Why Humans Can’t Solve Real Problems
Observations from the porch about arguments, certainty, and the internet.
The other day I briefly became my spouse on Facebook. Not permanently—just long enough to stumble into a small anthropological experiment in the making.
Before I joined Bluesky, I didn’t actually have personal social media accounts of my own. Some of you old crusty writers can probably relate. If you need help identifying yourselves, look down at your writing space. The pile of unfinished draft essays written somewhere between pen and paper and hammer and chisel tells the tale. Which makes it slightly ironic that I found myself on Facebook at all.
I was there for something mundane and business‑related, using my spouse’s account as a temporary passport into the modern world. While wandering around looking for the thing I had actually logged in to do, curiosity pulled me into a comment thread that had taken a very familiar direction.
Within a handful of comments we had global war, presidential incompetence, conspiracy theories, Epstein, human trafficking, and the collapse of civilization. It felt less like a discussion and more like someone had compressed the entire internet into one conversation. Naturally, everyone involved was extremely certain about everything. Absolute certainty is one of the internet’s most renewable resources.
The people in the thread, however, were not my friends. They belong to my spouse. Or at least they did yesterday. I know of them, but I don’t really know them at all. I normally avoid comment wars, but curiosity kept me reading longer than I should have.
At some point observation stopped being passive. Using my spouse’s account, I wrote:
“Keep fighting with each other, humans, while the world is exploding around you. Very productive way to go out of this life.”
Strategic emojis were deployed and evidence was minimized as I quietly turned off notifications. Officially, that was to avoid the incoming noise. Unofficially, I already knew what would happen next.
Threads like that never solve anything. They expand upon their own madness until every problem is connected and everyone else is at fault. And that, in miniature, is why humans struggle to solve real problems.
The funny thing is, none of this surprised me. I’ve been around the internet long enough to remember the early days, when it was mostly academics, hobbyists, and strange little corners like Usenet. Even back then you could already see the pattern forming.
Give humans a place to talk without consequence and eventually every discussion turns into an attempt at conquest.
Technology changed. Bandwidth exploded. Platforms multiplied. Human behavior didn’t change at all. And that might be the real problem, because solving real problems requires something humans don’t seem to do very well online: stepping back from the fight long enough to think together.
From the porch, the pattern is hard to miss. Humans keep arguing about the storm while standing out in the rain.
— Sweeney the Genie
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