The Internet Has Been Starving Your Right Brain to Death

Clickbait title aside, we've been addicted to left brain-thinking thanks to the Net

Instagram recently added a filter to users’ feeds that blocks out political content. I was informed about this on TikTok and turned the filter off. Was the filter’s default setting “on” in bad faith, to block pro-Gaza activists? Possibly. Usually a move like this would enrage me, but days later, when the Key Bridge collapsed, there were political conspiracies from all directions blaming everyone from Ukrainians to lazy black bureaucrats.

I don’t think we should have our political filters on. Not on Instagram anyway. Internally, it may be wise to use our own minds to keep track of any tendencies we may have to go down yet another political intrigue rabbit hole.

Speaking of which, when did we get so investigative anyway? More importantly, how have so many been so confident that their detective work was so good? About a month ago, I read this on Substack. Here is the passage that got me going:

The dissident network opposing this Beast System we’re trapped inside of, this awful thing that’s digesting everything beautiful and good in the world and shitting out concrete parking lots and plastic ethnic food franchises, is composed of people who, for whatever reason, have retained or regained the proper balance of hemispheric cognition – which is to say, their right hemispheres are dominant, as they should be. The Regime is humanity’s hypertrophied, runaway left hemisphere; the dissidents are humanity’s right hemisphere, struggling fitfully to regain consciousness, trying to regain control of the social organism.

Don’t get the idea that everyone opposing the Regime is perfectly balanced. This is far from the case. We’re all products of this system, broken to one degree or another. A better way to put it might be, that small fraction of the population, say 10%, who can still use both sides of their brain at least some of the time, say 10% of it, are on one side; the other side is composed almost entirely of people in a left-brain hypnotic state. Most of the people on our side are still tarded, and even the ones who aren’t are tarded most of the time; but those brief flashes of insight make all the difference, and the enemy gets very few of those.

This is why our side keeps running rings around the Regime, despite the massive disparity in temporal power.

Almost exactly right. Our technopoly encourages us to use our left brain more than our right. It deifies it. But, with all due respect to Mr. Carter, this very black/white left wing/right wing thinking comes from the left brain and keeps us tied to its maze-like pattern, like everything has to be figured out.

John Carter is not the only one rebranding the right-brain as a right-wing dissident poet-guerrilla. Ian McGilchrist, the psychiatrist whose writings warn about the dangers of overvaluing the left brain over the right, has inspired a slew of IDW writers to frame the schism in political terms.

Coleman Hughes, another writer who has made a splash in right wing circles with his book The End of Race Politics, had this to say in his book:

Correlation does not imply causation. But the data, at least, are consistent with the view that social media has caused a major shift in how people view themselves and the world—a shift away from reality and toward paranoia, pessimism, and catastrophizing.

Which makes me think that treating our brain hemispheres like they are in a presidential race against each other is one more left brain rabbit hole, along with QAnon.

This is how the left brain works: analysis, fact-checking, logic (as opposed to the right, which is known for creativity, intuition, holistic thinking). The world can be reduced to data points. These data points must be gathered together into an analysis either similar to the mainstream narrative or not. In a perfect world, the left brain would patiently wait for more durable, well-researched data. But this is the Internet, where all narratives make sense. All cops are racist. No bridge collapse can be the fault of cutting corners financially. The left-brain is the deep state’s plaything.

I don’t believe the last one, but I do acknowledge that the left brain is getting worn out by Big Tech the way coke dealers in the ‘80s led to so many perforated septums.

Why would this be a problem? Let’s hear it from McGilchrist himself:

It’s not that we’ve all got schizophrenia — of course we haven’t — but what I think is that we’re all neglecting the right hemisphere. Schizophrenia is a case in which the left hemisphere has gone into overdrive, and the right hemisphere has been wound down or is not really being listened to, and this leads to delusions and hallucinations. I think we are now in a world which is fully deluded.

All that Q Anon rabbit hole diving makes more sense now, no? This is why every thing we read or see is just another animal print we track to catch the big fat goat on the mountain top.

Before we get too far down the right brain/left brain rabbit hole, I am not trying to be literal about the division here. You can replace “left brain/right brain” with “brain/heart” or “mind/soul.” It’s just that the brain dichotomy is most legible in our technopolitan times and, while I am not entirely sure that the Internet literally overstimulates our left brains and atrophies our right ones, I find it nearly impossible to deny that the Internet has engaged with our information-gathering side while getting us to summarily ignore the part of ourselves that embraces uncertainty, mystery, instinct. Too much light, not enough dark.

The funny thing about it is, all throughout history, society has valued the practical left brain. But before the Enlightenment, the right brain was satiated by religion.

From Neil Postman’s indispensable Technopoly:

The belief system of a tool-using culture is rather like a brand-new deck of cards. Whether it is a culture of technological simplicity or sophistication, there always exists a more or less comprehensive, ordered world-view, resting on a set of metaphysical or theological assumptions. Ordinary men and women might not clearly grasp how the harsh realities of their lives fit into the grand and benevolent design of the universe, but they have no doubt that there is such a design, and their priests and shamans are well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not wholly rational, at least coherent. The medieval period was a particularly clear example of this point. How comforting it must have been to have a priest explain the meaning of the death of a loved one, of an accident, or of a piece of good fortune. To live in a world in which there were no random events—in which everything was, in theory, comprehensible; in which every act of nature was infused with meaning—is an irreplaceable gift of theology. The role of the church in premodern Europe was to keep the deck of cards in reasonable order, which is why Cardinal Bellarmine and other prelates tried to prevent Galileo from shuffling the deck. As we know, they could not, and with the emergence of technocracies moral and intellectual coherence began to unravel.

As I’ve mentioned, not believing in God is helpful if you have something to fill the God-shaped void. Trying to fill that void with technological progress, like Francis Bacon did, is a recipe for…whatever we have now.

The Internet has not only overstimulated our left brains, but its cruel starvation campaign against the right brain might explain why, for example, the Internet has yet to contribute an incredible, lasting work of art. In the ‘00s, the indie rock albums and video sketches that went viral online were also backed by live performances. The alt-lit movement of the early ‘10s and the Dimes Square scene happened as much online as did at public readings. Arguably, all these eras of online art stood out from everything else because they all thrived on engagement with live performances in New York City, where legacy media is.

The only widespread artform that I can truly say is native to the Internet is meme culture. What keeps me coming back to Instagram is looking at a confusing, surreal shitpost, and trying to figure out what it means. Well, other things also count as art, like podcasts too, but more on them later.

But literature and erotica? From

Noah Kumin

‘s Mars Review:

One connection between literature and eros is that they are inefficient in a way that our society no longer approves of. To be erotically ensnared is, potentially, to lose your mind or your livelihood. To read or write literature is to practice an arcane ritual that only serves to remove you from efficient markets. Neither of these practices helps you save up for your 401(k).

Inefficient. That is a good way of seeing if something is good for your right brain. Shitpost memes are truly inefficient. Rambling podcasts (as opposed to the TED-talky NPR style that the center left can’t seem to resist) are inefficient. How often is anything done online for its intrinsic value?

It got particularly bad after 2016, according to Kyle Chayka’s excellent new book. Filterworld. This is when it wasn’t only Facebook that had an algorithmic news feed. Instagram and Twitter also abandoned the chronological feed at this time. From 2016 on, even though technology and politics have changed drastically, this also explains why culture, even now, has seemed relatively monotonous. Grey scale cafes, etc. Everything that exists offline must be legible on the Instagram grid or the TikTok feed.

About a month ago, there was a viral meme about the movie Dazed and Confused. It says that if the movie were, let’s say, rebooted this year, the movie would take place in 2007. Many pissed off Gen Xers (myself included) were baffled. The gap between 1976 and 1993 seems so much larger than the gap between 2007 and 2024. My best friend helped me piece it together: there were massive cultural differences between 1976 and 1993, but the political and especially the technological differences were not as great (1993 was one of the last years without widespread Internet access). The differences between 2007 and now are the exact opposite. Technology (the first iPhone was released in 2007) and politics have gone through seismic changes, while culture has changed superficially.

Watch an episode of Entourage if you don’t believe me. The show’s protagonist was a Hollywood actor who was always with it. You will see the cultural changes are superficial. There may have been a few more rock songs back then, but other than that, there’s rap music, pop, etc. Now look at the political climate and the technology. Entourage was clearly released before #MeToo. Ari’s racist, homophobic jabs at Lloyd would have gotten the show cancelled today, But frankly no difference is greater between a 2007 episode of the show and today’s world than the Blackberries that everyone obsessively brandishes. Blackberries were the bell bottoms and afros of the ‘00s.

It should come as no surprise that these are the types of revolutions we are seeing. Tech and politics are inherently left-brained fields while culture is right-brained. It is no accident that as technology has improved, everyone has been siloed into political echo chambers. Thus, The Discourse.

Recently, Erik Hoel posted an ambitious newsletter trying to tackle what he believes the Hegelian dialectic of our time is. Here is what he believes it is:

Thesis

The Mob

Antithesis

The Sovereign Individual

With the synthesis happening in the future and being a compromise of the two opposing forces. I was inspired to find another dialectic:

Thesis

Reductionism

Antithesis

Complexity

With the synthesis again happening in the future and being a compromise of the two opposing forces.

Since the ‘00s, we have seen reductionism run rampant. Pitchfork’s record reviews had a decimal point to imply scientific accuracy — and to put to rest any notion of feeling conflicted. Some blogs had long posts, but most of them were a paragraph long and linked to a legacy media news article, acting as a CliffsNotes for the news and paving the way for Twitter, the Cadillac of reductionism. Needless to say, all this reductionism is easier for algorithms to handle and for dopamine-chasing scrollers to digest.

It hasn’t just been content, incidentally, that has fallen prey to left-brain based reductionism. Freddie DeBoer has isolated the root of today’s obsession of classifying guys according to the person-guy model (LitBro, FilmBro, etc.): it all came from hipster culture. Before this phenomenon, hipsters used to call each other hipsters in a derogatory fashion, to throw off the scent of their own odious, hyper-privileged elitism. As this became transparent, new targets were needed, but the reductionism spoke to the issue: projection. “At least I’m not as pretentious as that guy who likes David Foster Wallace.”

But have no fear: the growing complexity antithesis is very real. Just two days ago, Ted Gioia heralded the dawning of a humanities revolution he sees on the horizon, where people will come before tech. Fashion girls are moving from Instagram to Substack. ¹ It also turns out that Gen Z is as fond of complex media like long podcasts, YouTube videos, even long films like Dune 2, as it is of TikTok (which itself is slowly pivoting to longer videos). Speaking of Dune 2, we are also apparently in the golden age of highbrow sci-fi with shows like 3 Body Problem and Foundation. Anecdotally, I can add that I heard Beyonce’s country album yesterday. Ready to hate it, I was bowled over by how she had a respectable disregard for any genre conventions, let alone country, and released a truly remarkable album that will take a while to digest and understand. This is coming from someone who, a little more than a year ago, described her as “cringe.” Yes, I was being reductionist.

A common way to simplify the difference between the left brain and the right brain is this: the left brain primarily deals with the map, the right brain deals with the territory. Douglas Rushkoff’s latest newsletter warns us that the map/territory divide will be at the very heart of the ongoing AI growing pains. Left to run amok, generative AI can further plunge us down a left-brain hellgrid. If we can successfully use AI to filter out AI-generated content, however:

[T]hey can help remind us when something is just a map, a model, a social construction rather than a given circumstance of nature. That’s the first big obstacle I’ve been harping about for the past year two - the thing standing in the way of our reaching coherence or functioning as a society. We are walking around mistaking too many things and institutions as given circumstances or conditions of nature that are really just social constructions. From the money in our pockets to the fact that we need a car to get to work or that we need to be employed at all or that we need to pay rent to some landlord in order to be allowed to sleep in an apartment. 

When we’re born into such a world, of course we accept such conventions at face value. It’s how things are. But the trick to moving beyond them is to alienate ourselves from them, and recognize their inventedness so we can “program” them differently.

Want another way AI might paradoxically break us out of the grid? It’s your lucky day: Patrick McGraw, in an interview with Dazed regarding his literary magazine, Heavy Traffic, said this:

Language is representative of that. It became intensely structured over the past century, more structured than it ever was. Now, that kind of base, written language is going to be done by AI – and as long as humans don’t have that responsibility anymore, they will turn away from it.

Epilogue

As a few of you may now, I am in recovery. Today I have six months and twenty-nine days clean. When I relapsed back in August, I took mushroom chocolates on two consecutive days. The second trip was hellish enough that I ran back to a meeting that night. But the first trip was relatively euphoric. Very right brained. I went to Central Park on a beautiful day. I remember when I was on the subway, though, everyone was on their phones. I was too frightened to stand out as the only person not looking at it, so before I looked at my feeds, I distinctly remember sighing and mumbling to myself “Ugh, the discourse.” Even on a relatively carefree, spiritually-centered day, I found myself scrolling and swiping like the rest of the algorithmically-calibrated sheep on the grid, looking for hoof prints to a non-existent mountain.

1. If you are a fashion girl and you stumbled here, might I suggest a grey hoodie with a wool lining and a chrome Slurpee straw as a smart accessory?