Side Effects of the Unfinished Internet

Let's do a thought experiment. Go back in time and find someone from 1990. Tell him everything about the modern internet - instant messaging, email, blogs, Amazon, Wikipedia. Everyone has a smartphone in their pocket. Anyone can talk to anyone and look up anything. Then ask them how they expect technology like this to affect society . What will they predict?

They might predict the explosion of new things. They might say that making information immediately available to everyone would increase knowledge in all areas tenfold. The ability to communicate instantly with anyone will work wonders of efficiency. They might argue that, in theory, networking with all the other public entities in existence would give rise to new ideas and usher in a new era of peace and understanding. They might predict that the result of all this will be a glut of new businesses and technologies, with exponential growth in productivity and progress—not just in computing, but in all areas. That's exactly what optimistic internet pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee envisioned.

But that's not the case. That's not to say the internet isn't helping -- the internet has brought about real improvements in the quality of life. Being able to book a car or hotel right away is great. Despite its many shortcomings, Twitter can be a magical thing. Access to any public knowledge anywhere is a miracle. While the Internet has brought about many advancements, it will not necessarily bring about an explosion in the physical world .

For example, the internet was supposed to make starting a business easier. But the number of startups had been declining before the internet, and it has continued to decline since . Overall, GDP growth and productivity growth are still about the same as they were before the internet—progress, in general, probably won’t grow super-exponentially because of the internet.

This may not be a completely fair observation. The internet could be the reason for any progress. Without the internet, the number of start-ups could shrink further and GDP growth and labor productivity would stagnate. The internet may just be the latest invention to drive progress, just as cars, electrification, and computers have driven progress over the past few decades. Scott Alexander explains a related idea .

Having said that, this is not a completely satisfactory answer. Undoubtedly, something as transformative as the internet and smartphones - the ability to talk to anyone and learn anything - will significantly increase the number of new ideas and productive enterprises.

I think the internet can still do what it was envisioned, and in the long run. But I think that the way we currently use the Internet - manifested through smartphones, social media and aggregators - is not perfect and needs to be improved in order for the Internet to evolve in the desired direction.

Let me be clear: the Internet has many, many positive effects. But I think there are side effects in its current design that make it more difficult to use meaningfully. While it's possible to avoid them, it's really, really hard for the average user at the bottom, which leads to an unrealized potential.

The side effects I'll discuss are particularly relevant to creators: those who are good at thinking new ideas and creating new things. The most obvious audience is those who rely heavily on the internet - programmers and creative artists come to mind - but the impact generally extends to everyone who uses the internet.

Meaningful creation is influenced by several factors. These include:

1. Downtime : Time to wander, think, and come up with new ideas.

2. Focus : The ability to focus on an idea or task for a prolonged period of time.

3. Motivation : The desire to dedicate work to new but uncertain endeavors without regard to opportunity cost.

4. Community : An environment conducive to encountering a set of novel perspectives and ideas, disseminating high-quality, well-thought-out ideas while suppressing low-quality ones.

I think the internet has had a negative impact on all of these, and resisting that negative impact is critical to moving the internet in the direction it should be.

Downtime

Taking a break from mental work helps creativity. That's because coming up with new ideas requires downtime - away from commitments and distractions, and letting your mind wander. Time away from stimulation allows us to subconsciously think about new ideas, analyze the past, and think about the future. That's why some of our funniest ideas come in the shower or just before bed.

"Downtime" is very helpful, and many creative people organize their daily work around maximizing "downtime." Benjamin Franklin liked to live a simple life so he could better focus on his creative work, and Charles Darwin liked to avoid commitment in his daily life. Paul Graham makes a similar point indirectly when he talks about startup ideas.

Unfortunately, internet-related products have reduced the amount of "downtime". They do this by subtly consuming the time that usually leads to boredom—time that we are usually forced to lose our minds on.

Many of us pull out our phones to check Facebook while on the toilet, or turn on a podcast during a long walk. Standing in line at a restaurant or on the subway to work, historically thought time, has now become occupied time. Even when we consciously set aside free time, we often don't—email and Slack allow us to stay connected to work when we get home.

The result is that many people don't remember when they were last bored. When I was a kid, I remember that feeling of boredom - but it rarely happens now because there's always something new to keep my eye on.

It's not all bad either. Idle time is usually inefficient. But this boredom—5 minutes here, 10 minutes there—may be helpful for new ideas and new beliefs. What's the funniest thought you've had while in the shower, or doing something boring? Missing them can mean less room to think.

Free time allows us to think, learn about the past, learn from it, and look to the future. Unfortunately, time-sensitive news and social media keep us perpetually stuck in a never-ending present, always on the lookout for what's going on in the moment. Constantly bombarded by disruptions—many of which don’t directly affect our lives—it’s hard to find time for “downtime.” It's hard to find the kind of thought that isn't usually there, or the kind of action that isn't usually taken. That could mean less interesting art, less new business, or less high-quality ideas.

Focus

Anything difficult requires concentration. Especially high-value, hard-to-replicate work—so-called "deep work"—requires distraction-free, highly focused time. This is in contrast to "superficial work": like checking email, responding to notifications, or tweeting.

Almost all of us realize to some extent that the Internet has made "deep work" more difficult. Constant Slack notifications are not good for uninterrupted focus. Responding to a large number of emails can feel productive, but it can make it hard to concentrate on work. Everyone has the urge to go to Facebook or YouTube.

But my argument is not just that the internet is a distraction. It's obvious that everyone uses the internet to procrastinate. Distraction has been around for a long time: before the internet, it was TV.

Rather, the internet is designed to make it difficult for people to do "deep work", even outside working hours. Specifically, being able to hear anyone's voice and instantly browse to something interesting is a relatively new phenomenon -- and it can affect our ability to focus. The dopamine produced by constantly scrolling through a stream of information or clicking on a link can have a serious impact on shortening our attention span or our ability to think deeply about a problem. The Internet is changing the way we think.

Funny, I feel like it eats away at my focus. : As I write this, I have to resist the urge to check my phone, go to YouTube, walk around, find something -- anything -- to give me something new and interesting to do. Not only did it make it harder for me to write this article on the computer, but the urge persisted even after I was away from the computer: when I was reading a long book, watching a movie, or even having a focused conversation, This urge will appear.

The effects may be mild - they are not life-threatening at all - but I wonder what the cumulative effects are when everyone suffers from them. We've probably seen it: The skyrocketing news cycle appears to be a direct response to the continued decline in public attention. I worry about the impact on creators - people have to focus on the long term to improve the future .

Motivation

Creating new things is difficult and risky. It usually takes long hours of hard work, ignoring the outside world, and doing things that might not work out. Making meaningful contributions to an established field of science requires decades of education and practice. Becoming an influential artist or entrepreneur can take years of hard work that no one respects until it pays off. Most startups' original ideas were not considered prestigious or popular at the time.

At any time, spending ten years with your head down in pursuit of something vague is a tough decision. But making that choice may be harder now, because it's harder to ignore the outside world now.

The ever-increasing interconnectedness of the internet means we are more aware of all the other things we can do. Social media has given all of our friends great clips without mentioning the negative consequences that come with it. Our fear of missing out increases when we see someone else doing something we have to give up, which means we often feel worse. This can make it harder to stay motivated on obscure, risky little projects. If past geniuses saw their friends keep improving when they were stagnant, would they be discouraged in hard times?

The Internet has exaggerated the desire for imitation. We're more connected with our friends, which means we see more of what they do - we see them doing the same jobs, pursuing the same hobbies, doing the same things that are socially recognized and acceptable. That could mean taking less unconventional, uncertain paths—those most likely to break with current routines.

Community

Until two decades ago, the people we met were highly dependent on geography. Generally, we can only communicate with our neighbors within city streets. Because we may only move a few times in our lives, that means we may encounter a much smaller range of people.

The Internet has removed this barrier by allowing us to connect with anyone, anywhere. On the one hand, this means being exposed to more diverse viewpoints and ideas. It's a great thing and has played an important role in advancing society.

But the diversity of ideas, the amount of content from everyone, quickly becomes too much. There is so much content, stories, ideas, posts, people, opinions of varying quality that it is necessary to filter out some of them. Internet products have responded, filtering what we see through recommendation algorithms and news aggregation. While it may have been well-meaning at first, it has also led to things like "echo chambers" and polarizing recommender systems. Access to novel ideas and different perspectives is harder, not easier, unless they are explicitly sought out. Now, the internet allows us to transcend the diversity of our local communities and connect directly with people who are already like us, rather than stumble upon new ideas outside of our local communities.

The best ideas come from a mix of people with different viewpoints, but many of the biggest platforms on the internet — social media, news — make this model harder to pull off. While spending a lot of time with ten interesting and different people might be better than spending a little time with a thousand similar people, the current platform pushes us towards the latter. This means that our conversations take place in larger public spaces — like Facebook — which allow for sporadic thoughts as social judgment grows.

Improved social judgment can also mean a maladjustment to personality. In the old days, if you did something crazy in five years, no one would know. But now, your life updates are often public. This effect of social proof, combined with curation — likes on Facebook, stories on Instagram, news that emphasizes a particular narrative — could mean a more collective mindset that doesn’t lend itself to new things.

Counterarguments

For every statement I made above, there is a completely opposite argument. You might argue that instead of diminishing focus, the internet has provided us with a wealth of long-form content and tools to increase productivity. It's not about pulling people away from unconventional paths and ideas, but making it easier for people to pursue them and show them to people outside their circles.

This is real. Both views are likely to be true, positive or negative. This is because the effects of the internet do not apply equally to everyone. For those who inadvertently use the Internet correctly, the Internet may greatly facilitate the development of new ideas, productivity, and overall well-being. But I'd wager that many people, or even most internet users, don't have this experience, because the current form of internet products doesn't gravitate toward this usage pattern by default. To avoid the negative effects of the internet, it must be used in a very thoughtful way. It's hard.

You can also argue that these negative effects are not unique to the Internet. After all, TV has the same problem: it distracts us, makes it harder to focus, and only showcases mainstream ideas and communities.

This is also true, although I would argue two things. First, the flaws of the Internet are particularly impactful because of its accessibility. Unlike our TVs, each of us has a smartphone in our pocket that we can use at all times, making these effects more pervasive. Second, the fundamental design of the technology makes it more difficult to address these effects of TV. On the other hand, however, it is still possible to change the internet to counteract these side effects - which makes it all the more debatable.

Change

Why the design of the internet has evolved in a way that causes these side effects is another topic. This is likely to be closely tied to the history of the Internet - a mix of emerging technologies, venture capital, rapid growth and product iterations, meaning there is no time to think about the ultimate ramifications.

However, all we can do is speculate on how we can change the status quo. There are almost certainly some tweaks we can make to make the internet a better tool for everyone. It's not just good for creators; it's probably good for everyone as well.

For example, we can invest in educating people on how to use the internet thoughtfully. Now, how we use the internet depends on how we get there—whether it's through Facebook referrals or TikTok ads. This is good for rapidly expanding a user base, but it may not be the best way to steer people into meaningful interactions with the internet that allow for "downtime," focus, and active community interactions . Maybe we can guide people more explicitly: after all, we don't let people falter in their learning about nutrition or medicine. Why should the internet be any different? I remember when I was in elementary school, my teacher taught me the importance of nutrition and the dangers of smoking. Perhaps classrooms of the future can also teach healthy internet use more explicitly. Just as nutrition and smoking were issues of previous generations that must be addressed through education, learning to use the internet can be our challenge.

There might be a startup that makes sense here: helping people make better use of the internet and discovering that community is important to them. The most challenging part seems to be how to quantify "better": how do you measure whether the service is working well? Obviously, it won't correlate with usage time or any other typical internet metrics.

We can also adjust internet platforms to reduce the importance of social verification. Maybe there's a way to better connect people with others in an unconventional way that encourages smaller constructive steps, rather than showing off "brilliant" results - in a very short period of time, day after day Drive progress day by day. By doing so, we can build community that inspires others to accomplish achievable goals for days or weeks, rather than unshakable, multi-year goals.

A renewed emphasis on the shift towards private rather than public communities may also be a good start. Meaningful conversations seem to exist more in small spaces—where people can comfortably say something questionable or controversial. Existing platforms seem to have realized this: Facebook believes that the future of the platform is for private communities, and Snapchat may be successful because they realized it in the first place .

Increasing the communication bandwidth of the Internet—in other words, making it more like real-life communication—will also help. Perhaps the space provided by VR will allow us to have more meaningful interactions with others , such as full conversations. This may be better for communicating and thinking than the low-bandwidth, high-stimulus networks that have become popular in the past decade.

On a more radical note, perhaps we can fundamentally redesign the way the internet works so that it doesn't have these effects on our attention and focus. Maybe it's a layer of abstraction that removes hyperlinks: instead of schizophreically clicking on links to jump, we move around in virtual environments to explore new websites, much more similar to exploring in the real world. Alternatively, we can build smarter systems that present information in a longer-term, more focused manner, more akin to a dialogue or a documentary, rather than using an interesting but messy feed of information. This may have less effect on distracting us.

These ideas may not work at all. Even if they did, it would be difficult to quantify their impact. But, as creators and users of the internet, we can think about how to address the side effects of what we currently create. It's an exciting opportunity: it's an opportunity to make the Internet an amazingly progressive tool, as one might expect.

Compiled from: The Side Effects of an Unfinished Internet