YouTube, or How the Internet Created a Confederacy of Dunces

We like to tell ourselves we live in the information age, but my experience over the last couple of decades instead points to a disconnect between education and technology, the result of which is that we now have at least two generations who have no idea about how to use the internet.

Before the popularization of the world wide web, somebody with no formal education in a particular subject accepted their ignorance, and generally acted with a degree of caution, aware that they risked being exposed as a fraud. Things were clear cut: if you were going to talk about a particular topic, you needed knowledge and experience, which involved a complex, long and arduous process: going to libraries, reading, talking to experts, etc.

The arrival of the internet promised us access to an unlimited storehouse of knowledge in a few clicks. But because schools failed to teach children how to access that information properly, developing their critical faculties, there are any number of people who believe that on the basis of a couple of clicks and a few memes, they are experts in any given subject. Driven by our seeming innate tendency to simplify things and by social mechanisms that create echo chambers, surrounding us with content that reaffirm our biases, people come to rely solely on a generally erroneous intuition and the fact that they can access many opinions that supposedly prove them right (and reward them with dopamine if they are even more vehement in defending that point of view, even if it is radically wrong or outright stupid). They then insist on repeating those same memes as slogans, regardless of whether they are talking to another ignoramus like themselves, or an expert in that field who has devoted their life to the subject.

The vast majority of those who use media like YouTube to comment on complex subjects use reasoning that does not stand up to even the most basic scrutiny. In the absence of education in the use of how technology can help us acquire knowledge, we are seeing the formation of generations of dunces, dunces who tell other dunces what’s going on. And these people are able to vote, and their vote is worth the same as that of a responsible and well-informed person: hence the rise of populism and the radicalization of society. By ignoring the role technology in the educational process and letting people teach themselves, along the lines of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideal of the noble savage, we have created a society that is easy to manipulate, willing to swallow any nonsense, incapable of arguing properly and of protecting itself from ideas that might be attractive but that have no basis in truth.

This process has taken place over very few generations, and anyone old enough to remember the pre-internet age can see it. Society today is largely made up of dunces, people who are easily manipulated, and a cohort of so-called prophets dedicated to manipulating them. The internet has become the mechanism that allows us to program or be programmed because the education that should have allowed us to learn how to avoid it was never provided. “Let them read books, so they don’t get distracted.”

To make matters worse, we now we have machine learning and generative algorithms able to deliver answers with even less effort, without even having to choose between ten links. And again, instead of helping us to learn how to use this latest technological advance and apply our critical faculties to sources of knowledge, most people will simply read a very well written paragraph and believe that they are now experts in any subject. Do you want to participate in a chat about quantum physics? No problem: “ChatGPT, explain quantum physics to me as if I were a five-year-old”. Meanwhile, alarmed physics teachers warn that ChatGPT makes basic physics errors in its answers… errors that were in the dataset used to train the algorithm, and that will be spread ad infinitum, as more pages are generated with that same algorithm.

I used to be almost pathologically optimistic, but after a few hours looking at comments on YouTube, let’s say my outlook has changed. Honestly, if I were responsible for the content on YouTube, I would kill myself. I’m beginning to think that there really is no hope for the future.

(En español, aquí)

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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