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Arthur T Knackerbracket [soylentnews.org] writes:

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story [theregister.com]:

Everyone I've talked to recently seems to have developed their own highly personalized strategies for dealing with the world news that now surrounds us.

It wasn't always like this. At the start of my nearly 45-year career in tech, everyone had the same four sources of news: TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. A lucky few might have accounts with early online services like Compuserve or Prodigy to learn what other geeks thought.

Then USENET [theregister.com] spread from a few universities to a few well-connected tech companies – most of whom used it to talk tech and science or share facts … until the .alt groups proved that people can and will argue about anything online.

When the Web erupted, turning everyone into a (micro-)blogger [theregister.com], the number of news channels went to infinity - and beyond.

All that happened despite humans seeming not to be well-equipped for news flows larger than a stream of village gossip. We certainly can't filter at a scale that matches the torrent of information available in the global village.

Many of us are completely overwhelmed, every day, by an onslaught of information that may or may not be truthful, may or may not be personally meaningful, but more often than not feels unwanted and unneeded.

After years of this, we're so sensitive that approaches from anyone we don't already know or trust feel like an intrusion.

Some folks respond by dropping out completely, unplugging themselves permanently, an act of asceticism far too extreme for most of us.

Others create a “digital sabbath [wikipedia.org]” by selecting a day of the week on which they avoid all electronic connections and media.

There's a lot to recommend that approach, but to me it feels like an individual and makeshift defense.

Limiting my social posts to the performative site of Late Capitalism - LinkedIn [linkedin.com] - and restricting my news to a handful of the very best tech sites (including this one) creates space within me that I can share with friends when they come burdened by the latest outrages and horrors. It's all slapdash and imperfect - but at least now I feel as though I'm not deliberately trying to weight myself down in raging seas.

This is no way to live.

We need a deep and considered rethink of our entire approach to connectivity. Instead of just blaming the smartphone for all our woes we should ask ourselves why we feel compelled to doomscroll. Why we must know every last fact about every single thing that even vaguely interests us?

It's not just the intermittent reward-driven addictiveness of modern user experiences. These simply leverage facets of our own nature that existed long ago. In the village, we perked up our ears to hear the latest scurrilous rumors about our neighbors. We're reaping what we've sown.

Is it possible (and reasonable) to not care? To replace the fear of missing out with the joy of missing out? Can we learn to discriminate between what's immediate, important and relevant - and everything else?

That's the pause we should have given ourselves - a “gap year” - before we leapt headlong into overconnectivity. We could have used that pause for building psychic and cultural defenses to keep us well-grounded in a sea of chaos. But we didn't know what we didn't know, so here we are.

We can't rely on tech itself to help. This is not a problem that an LLM can solve, or that any government can relieve with a new law [theregister.com]. We need to rely upon ourselves.

We haven't yet learned how to sustain our efforts to disconnect and filter in a way that creates the sort of space we need to able to plan our next step, then the step after that, and future evolution. To make that kind of progress, we need good defenses, better practices, and dedication to improving ourselves.

We won't always get it right, but we can always get better at it. We need to. This raging sea won't be calmed any time soon.

Original Submission