Legacy outlets that tossed newspapers onto doorsteps were quickly outflanked by social media apps that pushed notifications onto home screens. Whether you were pulling-to-refresh Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, the contours of our new information ecosystem began to take shape: an endless firehose of "content" from billions of voices. Before long, a handful of platforms achieved so-called "network effect" and injected themselves as the new mediator class, personalizing each of our feeds by cherry-picking content so as to maximize our engagement and their advertising revenue
  • As for today, we are witnessing the apex of the previous era and the dawn of the next. With each generation of mobile connectivity, we've invented new ways to saturate every available megabit of bandwidth and every spare moment of attention. Most people spend multiple hours each day lost in an infinite scroll of vertical video. Textual thoughtleaders have given way to video influencers. Active curation has succumbed to passive consumption. If the 2010s represented an eruption of hot takes being spewed across ideological lines, the magma has cooled throughout the 2020s as users have been sorted into like-minded pools of lackadaisical discontent. For most people, "news" no longer exists—people simply hear things. Who they hear from and about what is selected by an algorithm designed to provoke newly-invented emotional reactions that the market greatly values: unfulfillment so as to scroll past more ads, uninhibition so as to make more purchases, unsatisfaction so as to keep coming back. By now, most of us have long since traded away our capacity for emotional regulation in exchange for the promise we'll never experience boredom again
  • And what of tomorrow? One can only imagine what fresh hell they have in store for us. Will human creators be replaced by celebrity avatars? Will targeted display ads give rise to individualized video trailers starring you in a film about how an irrational mid-life car purchase will make an idealized version of your high school crush want to sleep with you? And who needs an imaginary friend when your kid could grow up with an omnipresent AI companion to shape their cognitive and social development—while also subtly influencing which brand of chips they'll buy? I'm honestly hopeful the answer is yes! (If only because such a future indicates we still have a functioning economy with access to fresh water…)

The timeline above might feel truthy to you. Maybe it maps to your experience as well. And forgive me if this all reads as obvious—you've probably also looked back from time to time and considered the dizzying pace at which the world has changed. Growing up, progress was defined by more access to more perspectives delivered in less time and less money. But now, with the benefit of hindsight, it's starting to feel that information itself has been transformed as well: more personal and more engaging, but ultimately less actionable and less satisfying.

We don't love to win, we hate to lose

A line from Interstellar acts as its thesis, cohering a narrative that extends light years and spans generations. Perhaps appropriately, it takes an AI to tell the human characters this:

Newton’s Third Law. The only way humans have figured out how to move forward is to leave something behind.

Humans are generally very sensitive to loss, and the psychological phenomenon known as "loss aversion" describes a powerful force motivating people to stand athwart history and moderate the pace of change. We know it best for all the ways it leads humans to make irrational, unwise decisions (staying in a bad job too long, holding onto your worthless NFTs, refusing to cancel Netflix), but the reason loss aversion exists to begin with is that in nature there are countless more ways in which avoiding loss is adaptive behavior. I'm sure some ancestor of mine hundreds of thousands of years ago only survived because they refused to let go of a banana… loss aversion isn't all bad.

Anyway, loss aversion is why attempts to take away the Internet as we experience it today—as we saw earlier this year with TikTok and as I witnessed again on this plane—cause people to get upset. In January, the Internet was pounded with videos of 20-somethings half-jokingly swearing fealty to the CCP to advocate for their favorite app. On today's flight, a finance bro threw a tantrum demanding outsized compensation for missing a full day of trading as he pointed to his ticket, which erroneously labeled the plane as being "WiFi-equipped."

We can all relate to how it feels to have something we find precious taken away from us, like bananas or TikTok or WiFi. We are less attuned to, but still plenty capable of lashing out over, intangible potential loss—as we've seen in the debate over net neutrality or the spectre of ISP data caps. But when it comes to this particular discussion where the sort of philosophical loss being described can only be conveyed through a careful comparative analysis over a period of decades? We're cooked.

We all might harbor nostalgia for the way things were, but loss aversion can't help us reclaim such distant past. Any attempt to actually go back would itself be perceived as an unacceptable loss. Like it or not, humans are now a race of TikTokers—at least until some new thing outdoes TikTok in a manner that people like you and me will only read as depraved but in which the rest of the world will view as incremental progress.

What exactly was lost?

Even people clamoring for a return to the pre-Internet glory days of Real Journalism wouldn't actually be willing to trade in their smartphones for one measly hour of nightly news from a handful of national broadcasters. In general, it's easier to wholesale vilify a new technology (video games! smartphones! TikTok!) than to drill into its unintended consequences while simultaneously acknowledging its merits. So instead of buying a dumbphone and moving to a cabin in the woods in the vain hope that it will transport me back to the 90s, it seems more useful to sit and have a think about the positive attributes of the long-dead media ecosystem and consider what it might look like to reclaim those benefits in a modern context.

On reflection, I can think of two important benefits of the highly-constrained media environment of the pre-Internet era that almost sound quaint by today's standards:

First, it turns out that a scarcity of sources—not speed or accuracy of reporting—is what gave news media its authority in society. For the most part, people walked around with a shared understanding of the world they occupied, accepted a broad base of agreed-upon facts, and associated the oppositional "other" as belonging to distinct, geographically-defined media ecosystems. Americans largely believed their neighbors were good people, didn't doubt the safety of fluoridated water, and mostly imagined their enemies as people living in countries that didn't air Murrow or Cronkite. This situation resulted in all kinds of terrible outcomes for people whose interests fell outside the narrow range of that day's Overton window, but it did foster a sense that "we" were on the same "team" operated by a common government that would from time to time "do things." It's hard to imagine a single country for which that sentiment still rings true today. Fringe ideas that would have been banished to stuffed-and-mailed-from-home newsletters with fewer than fifty subscribers in the 1970s now form a latticework of overlapping constituencies necessary to winning any level of elected office in the United States.

Second, it sure feels like the scarcity of scope of available information had a tendency to focus society on a tractable set of clearly-defined problems. When engaged voters in Detroit subscribed to one of its two regional papers, the number of topics under debate was constrained by how many column-inches would fit in the "A" section of either. As a result, it was actually possible to keep abreast of "the issues" (arbitrary as they might be) throughout an election, form comprehensible opinions, and support candidates based on their positions. This reality began dissolving with the advent of social networks and new media, before disappearing entirely once algorithms started drawing from that well to populate everyone's feeds. Today, we doom-scroll timelines that are customized to our unique desires and anxieties, effectively corralling each of us into a community of one. The thought of plopping a half-dozen random voters into a focus group with the expectation their policy priorities would circumscribe a preordained set of traditional issues simply beggars belief. (The political press tends to confuse this phenomenon with polarization, but it's actually worse: polarized disagreement presupposes agreement on what people disagree about.) Hell, pluck any two people for whom a pollster would rate as "highly-engaged" and—forget about reading the same paper—they probably wouldn't have even heard of each other's self-reported #1 issue.

So, what did we lose by gaining infinitely-connected networking technology? We lost a shared sense of the world we collectively inhabit, as well as the most pressing issues facing it. As a result, it's no wonder that people from seemingly every developed country believe things are going to hell: modern information distribution organizes around ideological borders as opposed to geographic ones and is scientifically engineered to engender emotionally-charged, high-stakes attachment to any of a thousand disparate animating issues.

So that's neat.

Maybe this is coming to a head

Intellectuals like you and I who can still be bothered to read and write text in excess of a thousand words have, in recent years, started to detect that something is amiss here. I, for one, have been worried about this shit since well before it was cool. The approaching endgame started to materialize with Facebook's introduction of the News Feed in 2006 and began to feel locked-in with the Internet's collective pivot to video in 2015. These moments stand out as milestones in both of two parallel timelines that have played out with approximately zero awareness of or interaction with one another (until recently):

  1. The educated, book-reading class has tackled the changing information landscape with the same journalistic detachment as it would any other "social epidemic," like second-hand smoke or teen pregnancy. Its movement can be charted by a familiar progression of the sort of sleeper-hit nonfiction books we see written in response to any such societal issue: from identifying the problem to exhorting individual resistance to offering parenting advice to bargaining with the changing world before eventually pathologizing its effect on children. This culminated in a variety of tech-skeptical policy prescriptions, antitrust suits, and saber rattling by the Biden administration

  2. While journalists merely adopted the dark, the alt-right was born in it, molded by it. As early as 2005, I remember memes originating on 4chan and later showing up on GAF before landing on IGN and ultimately being deposited as sediment in the collective male gamer id. Sometimes the meme pipeline was harmless, like when "Rickrolling" emerged from 4chan's duckroll trend in 2006, but it was just as often horrifying. I ran into Brianna Wu several times the year Gamergate broke out, and I genuinely struggled to reckon with the real-world consequences she suffered at the hands of a few basement-dwelling edgelords. 4chan's notoriety peaked when it birthed QAnon, but one can draw a straight line from the image board to any of the men's rights movement, cesspool of pick-up artists, or phenomenon of incel mass shooters. By 2024, dank meme laundering had taken many of these deplorable positions mainstream, and a male-coded political constituency ("the Manosphere") emerged around Barstool Sports and Joe Rogan, espousing a masculine primitivism skeptical of effete knowledge work

Both tracks have seen phenomenal success in their own way.

The poindexter liberals in their ivory towers of intellectualism wrote a bunch of books about how smartphones are bad and as soon as it became about "the children", they inadvertently turned the Christian right against the same technology that had radicalized them in the first place. The streams are really crossing now that Republican states are climbing over each other to ban phones in schools and social media accounts for minors.

Meanwhile, a handful of hentai-hoarding incels on 4chan spewing memes and conspiracy theories wound up getting to choose the Vice President with J.D. "maybe the Internet was a mistake" Vance. The lines are again blurring as ambitious Democrats like Pete Buttigieg and Josh Shapiro court The Male Vote by showing up on right-leaning podcasts men apparently listen to. And whether it's evidence of horseshoe theory or a sign of a broader belief that technology companies are fucking up our civilization, MAGA diehards like Matt Gaetz have found common cause with liberal firebrands like Lina Khan in support of breaking up the likes of Google, Meta, and Amazon.

Planet Earth is undeniably a bit of a shitshow at the moment, but I'm actually feeling optimistic that we're approaching the precipice of something that will—once we get to the other side of it—feel like the beginning of a sea change in how information is organized, constituted, and distributed. To wit: skepticism of information technology has materialized and matured from opposite ends of the political spectrum, and advocates from both sides are meeting in the middle with relatively boring policy prescriptions like regulating the use of smartphones in schools and expanding the scope of antitrust actions. Seems… fine, actually?

I don't expect any of the solutions being proposed today to, you know, work. But it definitely feels like we've hit a critical mass such that the changes we see in information technology during the next decade will look markedly distinct from the last four. 🤞