The Internet is a Transparent Asylum

You open YouTube and the feed presents itself as a single surface. A man ranks the worst genetics for building muscle. Beside him a historian stands before a bronze statue and speaks of open-source weeks at the United Nations. A boxer faces a six-foot-seven opponent called a psychopath. Britain is drawn as a map locked in combat with a cartoon woman in a hijab.

Somewhere lower a police officer weeps on camera. The titles sit next to one another without any discernable hierarchy. Ten years ago many of these subjects lived on the margins of public speech. Today they occupy the center and yet the center no longer holds the shape of a public square. Instead, all these things have become an asylum in which every patient shouts at once and the attendants have long since abandoned the idea of keeping them quiet.

On June 30, American Krogan noted that YouTube seems much worse today than it was ten years ago despite the fact that many dissident talking points have entered the mainstream. So why hasn’t anything changed? The answer, in a word, is density. Dissident talking points have entered the mainstream, yes, but so has literally everything else.

There’s no room for any victory of any particular argument on YouTube. Instead, YouTube and all of mainstream Internet conversation has collapsed the conditions under which viable arguments still matter. Imagine a room full of voices speak at the same volume and the same speed. Eventually, the ear loses its capacity to distinguish your name from the rest of the noise. The human power of appropriately responding to a call to action in our time is drowned in any number of simultaneous demands.

This is the society of transparency in its finished form. Transparency was sold as the ally of trust. In practice, however, transparency it has abolished the very intervals in which trust can

grow. Actual trust requires the possibility that something remains unsaid and that time may pass between the speaking of a word, considering it, and then answering it in kind. Total exposure has removed that interval. Now, everything is made available at once and anything secret is treated as an obstacle. Any resistance that forces thought to slow down and take shape has been smoothed away and all we have left now is an endless stream of content that can be calculated, ranked, monetized, and then forgotten.

The flood of information itself does the work that was formerly assigned to censorship. No committee needs to meet in order to produce the asylum when the inmates were busily producing it themselves. The architecture of permanent visibility already guarantees that outcome. Platforms reward all these simultaneous messages and the algorithms prefer everything hits you immediately. Everyone has been trained to consume rather than to answer. Everyone concerned with free speech has forgotten that speech is worthless if it ceases to be an act that binds the future with the past. In stead, speech is just pure exhibition, made to turn human beings into glass. Every interior surface is offered to the light, and in that light the capacity for authenticity has died.

History has always depended on the power to hear a call that arrives from beyond the present moment. A people becomes a people when they answer something older or larger than themselves. God is infinite and discerning His answer takes time. It requires sequence and the freedom to refuse something immediate in favor of something long-lasting.

This asylum is the logical result of a culture that has made illumination its highest value. When every shadow is abolished, the soul loses the darkness in which it once learned to see. When every secret is forced into the open, the possibility of trust dissolves into mutual surveillance. When every voice is amplified to the same volume, no voice can call a person out of himself. The result is the condition we now inhabit: a mainstream that has become indistinguishable from the psyche ward and a public square that functions as a continuous panic.

Our civilization produces more information than any previous age but with less capacity to respond to any of it.

There is no conspiracy behind this state of affairs. The intention is already written into the demand for total openness. More information, more communication, more acceleration: these were the promises. Their fulfillment is the nuthouse. And the cure will not be found in still more transparency. It will begin only when men and women recover the right to remain hidden, to speak in sequence rather than in simultaneous flood, and to answer only The Word that still possess the authority of a genuine call to action.