Information cycle

I used to feel overwhelmed by the amount of information, that surrounds me.

First time I felt so would've been around COVID times, as we became glued to news feed, monitoring spread of desiase, locked at home trying to entertain myself.

Days went by and more and more I felt tired after 12 hour shift of consuming work related, university related and brain rot related information.

Second hit was when war in Ukraine began, my desire to monitor battlefield and being in constant alert mode over 'is everything alright with friends and family?' took it's toll, and I removed every social media from my phone.

As time passed by with information diet, my brain and body started to demand those quick and efficient dopamine kicks, by spending few minutes here and there on algorithmic apps. And they were not wasting time either, perfecting matching algorithms to deliver from the get-go.

But here we now, it's January of 2025, and AI (such as ChatGPT, Claude or Apple Intelligence) is ravaging for 2 years straight. And I already feel tired of how inflated information became, it no longer brings the value I need nor satisfaction I strive for. LLM's generate content for LLM's to digest and spoon-feed to humans in order to get a bit of attention.

Makes me sad.

Internet as we were kids

I grew up in 2000's, internet mainly was still a new thing, yet it found a huge adoption, as people were able to chat via ICQ/XMPP, email felt like a weird thing and getting a webcam for us at home and grandparents to 'Skype' them was a first WOW moment.

But what that time also had, is the struggle to find an information. As you had to know a guy who knows certain URL address, where you can find whatever you desired to find. And if there's no such guy in the reach, you are lost. But then I came upon google, and it was a godsent (at first). Thousands of results that can fit my question, different websites promoting XYZ and joy of finding something new and wicked.

From there I was able to first find online communities, and here the life was thriving, people sharing memes (or at least 'funny pictures' as they were called), sending some files/games which cannot be found in your section of internet, music sharing over the magnet links.

It's funny that the value of those 10-15 tracks saved on hard drive was even bigger than my spotify library right now.

Fast forward to mid 2010's.

Internet as we were teens

Instagram is a thing, twitter is booming and every app has weird behaviour. You can never reach the end of the page, no matter how deep you scroll, it's always adds new and new posts to show to you.

And those were a real drug.

(I remember when you can scroll to the bottom of insta feed, and felt void since there's no more blurry pictures of food with weird filters from your friends.)

As with any drug, you getting used to it, posts started to become shorter and youtube videos edits became much more dynamic. I did not spot exact moment when it happened. But the itch to consume more information became more vivid.

Imaginary meter in the head is always telling you if enough of it was consumed.

That makes me tired and anxious.

Internet as we are adults

And now the adulthood. Could be that my dopamine receptors are highly tolerant for all the stuff I consume daily, but the internet as it is, no longer brings joy or satisfaction. I'm becoming more and more believer of Dead Internet Theory (wiki link).

The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts, due to a coordinated and intentional effort, the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimize organic human activity.

Funnily enough it brings me back to the need to connect with people in real life. To explore the life outside of the screen and to escape 'the feed', since it's litterally feeding you, feasting on your attention.

Conclusion

As I understand with my limited knowledge of history, the breakthroughs of information production and exchange were quite common across the history of mankind. From the language system, through writing, through art forms, through infrastructure of any kind (internet included). And the information production and consumption overgoes some cycles, where we awe the progress and the fact of 'connectivity', but then go back to simplier way of living and trearing it.

Maybe it's one of those.

See ya ;)