September 22, 2026

we live in a society pt1 - Infobesity

This will be the first in a mini-series of posts as I attempt to consolidate ruminations floating around my digital holdings.

There is an article written in 2023 which introduced me to a term I have since grown fond of: Infobesity.

In short, the authorial team at Better Ipsum put forward that both organizations and individuals in our modern digital era can and have become overloaded with information; [here’s where I start inserting my opinion] to the point of near-debilitation at the tasks which once propelled humanity forward. Engaging in the “public marketplace of ideas” is more or less an exercise in futility; be it because the dead internet theory has come to full fruition and there is nobody left to engage with, or because nobody has the bandwidth left to engage after fending off the firehose of slop that is pumped in our faces on the daily.

We are well into the Age of Misinformation, and it is difficult to say when the Age of Information ended. One might be inclined to say it was when the first LLMs were made available to the public, but that was clearly not the beginning. It could be argued that the birth of social media websites in the early 00s were the inflection point, but I am inclined to think there were at least a few years of sincere net benefit from the My Spaces and the Face Books of those days.

I will let that question remain open for others to debate though (for now), because it need not be answered to recognize a few things clearly:

1. Across the world, but particularly noticeably in the USA, what is “true” to us as individuals is subject to the reality being constructed around each of us, not by our free will, but by social media algorithms, paid advertisements and sponsorships, and whatever narrative our news sources of choice are crafting.
2. The aforementioned social media algorithms are knowingly engineered precisely to exploit the things which draw our attention most strongly; risqué photographs, sensationalist headlines, lambasting of political and cultural opponents, regional tragedies, and even cute cat videos.

I will have more thoughts to share, but I’ll leave this here now so I can still function tomorrow…

seventhray