🔒 How Free Speech Internet Culture Cooked Our Brains

As our technology has vastly overshot what resources we’re able to acquire with our meaty fingers alone, we’ve put stresses on our bodies that the slow pace of evolution hasn’t prepared us for. Or, in building our bodies for scarcity, we have been granted traits that make abundance detrimental.  We crave sugar and salt because these are things that our bodies need, but we’re not physiologically capable of handling the vast amounts of it that we’ve made available to ourselves—requiring us to practice a restraint against our natural tendencies.

 We weren’t built to spend very large amounts of time sedentary, in a seated position. We weren’t made for endless repetitive tasks that burn away the cartilage in our wrists and elbows. We weren’t meant to remember to “lift with our knees.” Our lungs didn’t develop to inhale smoke on purpose.

 One thing, I think, that is rarely mentioned along these same lines is that we are evolutionarily unprepared for the devastating psychological consequences of the internet.

I think that we can all agree that there is something terrible happening to the Western world, politically. In the United States 2011 primaries, Republican voters chose Mitt Romney as their candidate to challenge incumbent Barack Obama in the presidential election. Romney was a very moderate conservative in a line of Republican presidential candidates which had been growing more moderate since Reagan, a pattern unbroken whether the candidate was successful or not.

 Politics, in general, was cooling down.

 Just four years later, in 2015, the heat shot up very suddenly. An extremely right-wing populist television celebrity swept the Republican primaries, ahead of his closest rivals, who were all still to the right of Bush. Donald Trump narrowly lost re-election in 2020 but reclaimed it in 2024, by moving even further to the right.

 Now, things that would have been scandals even within the GOP a decade ago are normal and commonplace. There are anonymous neo-Nazis running the government’s social media and trolling the country with groyper memes. Congressional staffers have swastikas hanging up in their offices.

What the media isn't mentioning (understandably, due to the swastika distraction) are the "Ohio" memes also prominently displayed behind this guy, providing clues about how internet baked this shithead is. But we'll get to that soon.

In 2015, Hillary Clinton made a massive, campaign-wounding faux pas when she commented that some of Donald Trump’s followers were a “basket of deplorables.” In 2025, the White House spokesperson matter-of-factly declares that all Democrats are criminals and terrorists. There is no media firestorm. Not a brush fire, not even a spark.

Something has happened to a zeitgeist-altering number of people from the generation after mine and even the youngest of my own generation. People who are beginning to vote and beginning to enter government and lead companies.

 Just the other day, the group chats for a number of Young Republican groups was leaked to the media. Falsely labeled by the Vice President as “young kids,” like they’re high schoolers, these are in fact mid-20s to even early-30s men, who are leading the Republican membership drive among youth. They are tomorrow’s politicians, and some are already senators. In private they make Holocaust jokes and refer to black people as “watermelon people.” Referring to black football players, one remarked “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.”

 Those of you who read to the bottom of my articles know that I’m writing a book about this, and you can read excerpts of the draft here if you upgrade to a paid subscription, but here’s a taste of my Theory of Everything: The right-libertarian capture of the internet, the notion of it as a place where we can do or say literally anything that we feel like in anonymity, has turned it into a psychological torture chamber. Social media is making us less empathetic. It’s eating our humanity.

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