Ask Lemmy

I think our skill to process information has natural limits, which were overwhelmed decades ago by the social media firehose and a breakdown of information-filtering infrastructure.

an average edition of a newspaper the size of The Times already contains more information about the world than a person in the 17th Century was likely to come across in a lifetime. (Wurman, Information Anxiety)

That was back in 1989. We're now 30 years later with an internet supercharged by predatory algorithms.

And we can't filter all of it without either completely withdrawing from the world entirely or spending months learning why and how to filter it ourselves.

We have had information overload in some form or another since the 1500s. What is changing now is the filters we use for the most of the 1500 period are breaking, and designing new filters doesn’t mean simply updating the old filters. They have broken for structural reasons, not for service reasons. (Shirky, It's Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure)

I use AI because I'm done being asked to turn off my ad blocker, and accept cookies, and download the mobile app for a "better" experience, and scroll through pages and pages of absolutely worthless fluff completely unrelated to what I'm searching for. Or, alternatively, get blocked for simply having a VPN on to find out how to do the most absolutely mundane things you could possibly imagine.

The internet has been dead since 2016.