Welcome to the Age of Ideological Information Indulgence

Have a few more posts, as a treat — and when it starts to feel bad, just keep going

Information is an addiction. We don’t often think about it that way because we don’t often align our scrolling habits with collecting information. We position it as social media is an addiction, or media is an addiction. But we don’t call out that obsession for what it really is — information, even if it’s wrong or tied to something as harmless as TV series or video games. We love collecting, reacting to, and building our identities around the vast, infinite information that floods our feeds. 

Fundamentally, information then works as any other addiction. We start off with feeling relatively satiated by the minimal dosage and then before we know it we’re fiend’ing for any kind of hit — a tweet with a statistic, a TikTok with a recommendation, or a YouTube video going over a micro detail within the world of our dorkiest habit. I like the way Jon Stewart put it on a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show: when you’re young, the Sears catalog women are scandalous enough, but when that doesn’t work you seek out anything that makes you feel something. 

Addiction in media fuels monetization. Monetization fuels product development. Product development fuels mass behavior. Mass behavior brings us right back to addiction, but now more divided and isolated than ever. We can blame social media all we want, but this started way before. None of this is new to society at large — media academics have pointed to the development and popularity of penny papers helping to establish stronger literacy rates and the newspaper industry because of these same tactics — but it’s now more evocative and accessible. Access to news and information, both the typical Walter Cronkite 6:00 news fair that we hold so dear to our hearts that yearn for better times as well as the constant talking head analysis programming that defined early cable networks like CNN, went from something that occurred outside the house to inside the house. It went from a newspaper on the doormat to something you could access from the couch. It went from something that came once a day to something that was always there. Bored? Check out what CNN is talking about. 

It’s not just news, either. Information was being made available in just about any format disguised as entertainment or distraction. I mentioned above that penny presses found hordes of audience. That happened in large part because information stopped being critical know-how and became distractive entertainment. The more that we could consume information under the guise of entertainment, the more that we became addicted to the reaction rather than the information itself, the more an industry started to take shape. We didn’t just want to know what happened, but we wanted to feel righteous about our ideals, our faiths, and our moral standing. Information was less about informing and more about aligning. The technology and distribution may have changed between that period and today, but the psychology that governs these capitalistic endeavors haven’t. 

The 1850s into the 1900s were the beginning of our love affair with ideological information indulgences. But they were just the beginning. 

A Short History 

Before we dive into our descent into our current information maelstrom, we have to examine how we got here. Hyper growth is driven by technology because technology eventually makes certain business aspects far cheaper and/or eradicates other businesses. Consider newspapers. The development of Konig’s steam press in 1814 allowed The Times to increase the production of impressions from 20 an hour to 100 per hour, a 500% increase in volume. Then in 1848, the introduction of a cylinder bed instead of a flat one allowed a fast rotary action, meaning the publishers didn’t have to start and stop the presses in the opposite direction to get the correct impression. This increased the number of impressions from 1,000 an hour up to 12,000 an hour. Although The Times was the first paper to employ the technology because of its initial cost upfront, as newer technology came along, other papers (including working class radical papers that weren’t generating significant revenue) could buy the cheapest versions of these steam machines to increase their own quantity of papers. 

An increase in the number of papers was met with another important technological advancement that greatly impacted the abundance and availability of information: infrastructure and railways. A fun fact is that John Palmer introduced mail-coach in 1784 because he was pleased with the betterment of public roads. Mail-coaches were faster than horse-mail and allowed purveyors to get to post offices faster, which in 1787 established a separate office to facilitate the distribution of newspapers. This brought information directly to people around the country. Instead of having to go to coffee houses to read news (note: this was actually a positive and we’re going to get to that in a second), newspapers were brought to people. 

It would be impossible to get into the nooks and crannies of media’s 500 year development, but at the same time that steam presses and railroads were changing the world, two cruxes that created the media environment we exist in today appeared: a separation from direct government interference that led to indirect government relationships, and the influx of advertising that was about to play a much more significant role in editorial choices the larger circulations got and the faster papers were printed. Advertisements, always central to the media’s existence, became a silent commander of the stories that appeared in papers. Government officials started pressuring advertisers, therefore, to achieve the results that they could no longer control on their own. 

The type of news that worked, therefore, became less focused on political updates and more “heard around town” type entertainment that neighbors wanted to dig into. As Blessed be the Critics pointed out in 2018, “The deaths of Horace Greeley in 1872, Charles Dana in 1897, and Edwin Lawrence Godkin in 1902 marked the end of personal journalism. Such a press reflected the character and policies of its editors and often overlooked circulation concerns. Typified perhaps most acutely by Joseph Pulitzer‟s New York World, “the new journalism was dedicated to making profit.” This meant that “with the increase of profit-oriented journalism during the 1890s, however, sensationalism reached new heights,” the Journal added. Perhaps the shift is best summarized by The Nation’s Edwin Lawrence Godkin, who wrote for The Atlantic Monthly in 1898:

“As soon as the collection of it became a business, … the sense of proportion about news was rapidly destroyed. Everything, however trifling, was considered worth printing, and the newspaper finally became what it is now, a collection of the gossip not only of the whole world, but of its own locality.”

Information very quickly became something to react to rather than consume. You could indulge in the yellow journalism that was becoming more and more popular because it was cheaper and it allowed more reflection of your own values and situations compared to the droll but important political reporting or foreign policy of the day. Sound familiar? I worked for a large city paper at the beginning of my career, and we were far more likely to put up a story about celebrity gossip or some banal “weird” story because it drove clicks, which drove advertisements. Foreign policy had no place in the paper because foreign policy doesn’t sell papers — unless it could be converted into ideological opinion. 

Perhaps the most modern example is cable news, turning information into entertainment available 24/7 — and changing the type of information that was aired based on the demands of audiences and advertisers. It wasn’t just news that people wanted once they got access to more of it than they knew what to do with, right? It was gossip; thinly veiled takes hidden behind words like analysis. There were little non-update updates about tragedies like plane crashes. There were round-the-clock table discussions about the abduction or murder of a teenager in the suburbs. Truthfully, the more access portals to information (a term that exists beyond news to include entertainment and public opinion) that opened, the more opportunities were presented to pick and choose our own version of reality. 

What social media changed, and changed quicker than we’ve had the chance to sit and really comprehend rather than just react to itself, is the interactive quality. The thing we’re addicted to now isn’t the steady flow of information or the entertainment we have access to but the interactiveness of consuming information through absorbing other people’s reactions rather than the thing itself. Hot takes on TV shows, sides taken in public fights, quickly tweeted analysis of a news item. Our value moved from the information we consumed to the people we consumed information with and from.

 Indulgences 

My grandfather used to work in a chocolate factory. After stuffing his face with different types of chocolate — milk, hazelnut, caramel, almond, and so many more — treats for 30 days, he started to get routine stomach aches. He couldn;t even look at the chocolates as they came down the belt by the third month. He stopped eating chocolate for a year. He would tell my brother and I this story whenever we begged for more candy. The lesson was obvious: everything in moderation, otherwise you’ll make yourself sick. 

I wish someone told me the same was true about information when I signed up for Twitter in 2011. We do actually have data that suggests information overload is similar to overindulging on sweets. Information Overload Phenomenon (IOP) creates cardiovascular symptoms associated with increased stress, reduces serotonin in our brains, and hurts sleep, according to a NHS study. Other researchers have noted over the years that IOP “influences how people determine whether to keep searching and processing OHI or stop it…the individual confronts problems in identifying relevant information, becomes overtly selective and neglects a large amount of information, [and] faces difficulties in understanding the association between details and the overall perspective.” Simply put, we feel bad when we receive too much information, and we’re more inclined to lose perspective about the information we’re receiving while blocking out significant percentages of relevant information. 

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that we seek out information and media that makes us feel better about the information we’re taking in. It’s a subconsciously biased reward system that we don’t even know is in place. We can see information overload phenomenon in the podcasts we’re drawn to, the shows we watch, the social platforms we decide to use, and our own reactions to the people we consciously choose to follow continue this insulation of subconsciously biased reward. 

Journalist Laura Hazard Owen wrote a piece for Nieman Lab this week explaining why she was changing her approach to consuming the news. Owens, like many of us, was addicted not to the flow of information but the flow of reaction around that information; the feelings we often associate with entertainment or real life encounters (joy, anger, mourning). “I’ll read news, not other people’s reactions to news,” Owen wrote. “I have resubscribed to print newspapers because they are finite; when you’re done, you’re done.” Owen adds, “I’ve spent the past few years reading tweets about articles, not full articles; reading screenshots of the bad part (highlighted); reading only the most outraging detail from a story…instead of coming up with my own reaction to the entire story, I just ingest reactions from other people.” 

Owens isn’t alone. The vast majority of us get our news from social media sites, according to Pew Research Center. News outlets ranging from The New York Times and CNN to Fox News and NBC all saw stagnation or declines in reliance from established traditional news outlets as their main source of information between 2020 and 2024. Reliance on non-traditional or other forms of media (podcasts, YouTube videos, social media) saw a notable increase in the same period. This tracks even more with young voters and republicans. About 37% of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters have a lot of trust in news that comes from social media, putting it about on par with the 40% of Republicans who trust national news organizations, according to Pew. Then there’s the youth. Those under the age of 30 are now as likely to have trust in information from social media than from national news organizations. 

So we’re consuming more reactions than information, and we’re becoming more and more addicted to the platforms that feed us those reactions as information. That’s news. But we’re also seeing it within pop culture. Take The Boys for example, a show that I adore — and a show with a very specific ideological position. It’s the type of show that right-wing-leaning viewers celebrate because they ignore that the show is making fun of them…and have a visceral reaction to when that ideological bubble is shattered. Here’s my friend Ryan Broderick on this phenomenon: 

“The Boys subreddit is chaos right now. Threads getting locked, users rage-deleting whole accounts. It’s amazing. Right-wing users are whining about “no politics,” but it’s impossible to talk about the show without them now. Fans who thought Homelander was cool are in a meltdown.”

As Forbes’ Paul Tassi noted, Homelander, an obvious fascist character, was an even more obvious “commentary on specific elements of the political right.” The problem, Tassi rightly argues, is that everything Homelander was satirizing “was already so close to parody itself in the first place, that those same people are falling for it twice, once in real life, now in a fictional series where they don’t understand why he’s an irredeemable villain.” 

You can guess what happened next. The Boys became a trending topic on Twitter, there were dozens of podcasts dedicated to deconstructing the problems that were now apparent for right-wing viewers, and instead of reacting to the show itself, audiences and fans started reacting to the reactions. Instead of feeling, they sought out being told what to feel. I was thinking about The Boys in relation to this new period of leaning into ideological information indulgence because of a post from the official Boys account making fun of Elon Musk’s new DOGE government program. Great post — and one designed to be reacted to instead of engaged with; something to spur a hundred thousand tweets about cultural problems with the show instead of getting people to laugh.

It played directly into the ideological information indulgence because that’s what good media accounts do to get attention. 

Reacting to Algorithms 

A stat I’ve used multiple times in other articles but one that I love because I think it actually gets to a giant problem in our global communication is that 66% of Gen Z spend more time with videos about a thing on YouTube than the thing itself, according to YouTube’s Insights team. On the one hand, this makes sense. The Boys is going to run a finite amount of episodes. Audiences don’t necessarily want to rewatch the same episode over and over again, but they want to dive further into their obsession through related works — subreddits, YouTube videos, TikTok stan accounts — that also makes them feel more connected to their communities. The more information they take in about how they’re supposed to feel, based on the reactions of others that they’ve developed parasocial relationships to, the more their emotions are likely to change. 

We have empirical proof of this, too. A 2019 study from the University of Duisberg-Essen found that “peer comments indeed alter the emotional effects of the video clip, with negative comments leading to a reduced sense of elevation,” according to the report, with elevation being a term used to express a feeling of warmth or compassion. These types of videos, however, make you want to search out similar content about similar topics — something platforms like YouTube are only too happy to provide as it boosts engagement. 

One of my favorite points made by media researches in the 1970s (bear with me) about the formation of organized press and a soon-to-be-booming media industry in the late 1700s to mid 1800s was that people were exposed to more opinions and slants within their media through coffeehouses and taverns because the media was easily accessible, free, and spread out. Certainly biases existed among readers as they do viewers today — a cable subscriber has access to all major cable networks but may only watch Fox or MSNBC — but academics found that a more open attitude from readers still curious about the role of an organized press was apparent in the readerships’ behavior. 

I like to think of it another way. Since there were options to peruse, readers were allowed to browse. I don’t believe in blaming algorithms for everything. It’s lazy, and it removes the responsibility of being independent, individual thinkers at a dangerous level. I do, however, believe that we are designed to seek out easier alternatives. Each revolution that has come to pass is centered around technology easing labor (and eliminating jobs in the process) to create higher profits (while eliminating jobs in the process) and get products to consumers faster. An algorithmic recommendation engine is the epitome of that philosophy. When you remove the necessity of perusing in lieu of surfacing an assumed relevant video or website, you teach behaviors that do alter the way humans behave. 

In other words, sure we could fight back against it, but why would we? This is the crux of where ideological information indulgence finds itself today. Just think about everything we’ve been discussing. You don’t ever have to see something you disagree with if you don’t want to. Just train your YouTube algorithm or, even easier, just head to X. Disagree with X? Head to BlueSky. The Guardian isn’t posting to X anymore, a decision that I understand but one that I’m not sure I fully agree with, meaning that if you, like the majority of young Americans get your news from social media, you’re actually missing out on the ability to even see a potential news organization. As I’ve noted, this goes beyond news. You want to feel angry about Star Wars? There are plenty of people who agree with you on YouTube and Spotify! You want to listen to one-sided podcasts from people who you fundamentally agree with? That’s available at the tap of a button. 

The cherry on top of this nihilistic sundae is capitalism. Isn’t it always? We have existed in an age where there is no end state. The endstate is a growth state. This means that in order for companies like Google and Bytedance and Meta and Snapchat to continue growing, to continue pleasing investors and shareholders, they need to grow. They need to present outrageous advertising revenue. They need to invest in new technology — like AI, which doesn’t show promising signs just yet from a profitability standpoint — to make creating and uploading easier for any average person in order to continue bettering advertising revenue. They need to own the pathway from your eyeballs looking at a screen to the moment you go to sleep. 

How do you do this? You don’t challenge, you indulge. We have more information and media than ever in history. More than we know what to do with. It’s, quite literally, making us sick. But unlike my grandfather who stopped eating chocolate after a month because he hated the way it made him feel, we’re indulging more than ever. I’d say the doctor can see you now, but we don’t have a cure. The doctor is being paid by the pharmaceutical companies, and they’ve got us hooked on anger, fear, hatred and, perhaps most powerful, righteousness. As Bo Burnham said, welcome to the internet. Have a look around. Anything that you can even think of wanting, almost certainly can be found.