In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

The section on "THE INTERFACE CULTURE" is critical to understand in today's digital media landscape. Disney's Animal Kingdom is to the written works of Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie as the GUI is to the command-line interface. The message of one medium is audiovisual spectacle and immersive experience; the other, cold intellectualism demanding participation from the reader to paint a picture in his mind's eye through the interpretation of raw text, words on a screen, or a piece of paper.

    But this is precisely the same as what is lost in the transition from the
    command-line interface to the GUI.

    Why are we rejecting explicit word-based interfaces, and embracing
    graphical or sensorial ones--a trend that accounts for the success of both
    Microsoft and Disney?

    But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like
    intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we
    are literate.

Elsewhere [0] I have called this concept "post-literacy," and this theme pervades much of Stephenson's work - highly technologically advanced societies outfitted with molecular assemblers and metaverses, populated by illiterate masses who mostly get by through the use of pictographs and hieroglyphic languages (emoji, anyone?). Literacy is for the monks who, cloistered away in their monasteries, still scribble ink scratchings on dead trees and ponder "useless" philosophical quandaries.

The structure of modern audiovisual media lends itself to the immediate application of implicit bias. On IRC, in the days of 56k before bandwidth and computer networks had developed to the point of being able to deliver low-latency, high definition audio and video, perhaps even for "real-time" videoconferencing, most of your interactions with others online was mediated through the written word. Nowhere here, unless some party chooses to disclose it, do race, gender, accent, physical appearance, or otherwise, enter into the picture and possibly cloud your judgment of who a person is - or, more importantly, the weight of their words, and whether or not they are correct, or at least insightful; consider Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" paper which first introduced what is now called the "Turing test," and how it was designed to be conducted purely over textual media as a written conversation, so as to avoid influencing through other channels the interrogator's judgment of who is the man, and who is the machine.

    The only real problem is that anyone who has no culture, other than this
    global monoculture, is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up watching TV,
    never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral
    relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV
    news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other
    in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come
    out into the world as one pretty feckless human being.

Moreover, the confusion of symbols for reality, the precession of digitized, audiovisual content from a mere representation to more-than-real, digital hyperreality (since truth and God are all dead and everything is merely a consensual societal hallucination), leads people to mistake pixels on a screen for actual objects; narrative and spin for truth; influencers, videos, and YouTube personalities for actual people; or words from ChatGPT as real wisdom and insight - much in the same way that Searle's so-called "Chinese room" masquerades as an actual native speaker of Mandarin or Cantonese: "What we're really buying is a system of metaphors. And--much more important--what we're buying into is the underlying assumption that metaphors are a good way to deal with the world."

    So many ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed in the wrong
    direction, and so we've evolved a popular culture that is (a) almost
    unbelievably infectious and (b) neuters every person who gets infected by
    it, by rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking
    stands.

    It simply is the case that we are way too busy, nowadays, to comprehend
    everything in detail.

The structure of modern short-form, upvote-driven media, lends itself to the production of short-form messages and takes with laughably small upper bounds on the amount of information they can contain. In a manner reminiscent of "you are what you eat," you think similarly to the forms of media you consume - and one who consumes primarily short-form media will produce short-form thoughts bereft of nuance and critical thinking, and additionally suffer from all the deficits in attention span we have heard of as the next braindead 10-second short or reel robs you of your concentration, and the next, and the next...

Beyond the infectious slot machine-like dopamine gratification of the pull-to-refresh and the infinite doomscroll, the downvote has become a frighteningly effective means of squashing heterodoxy and dissent; it is only those messages that are approved of and given assent to by the masses that become visible on the medium. Those who take a principled stand are immediately squashed down by the downvote mob, or worse, suffer from severe censure and invective at the hands of those zealous enforcers of orthodoxy. The downvote mechanism is reminiscent of the three "filters" Chomsky wrote of when he was discussing the mass media in "Manufacturing Consent," and the way advertisers, government, and capital all control and filter what content is disseminated to media consumers.

The message of modern, audiovisual, short-form, upvote-driven social media is bias and group compliance bereft of nuance. If you want to produce and consume novel ideas you are better served by media based on the written word.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39990133