Can You Guess What Is Making Everyone Stupid?
November 17, 2025
Another short essay from a real and still-alive dinobaby. If you see an image, we used AI. The dinobaby is not an artist like Grandma Moses.
I read an article in “The Stupid Issue” of New York Magazine’s Intelligencer section. Is that a dumb set of metadata for an article about stupid? That’s evidence in my book.
The write up is “A Theory of Dumb: It’s Not Just Screens or COVID or Too-Strong Weed. Maybe the Culprit of Our Cognitive Decline Is Unfettered Access to Each Other.” [sic] Did anyone notice that a question mark was omitted? Of course not. It is a demonstration of dumb, not a theory.
This is a long write up, about 4,000 words. Based on the information in the essay, I am not sure most Americans will know the meaning of the words in the article, nor will they be able to make sense of it. According to Wordcalc.com, the author hits an eighth grade level of readability. I would wager that few eighth graders in rural Kentucky know the meaning of “unproctored” or “renormalized”. I suppose some students could ask their parents, but that may not produce particularly reliable definitions in my opinion.
Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough, the new standard of excellence today.
Please, read the complete essay. I think it is excellent. I do want to pounce on one passage for my trademarked approach to analysis. The article states:
a lot of today’s thinking on our digitally addled state leans heavily on Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, the hepcat media theorists who taught us, in the decades before the internet, that every new medium changes the way we think. They weren’t wrong — and it’s a shame neither of them lived long enough to warn society about video podcasts — but they were operating in a world where the big leap was from books to TV, a gentle transition compared to what came later. As a result, much of the current commentary still fixates on devices and apps, as if the physical delivery mechanism were the whole story. But the deepest transformation might be less technological than social: the volume of human noise we’re now wired into.
This passage sets up the point about too much social connectedness. I mostly agree, but my concern is that references to Messrs. McLuhan and Postman and the social media / mobile symbiosis misses the most significant point.
Those of you who were in my Eagleton Lecture delivered in 1986 at Rutgers University heard me say, “Online information tears down structures.” The idea is not that the telegraph made decisions faster. The telegraph eliminated established methods of sending urgent messages and tilled the ground for “improvements” in communications. The lesson from the telegraph, radio, and other electronic technologies was that these eroded existing structures and enabled follow ons. If we shift to the clunky computers from the Atomic Age, the acceleration is more remarkable than what followed the wireless. My point, therefore, is that as information flows in electronic and digital form, structures like the brain are eroded. One can say, “There are smart people at Google.” I respond, “That’s true. The supply, however, is limited. There are lots of people in the world, but as the cited article points out, there is more stupid than ever.
I liked the comment about “nutritional information.” My concern is that “information bullets” fly about, they compound the damage the digital flows create. With lots of shots, some hit home and take out essential capabilities. Useful Web sites go dark. Important companies become the walking wounded. Firms that once relied entirely upon finding, training, and selling access to smart people want software to replace these individuals. For some tasks, sure, smart software is capable. For other tasks, even Mark Zuckerberg looks lost when he realizes his top AI wizard is jumping the good ship Facebook. Will smart software replace Yann LeCun? Not for a few years and a dozen IPOs.
One final comment. Here’s a statement from the Theory of Dumb essay:
Despite what I just finished saying, there is one compressionary artifact from the internet that may perfectly encapsulate everything about our present moment: the “midwit” meme. It’s a three-panel bell curve in which a simpleton on the left makes a facile, confident claim and a serene, galaxy-brained monk on the right makes a distilled version of the same claim — while the anxious try-hard in the middle ties himself in knots pedantically explaining why the simple version is actually wrong. Who wants to be that guy?
I want to point out that I am not sure how many people in the fine Commonwealth in which I reside know what a “compressionary artifact” is. I am not confident that most people could wrangle a definition they could understand from a Google Gemini output. The midwit concept is very real. As farmers lose the ability to fix their tractors, skills are not lost; they are never developed. When curious teens want to take apart an old iPad to see how it works, they learn how to pick glass from their fingers and possibly cause a battery leak. When a high school shop class “works” on an old car to repair it, they learn about engine control units and intermediary software on a mobile phone. An oil leak? What’s that?
I want to close with the reminder that when one immerses a self or a society in digital data flows, the information erodes the structures. Thus, in today’s datasphere, stupid is emergent. Get used to it. PS. Put the question mark in your New York Magazine headline. You are providing evidence that my assertion about online is accurate.
Stephen E Arnold, November 17, 2025
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