On Digitality

Thesis

What found its origin as a hacked-together assemblage of research exchange nodes, linked by sprawling tendrils which spilled out of the server rooms of defense agencies and high academia, has quickly flourished into the technological force that defines the lived experiences of the twenty-first century. In October of 1968, the first digitally transmitted message flickered to life on Stanford Research Institute’s Cathode Ray Tube Monitor (SRI International): “LO,” the first two characters of “LOGIN,” all that UCLA could transmit before system failure (McMillan). Upon realizing the success of the ARPANET project that he headed, unsung visionary Bob Taylor quoted a Japanese Proverb, celebrating the landmark success of the U.S. Government’s progenitor to the modern Internet: “None of us is as smart as all of us” (Berlin). It was this spirit of scientific optimism that championed the arrival of a world increasingly connected by digital technologies, in which social progress could realize its full potential, no longer hindered by the logistics of transferring information across time and space.

Digital technologies and their effects have so thoroughly reshaped the human experience as to be characterized as the “Third Industrial Revolution.” The invention and mass distribution of technologies such as digital logic gates or the semiconductor transistor enabled the promulgation of instruments that fundamentally underlie modern life, such as the Personal Computer, Cellular Communication Devices, and the Internet. The effects of Digitality, the state of living in a society characterized by the Third Industrial Revolution, underlie contemporary life so deeply that the illustration of its effects seems at times to border on futility. Within a matter of decades, the Internet has found a regular userbase comprising the majority of humans in existence and a near ubiquitous followership among the citizens of highly developed nations (“Data around the World”), and digital technologies now stand as the primary means of human communication and social interaction, commerce, distribution of information, communication of news, recreation, and the formation of culture and individual identity. In stark contrast to the utopic vision of its creators, grave human errors have ensured that digitality’s current implementation selectively furthers human flaws in its execution of these newfound obligations, which is resulting in the widespread death of individual identity, discourse, and truth.

1. The Convergence of Thought Towards a Mono-Consciousness

If digital technologies could be defined by a single intrinsic tendency, it would be convergence. Digital applications do not displace or overwrite archaic functions such as communication or the formation of identity; they instead integrate and homogenize them. Digital tendencies towards convergence, although intrinsic to some degree, are largely the result of deliberate design choices employed to ensure maximal user retention and revenue potential. The convergence of digital thought towards a mono-consciousness has resulted in the widespread languishing of discourse, identity, and truth.

1a. Algorithmic Psychological Targeting and the Synergism of Thought

The use of extensive psychographic targeting and other algorithmic heuristics is the primary force responsible for the seamlessness of modern digital experiences. Contemporary algorithmic targeting ensures that a totally new user can be identified, presented content that experiences have shown to ensure optimal retention, and tracked to other platforms. Vast datasets of personally identifiable information are bought and sold freely between entities, datasets that are often revealed by hackers to contain intimate details regarding every aspect of the target’s person. The adaptive user experiences of popular social media platforms such as Facebook or TikTok not only track personally identifiable information, but more extensively employ psychometric profiling—“the process by which observed or self-reported actions are used to infer your personality traits” (Zarouali et al.). Each like, scroll, hesitance, dislike, comment, direct message, or engagement instance is carefully noted alongside the content that sparked it and is parsed by AI-driven algorithms to identify Big Five Personality Traits (extroversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism) and thought patterns in order to return content which may mirror those traits (e.g., microtargeted political ads or a series of posts that are predicted to ensure maximal user engagement). The wholesale identification and exploitation of the deepest recesses of an individual’s identity readily enables the convenience and addictive nature of modern digital experiences and is the principal force behind the convergence of thought towards a mono-consciousness.

The primary goal of every digital for-profit application is to maximize user-retention through both extensive psychometric targeting and the deliberate use of behavioral modification techniques (Anderson et al.). It is openly known that digital empires such as Alphabet, Bytedance, and Meta extensively employ psychologists and consultants for the sole purpose of developing more addicting experiences. What is the most efficient way to ensure users scroll past the most ads on social media, or ensure that a user is presented a tailored series of recommendations and stories that past experiences have shown will keep them engaged the longest and hide from them the content that may conflict or challenge them, and thus risk them logging off. Most simply, identify a user and what they like, then inundate them with unending sources of highly personalized content that mirrors their preferences. This targeting unfortunately leads not only to an overly addictive and sterile user experience, but also to, much more dangerously, the formation of Epistemic Echo Chambers.

1b. Epistemic Echo Chambers and the Death of Discourse

With striking regularity, users self-select, often entirely unconsciously, towards content and individuals that mirror their predetermined beliefs. Within all past conceptions of society, it was wholly impossible to entirely avoid encountering dissonance of opinion, even in the most repressive regimes. Alexander Hamilton once commented on the health of such conflict: “The differences of opinion, and the jarrings of parties in [the legislative] department of the government […] often promote deliberation and circumspection; and serve to check the excesses of the majority.” However, in modern digital landscapes, group polarization occurs rapidly and with disastrous consequences, catalyzed by the mechanisms of self-selection and self-isolation, which psychometric targeting so extensively employs. When individuals already in accord deliberate on an issue, it is an immutable law of human nature that they will decrease in doubt and increase in confidence (Sunstein). As such, when platforms employ algorithms that direct users towards content streams that are epistemically isolated, they willingly cordon off virtually all users from the broader epistemic commons, radicalizing users in agreement, and allowing the healthy conflict of ideas (the lifeblood of functioning societies) to all but disappear—an unnatural death of discourse that John Stuart Mill elucidated as a “peculiar evil […] robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.”

Whenever elements do happen to meet in cyberspace, an evolutionary selection of ideas takes place. As previously described, where elements in accord encounter each other in cyberspace, they create a sterile, homogenous environment in which elements not in accord are removed by self-selection, or assimilated into preexisting belief sets through mental frameworks such as cognitive biases, peer pressure, and the positive affirmation to selectively interpret conflicting truths that digital technologies thoroughly encourage. Consequently, whenever elements in discord meet in cyberspace, the result is not, as one might assume from optimistic social theories, a productive or dignified pursuit of truth, but is—by the thoroughly encouraged epistemic vices of its participants—almost universally an equally unproductive exchange of memetics (Akhther), in which individual consensus is never pushed towards a median, only outwards. By these mechanisms, the ideas that are truly at hand are lost, and what little remains of each atomic collision of ideas are those elements found commonly of human flaw, aberrant ideas, or sentiments which fail to be destroyed.

Hideo Kojima commented on the gravity of this new informational order in his prophetic 2001 video game Metal Gear Solid 2, in which one character delivers the following message:

All rhetoric to avoid conflict, and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems. Everyone withdraws into their own small, gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds leaking whatever “truth” suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in “Truth.” (Kojima)

1c. Digital Mono-Consciousness and the Death of Identity

By its very nature, digital thought is abstracted from reality. The eternal and indiscriminate nature of the accumulation of information on digital platforms is fundamentally unnatural. For all of human history, human societies collected and distributed only the information that they felt the next generation deserved the honor of receiving. Quite similar to genetic selection, an incredibly small portion of the totality of information was selected and transmitted. Digital technologies intrinsically allow the instantaneous immortalization and promulgation of vignettes of human’s psyches, reflective of only one of the thousands of states of mind that we cycle through daily, and they lack the critical element for the human formation of thought: order.

Digital applications, by their immensity of information and unnatural lack of selection of that information, provide an environment in which each fleeting and often-flawed impulse of the user is capable of finding validation and formation. If you desire a vignette displaying this, simply Google “gang-stalking” and find what a surprising number of individuals claim to be victims of organized harassment by police helicopters, government mind-control agents, or people who are simply “out to get them.” Observe how digital platforms readily allow these “targeted persons” to find communal self-assurance and the validation of unstable thought patterns; and note the significant number of persons out there who may have created for themselves poor outcomes in life or downwardly spiraling mental states as a result of rash decisions they made upon their first inklings of disordered thought which were then fostered by digital mechanisms. How can a sane doctor convince a man he is mentally ill, when he knows of hundreds or thousands of others who see the same people following them, just like he does? Alternatively, look to the rising occurrence and normalization of flat-earthers, vaccine denialism, moon-landing denialism, climate denialism, political extremism, or other patterns of thought that might be classified as not reflective of reality.

Yet the finding of community by unstable individuals is only one of many expressions of the deeper and intrinsic flaw of digital platforms in their current execution—that is, the sustainment of disordered thought. Digitality psychosocially provides an environment, abstracted from reality, and thus the natural order, in which a critical element is missing for the formation of human thought: the reference points of life and the natural order—in other words, the commonality or rarity of elements, from which humans primarily draw inferences and form thought, as pattern-seeking creatures. Whereas reality is corrosive to disorder, digital spaces are increasingly corrosive to reality. Like bacteria in a petri dish, digital mechanisms provide just the right pH for those disordered elements of thought, which formerly would have languished by the checks and balances of reality, the natural order, or the normalizing tendencies of participating in healthy human societies, not merely to survive but to thrive in their parasitic development. Digital technologies enthusiastically provide the modern human their psychological mirror of Narcissus, an indiscriminate reflection, validation, and encouragement, even—perhaps especially—to their most dangerous flaws. In this sense, the digital mono-consciousness not only encompasses the sea of human psyches immortalized in their flaw on digital platforms; it also represents, for each individual person, only that portion of human psyches that—through the psychological targeting of algorithms—they come to identify with pre-deliberatively. That is, each individual only encounters those psyches with whom they come into contact, consume information, and synergize thought. While the user may be interacting with other humans, in the reality of the endeavor, they are only playing within their mind, spinning away on whichever tendril their impulse encouraged them.

The generation of culture and identity increasingly takes place, to a surprisingly large extent, in these flawed digital spaces. Individuals, and thus cultures, cannot possibly form an ordered identity, let alone a unique identity, when they are inculcated with content that psychologically encourages disordered thought patterns and that discourages ordered reasoning and interaction. Merely participating in digital societies means being psychologically exposed to, and thus assimilated into, the mono-consciousness of digital society. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “a man is what he thinks about”; the human is a social animal, and that quality has come to be their greatest weakness in navigating digital environments. Regardless of awareness, the disordered nature of digital thought is a critical cognito-hazard, highly capable of functioning on an unconscious or subconscious level. Individual identity is increasingly formed in environments pervaded by aberrant patterns of thought, which are noted and learned by repeated exposure, and is increasingly assimilated psychosocially from the broader swamp of this digital mono-consciousness, deeply lacking in individuality, substance, order, and virtue.

1d. Digitality and the Death of Truth

The mechanisms of digital convergence, such as algorithmic psychological targeting, Epistemic Echo Chambers, and the Digital Mono-Consciousness, all are consequential and cumulative in the most perfidious manifestation of digitality: the death of truth, which serves as the true flaw underlying the death of discourse, identity, and thought. The Internet was recently described by philosopher Brian Leiter as “the epistemological crisis of the twenty-first century,” and for good reason. Digital Interactions are fundamentally prone to deceit. In stark contrast to all previous vessels of dissemination, digitality necessitates no epistemic authority to disperse information to the general populace. The acquisition of knowledge by digital interactions is entirely reliant on, yet incapable of truly supporting, faith in the identity and epistemic authority of its promulgator. Social media posts, for example, are truly identified by little more than claims to identity, behind which often lie deceitful interests, be it apathetic, bored, or malevolent individuals, corporate or political astroturfing, or, most infamously, the psychological operations auxiliaries of nation-states. The extensive dissemination of misinformation and disinformation that is facilitated by digital platforms has been widely documented and discussed.

It is unlikely that there exists a point in history within the last five hundred years where the average citizen of developed nations—the singular operative condition for a functioning society—was as misinformed as today in the presence of the totality of humanity’s information made available to them. One might assume from optimistic notions of human adaptability that, given the immediate access to the information of the world at their fingertips, the modern human would be a philosopher-king. Instead, the attribution of epistemic authority by the general populace to fundamentally disordered, irregular, and anonymized (or pseudonymized) media—formerly reserved for those methods of dissemination requiring some verification before publication—has led to widespread and willing belief in partial truths, convenient interpretations, or total falsities. Information fundamentally in opposition to objective reality is increasingly granted veracity by users of digital platforms, with disastrous consequences. Lone-Wolf conspiracy theorist attacks, a sharp lessening of faith in institutions such as the federal government, the judicial systems, and the objectivity of the media, as well as increasingly cynical and hateful dispositions being adopted among and between opposing ideological sectors—all conditions generally regarded as precursors to societal breakdown—are in precipitous ascent, furthered in no small part by digitality.

The further one abstracts from reality, the less one lives in it. Digital information consumed by the general populace is almost entirely pseudonymous or anonymous, attributed to little more than a claim of identity at best, promulgated by whoever gains access to an account or username. No amount of “community guidelines,” “verification,” “fact-checking,” or “anti-radicalization pipelines” is capable of defeating the inherent impossibility of verifying the sources and intentions of information on user-based platforms, for-profit webpages, and digital communications in general. The death of information—furthered by individuals, corporate or activist organizations, ideologies’ adherents, think-tanks, and, most frighteningly and most discussed, by superorganizations such as nation-states and oligarchs—is fundamentally an exploitation of the intrinsic qualities of the medium of decentralized communication, and cannot be targeted except at the lowest possible connection: the user.

The users of digital platforms are the central promulgators of the death of truth. Users have proven, time and time again, fated to engage in the furthering of disinformation for its sensational nature, which exploits their cognitive bias as binary “wins for us” or as “outrages against us.” Digital communications intrinsically exploit the heuristic fault of the inevitable attribution of the same epistemic veracity to all information subconsciously, as users increasingly prove unable to psychologically distinguish between the digital and experiential. Brian Leiter commented in 2014: “Epistemic authority cannot be sustained by empiricist criteria, for obvious reasons: salient anecdotal evidence, the favorite tool of propagandists, appeals to ordinary faith in the senses, but is easily exploited given that most people understand neither the perils of induction nor the finer points of sampling and Bayesian inference.” Furthermore, digital information consumed and posted by users is universally of a highly selective nature, presenting to the world the information which glorifies or derides some end, be it social (the near-wholly status-chasing nature of social media), political (well-documented misinformation campaigns that sway entire nations), or financial (the attainment of capital). The ability to selectively contrive and portray an image to the world means that digital interactions fundamentally encourage deceit of others and self, an inauthenticity of which its perpetrator is often not even totally cognizant. Digital interactions have reduced information, discourse, identity, and thought to little more than unthinking and instinctive expressions of pre-deliberative dispositions. The manifestations of digital convergence will only continue to worsen if left unchecked, reaping tangible and disastrous consequences for humanity. A modificative form of “informational selection” to resolve this problem is immediately necessary.

2. Selection

Informational Selection can be defined, most briefly, as the evolutionary process of selecting and discarding information for societal preservation. Hideo Kojima—again through the voice of a character in his Metal Gear Solid 2—remarked with equal profundity on the universal and natural origin of this practice, which has shaped the very human societies we inherit, and how the Information Age has subverted such a life-giving process:

But there are things not covered by genetic information. Human memories, ideas. Culture. History. Genes don’t contain any record of human history. Is it something that should not be passed on? Should that information be left at the mercy of nature? We’ve always kept records of our lives. Through words, pictures, symbols [...], from tablets to books[...]. But not all the information was inherited by later generations. A small percentage of the whole was selected and processed, then passed on; not unlike genes, really. That’s what history is. […] But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always accessible. Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander. […] All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate. It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution.

2a. Selection as It Is

Informational Selection’s current execution is nothing short of an abomination when compared with its natural origins. For all of human history, an incredibly “small percentage of the whole was selected and processed,” the information of the totality that human societies felt furthered human betterment. Yet today (as described when elucidating the digital mono-consciousness), for reasons of profit, negligence, and convenience, the totality of information generated by humanity is unnaturally preserved, with strikingly few exceptions. Except when conflicting with law, profit, or convenience, the decentralized, unorganized, and ineffective stewards of digital platforms allow the preservation and furtherance of the root of disorder, the swamp of the digital mono-consciousness, the mass of totally disordered information, without respect to veracity, value, or virtue. That the vessels of digitality, optimistically exalted by their creators as a means of human collaboration and upward attainment, should have been degraded so as to primarily serve the exact inverse process—the means of human stagnation and disintegration—is abhorrent.

That society’s current vessels of the dissemination of information—that is, digital platforms such as social media and other decentralized for-profit ventures which have wrought the decay of modern thought—are somehow remediable to the pursuit of truth, order, virtue, or flourishing is entirely and effably false. They are a cancer in the side of humanity. The flaws of for-profit digital platforms of thought are intrinsic to their creation and nature. Decentralized and pseudonymous communication in self-gratifying echo chambers of tailored, sterile, and plastic content—which encourages the cheapest thinking and habits to indulge and addict, and that lie in a greater swamp of an ethos constituted of little more than aberrant thought and disorder—could never foster human flourishing or the pursuit of truth. Inviolable human elements of relation, identity, or thought are not capable of being abstracted from nature without consequence. What digital applications have gained is convenience and the immense richening of those entities that readily decide that the indelible damage of truth is a small price to pay for their continued profit. What digital platforms have wrought is the widespread promulgation and acceptance of living in disorder and falsity.

2b. The Possible Digitality

Modern applications of digital technologies have obviously wrought critically negative consequences for human society, yet some are also capable, with significant reform, of realizing immense benefits for humanity; deleterious elements of digital applications whose highest pursuit is profit or power are totally irremediable with human flourishing, yet the positive connectedness enabled by digital applications is capable of fundamentally revolutionizing human activity, life, and thought. Humans are more capable of collaborating and unifying (although they generally choose not to), for example in response to natural disaster or atrocity, and digital technologies have enabled the modern infrastructural miracles that underlie our day-to-day life. The most critical flaw of digital platforms in their current execution possesses a possibility for their most immense benefit: digital information is formless, and digital technologies are fundamentally revolutionary in the way they treat information. Whereas this formlessness being applied for purposes of profit or convenience has wrought the decay of discourse, identity, and thought, it possesses a positive capacity for equally revolutionary change. Through an ideal application of informational selection, digital technologies’ treatment of information represents, at its core, a perfection of how we collect and distribute information.

Digitality possesses the capability of realizing a sort of reversion and perfection of the oral preservation of history and knowledge. Just as truths were selected and passed on through word for tens of thousands of years, digital information exists only as long as it is continually spread unto the world. In contrast to every other form the preservation of truth, digital information is continually changed, clarified, and retracted, with or without notice, every microsecond. Digital infrastructure in this way represents an “organic” inorganic life form; just as a body is composed of trillions of living cells, replicating, mutating, and dying, the digital information held by humanity is comprised of an incomprehensibly vaster collection of bits and bytes, fluidly developing, expanding, retracting, and transmuting.

Digitality thereby enables an indelibly connected and resilient means of human communication, one that has failed to fully be realized in its current application. There exists an intended manifestation of Digitality, an ever-beating informational heart of the world, a connectedness which furthers the inimitable human nature of collaboration and betterment, capable of creating a positively hyperconnected digital world, on which the sun never sets.

3a. The Value of Truth and Our Imperative

An Ideal of Selection for Digitality constitutes a reversion to the same criterion of selection used, often unconsciously, with ubiquity for thousands of years before: information should be true—that is, information provided to the individual should correspond to reality and order. Information should truly represent humanity’s best attempt at obtaining truth, order, and virtue. Though it may not seem to initially be in any conflict, it is only when one considers what digitality’s current implementation promulgates that one realizes the radicality of such an ideal.

For example, psychometrically targeting users with disordered and false content that is entirely devoid of any real substance, meaning, or truth about the world, the common practice—used for the vast majority of the generation of capital using digital technologies—fails to represent humanity’s best attempt at obtaining truth. The realization of an ideal selection would almost certainly constitute a discardment of a vast majority of humanity’s information. The frightening progression of Artificial Intelligence is increasingly making possible a future in which AI might be capable of parsing the incomprehensible immensity of humanity’s digital information, over sixty trillion gigabytes, for those truths of value to humanity from the much vaster pool of junk data. From a purely administrative aspect, an ideal of selection would constitute a modification of core “Web 2.0” Principles, namely, a reversion away from the internet as almost solely a means of disseminating unverified, user-generated content, which is entirely useless at best, and societally destructive at worst, and a rejection of placing the generating of capital, or inculcating of messaging, as the ends of digitality. An ideal of selection would therefore largely suggest a reversion to the origins and true nature of the internet—for example, the ARPANET—which is based in societally guarded and unswayable institutions, whose purpose is the betterment of humanity and the acquisition of truth.

3b. Absolute Truth

The realization of a more connected and flourishing world starts with realizing Digitality’s true nature, subverted in its current execution. Wherever an ideal implementation of digitality might stand against capital, convenience, or power, it is helpful to recall the inherent paradox of man’s continual search for truth. Man’s tendency towards truth often has absolutely no relevance to his physical or mental well-being. Should man believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth, it would have no bearing on his survival and success as an organism. So why then, does man proclaim truth to the point of martyrdom, as the disciples were tortured and killed for proselytizing divine truths? It is because man has that one trait that puts him in transcendence even above the angels: it is his will that drives him. A will that invariably commands that living in falsity—living in untruth—is living in death. So let the pursuit of truth once again be admirably manifested by man, even at the cost of his bliss or his life, so that he may above all else, know in reality, and live in life.

To reject the confused myths that blind the world, and to forge a new order rooted in our very inimitable human nature—the gift of the inevitable and eternal pursuit of truth—may very well constitute the greatest thing that man will have ever done.

“[A]nd you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”—John 8:32