In Argument: Negentropy
The light of our century grows brighter every day. As Earth temperatures continue growing quickly year by year, we burn more and more fossil fuels to find the same comfort we used to take for granted, worsening a problem we have known about for generations. We have begun a dangerous pattern of consumption, where those of us who can afford heated dwellings, and cooled offices spend more of our hours staring into the unnatural light of screens powered by burnt fossil fuels. Our energy use rises while our progress towards sustainable power supply stalls. Instead, we keep relying on the power of coal and oil, which only serves to worsen our problem. We burn oil and gas as if they are a solution, though we know they are finite.
Every day we need renewable energy more and more. Humanity has been focused on other things, mostly computers and artificial intelligence, or what we call “information technology”, because of the vast and deep effects these technologies have on energy, work, and knowledge. Information technologies have caused our worldwide supply chains to change the work of humans, creating more demand for human thought, cooperation, and the kind of creativity that is still uniquely human.
However, with the introduction of new “generative” A.I. systems, we have passed a critical point and entered a new era. Much like the Cambrian Explosion, we are witnessing an evolution of thought, not species. Every day, new cultural ideas, memes, and words are created and in each of us grows a greater hunger for new information. Just as our bodies demand more food as they grow, our minds crave ever more information. However, we are coming to realize that much of the new information that has appeared on the ever-expanding internet is like poison to our bodies. As the internet has grown, so has our consumption, but we must start to become aware that we cannot eat only milkshakes and ice-cream, no matter how good they taste.
Just as food can both nourish or harm the body, so too can information nourish or harm the mind. The rise of the internet has flooded our cognitive environment with easily consumable, emotionally charged content, engineered for retention and manipulation.
In the same way that industrial sugar transformed the global diet via convenient, addictive, and damaging calories, modern information ecosystems have reshaped human attention diets. Social media algorithms are optimized not to inform, but to trigger. Rage, fear, and desire are the caloric equivalents of processed sugars: easy to digest, hard to resist, and harmful in excess.
In the 20th century we saw the emergence of public health crises from overconsumption. Americans suffered massively at the hands of heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. We are now witnessing parallel crises: mass misinformation, polarization, declining attention spans, and rising anxiety. These are not abstract trends, they are the measured and predictable result of a digital ecosystem that treats your mind like a stomach and feeds it a steady diet of constant novelty and poisonous outrage.
Consider the way platforms like Facebook (META) and YouTube (Alphabet) evolved. Sold to us as tools for connection or entertainment, as their power grew their business models converged around maximizing time-on-site and ad exposure. This incentivized the promotion of emotionally extreme, algorithmically tailored content, fatally addictive digital sugar. Just as lead pipes poisoned ancient Rome through decades of accumulation, our data pipelines now feed us contaminated information under the guise of connection and customization.
Knowledge itself is being commodified, stripped of its proper context. Clickbait headlines, deepfakes, and viral memes trade in cognitive calories with little nutritional value and potentially massive downstream effects. America becomes bloated on trivia while starving for wisdom.
Bad information does not always act immediately. It accumulates, disrupts, and deceives. It simulates knowledge while preventing understanding. The most potent poisons are often those that go unnoticed. It is tasteless, slow-acting, and hidden in plain sight.
I call on whoever is reading to think for a moment, are your information providers nourishing your mind – or exploiting it, just as past industrialists exploited the Earth? My goal in this essay is to explore how vulnerable we are in this new information environment, how individuals can navigate this landscape, and how we might be able to maintain sustainable and progressive growth without compromising our foundation.
In Argument: The Noosphere
Compare today’s shared human knowledge to that of a century, or even a decade ago, and the acceleration becomes clear. We’ve learned more in three generations than in the previous three millennia. Our shared knowledge used to be limited to libraries in universities and popular books, yet today we have personal computers, corporate servers and data centers, generative artificial intelligence, and all the humans who use and add to these online libraries. This evolution is an epistemic explosion. This is not just the printing press, this is the beginning of a new epistemic reality. It is hard to grasp just how profoundly this technology is reshaping everything. To find understanding, we must start at the basis of our information: mathematics.
Take out a calculator (most likely on your cellphone) and type some numbers in. Maybe multiply your yearly salary by the years until your retirement, or your hourly wage by the hours you work in a week. How long did this take? Three seconds, maybe five? One hundred years ago, the best computers in the world were people and they had you beat by approximately ten times your calculation speed. Your smartphone runs equations ten billion times faster than them; one followed by ten more zeroes.
Sometimes, a computer is just 10,000,000,000 times faster than you and there’s nothing that can change that. When it comes to calculation our computers do more than decimate us. They atomize us. It is not enough to just know this fact. You must believe this, because there is practically nothing that is ten billion times faster than something else in our lives. The speed difference expands when it comes to AI. It is like comparing a supersonic jet to a garden snail, except the jet would need to be 300 times faster than it is now.
Again, let’s do a bit of mental work. Visualize a world that exists atop the tectonic plates and is nested under the atmosphere, made of plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, humans, and anything else that lives. These are the “Biosphere” and it’s terrestrial nest, the “Geosphere”. The Geosphere is the sum of the incredible conditions that allow life to form: our vast oceans, stable atmosphere, shifting tectonic plates, and the vital magma core. The “Biosphere” is the conditions of life that emerged from the “Geosphere”. It includes both the microscopic bacteria that live in our guts and the vast taigas, savannahs, deserts, cities, coral reefs, and rainforests that blanket the Geosphere. The Geosphere is ruled by just physics and chemistry, but the Biosphere is also beholden to the laws of biology, genetics, anatomy and any number of the other natural sciences. Both the Geosphere and the Biosphere fall within a natural order that emerged out of the cosmic laws of physics and the divine canvas of chemistry, yet the Biosphere demands to be understood upon its own terms: wild forests, subterranean colonies, and sprawling cities. When we continue to look beyond these layers, we can see another level emerging, beholden to the same material laws. While our understanding of the natural world is built atop the discipline of biology, we will soon witness the emergence of a new science, and a new sphere. This “Noosphere” will demonstrate mastery: of physics, chemistry, and biology, and with it will emerge an order where ideas become the new animals, competing for attention, impact, and immortality.
In the eight decades since the initial vision of the “Noosphere” was presented by a French Jesuit priest, the internet emerged as a dynamic realm of ideas, biomes forming on webpages and ideas evolving and growing like tiny creatures in an ancient ocean. The Noosphere has begun to break down many of the hardest barriers that language and culture blocked, and that public education had yet to soothe. It’s ever-connected nature allows for concurrent thoughts to occur, compete, and collaborate across unbelievable distances. Conversations that used to only happen in small rooms between close friends on personal, scientific, or political topics are now publicly available to all on the internet who have the will to find them. Just as ecosystems give rise to predators and hierarchies, this new sphere of information brings with it a reshaping of power, access, and inequality.
In Argument: Revolution
As the Noosphere expands, it grows with an animalistic appetite and a super-human intelligence. Like the Biosphere before it, it selects, filters, and concentrates both its consumption as well as it’s creations. Ideas that were once scattered become centralized. Data that was once anonymous becomes tracked. While information proliferates across the Noosphere, power becomes consolidated. The technologies that allow us to think, connect, and create at scale also create conditions for a new kind of evolutionary pressure: a pressure on minds, institutions, and collective futures. Ecosystems generate predators, so too does the Noosphere. Just like natural evolution, this process is indifferent to justice.
Revolution rarely begins with fires. Often, it begins with a shift so quiet and structural that it creates thousands of injustices so minute they can only be measured once the riots begin. Today, revolutions are waged not by soldiers, but by search engines. The most powerful institutions on Earth manufacture cognition. Through vast repositories of user data, algorithmic targeting, and predictive AI, they mediate what we see, how we feel, and what we think is true. The result is not just an inequality of wealth, but an inequality of reality itself. One group writes the maps, while the rest walk blindly through terrain already chosen for them.
Let us be clear: revolution here does not mean anarchic destruction. It means spiritual recovery. It means claiming agency in an environment designed to shape us without our consent. It means restoring mutual intelligibility, ethical grounding, and civic navigation in a world of engineered distraction. It is not revolt—it is recalibration.
Every evolutionary leap creates a new kind of inequality—of capability, access, or understanding. As literacy separates classes, or as print empowers empires, intelligence enables inequality. We have not stopped evolving, though as our physical bodies stagnated, our cultural lives became vastly more complex. Corporations such as Facebook, Google, X, Amazon, or Tencent sit upon mountains of intelligence, and without access to this information we glimpse evolution’s open maw once again. If the inequality potential is equal in scale to the evolutionary shift, the resulting disparity will dwarf the periods of history following both the invention of the printing press and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. A growing division is emerging between the owners of digital platforms and their users. The CEO’s and shareholders of massive tech corporations acquire the potential to manipulate users into data-optimized consumption patterns that could subjugate users for years to come.
Whether or not this comes to pass, I urge you to consider how the information you read or consume is made in a new world that we do not understand as well as we once understood the relatively stable postwar American order. The foundations of culture have been fundamentally changed by the power of data, and we are locked into this brave new world. We risk atomization, at a intellectual as well as at a cultural level. This is not a cause for the youth to mourn over, as we do not have time to mourn lest we be consumed. Our first duty is to see the system clearly and to understand it, before we can begin to resist it, adapt to it, or reimagine it. Parents and children alike must know that humanity has forever changed the world, and that only through bold and faithful navigation, guided by principle and awareness, can we survive in the storm that now rages.