Why The Modern World Makes No Sense

Source: Why The Modern World Makes No Sense, Unsolicited advice, 31:09, uploaded 2024-11-23, Watch Later position 680.

The feeling that nothing makes sense anymore often comes from the difficulty of deciding what is true and what is false. Unsolicited advice takes Byung-Chul Han’s Infocracy as a route into that feeling. Han’s concern is the way information now reaches us, the way it changes our relation to action and the way it can weaken the shared ground that lets a society reason together. The video treats this as one perspective on a large subject, then brings in other thinkers to test and extend it.

Information overload and the loss of action

The term information overload appeared in the middle of the twentieth century to describe a situation in which a decision-maker receives more information than they can process. The excess eventually harms the decision itself. The video compares this with a low-end laptop trying to run a heavily modified version of Skyrim. Once the machine has more to process than it can handle, it stalls and may crash. Han places himself in a long line of philosophers who worry that something similar happens to people.

Hubert Dreyfus raised a related concern about the internet in 1999, drawing on Søren Kierkegaard. Dreyfus uses “passion” in a precise sense. He means the ability to turn understanding into committed action, rather than a high level of emotion. Kierkegaard and Dreyfus argue that understanding requires a manageable amount of information arranged in a form that makes its relevance clear. A sentence with its words in the wrong order shows the basic problem. Information also needs a structure that tells us what deserves attention and what we can leave aside.

Han’s account extends this point. Every presentation of information carries a judgement about importance because someone has chosen what to include and what to omit. When there is no shared sense of what matters or what is true, each person must decide the value of every new piece of information alone. That task takes time and prior knowledge, which leaves people poorly placed to judge claims that sit outside their experience. A flood of material from many authors, each with different priorities, can therefore delay action until analysis turns into paralysis.

The video says that Jordan Peterson makes a similar point in the preface to his latest book. It presents this as a point of overlap between Han’s analysis and Peterson’s more conservative philosophy, rather than as evidence that the two thinkers share a whole political position. The larger issue concerns the conditions under which knowledge becomes useful. Information that never leads to a decision remains an accumulation of material.

The problem grows when information systems select material for attention and retention rather than truth or use. Anger, disgust and fear can hold attention whether the claim behind them is true or useful. The video connects this to social-media algorithms, which reward material that performs well with users. Faced with more material than they can examine, people may accept that they will never know what happened and choose a safer aim. Kierkegaard’s passive spectator comments on the world whilst avoiding the risk of changing it.

The speaker includes himself in this criticism. When facts seem impossible to establish, people can turn to proxy measures such as appearing clever, witty or sardonic. Irony becomes a safe position because criticism does not require a definite view of one’s own. Critique still has a place in evaluating information, yet an endless stream of low-quality material that exists mainly to invite semi-ironic commentary loses its connection with action and with the work of making sense of the world. It becomes material for conversation and opinion rather than a basis for deciding what to do.

Speed, reflection and information made for its own sake

Han also connects the problem to the speed at which information expires. A daily newspaper released news in one or two short bursts. A story therefore had at least a day in which to remain part of public attention, and many stories lasted longer. Social media lets a story change quickly and makes access easier for people who do not buy a newspaper. The video accepts these benefits. Its concern is the time that disappears with them.

Turning information into action, and then into wisdom, requires sustained attention. A person has to discard what does not matter, shape the rest around a particular problem and fit it with what they already understand. The speaker points to monks who meditate on a passage of the Bible or a sutta for days or months as an extreme example of slow reflection. A story that will disappear within an hour cannot receive that treatment. It becomes a conversational detail, or material produced mainly so that an advertisement can sit beneath it.

The result in Han’s account is a rise in the quantity of information alongside a decline in the ability to digest it. The speaker recognises the irony of making this complaint as a YouTuber. The point survives the irony because the business model that rewards constant publication can create a large supply of information without giving people the time or structure needed to use it. The information ecosystem can leave people bewildered whilst still changing their opinions. That change leads into the question of social cohesion.

Shared definitions and shared ground

The video begins this part of the argument with the nineteenth-century fear that the decline of religious belief would remove a shared set of values. Atheist philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer worried that European civilisation could lose the beliefs that held it together. The concern appeared with particular force in Germany, which was still forming a national identity. Richard Wagner tried to supply one through his music. The basic claim is that a community with deep disagreement about its values will struggle to coordinate itself.

Han approaches a related problem through the information ecosystem. Social-media algorithms can place people in separate information environments, yet he is interested in a further consequence. The environments may give people such different pictures of reality that conversation itself becomes difficult, especially in liberal democracies.

The first difficulty concerns definitions. The analytic philosopher A. J. Ayer held that discussion needs shared definitions before it can make progress. Ludwig Wittgenstein treated many philosophical disagreements as confusion about language, first through the logical structure of language and later through the language games in which words take their meaning. An argument can continue for a long time whilst the participants use the same word for different things.

The video gives “right” as an example. One person may mean obedience to God’s commandments, whilst another means an action that produces the greatest good for the greatest number. Euthanasia can produce the same problem. One person may use it for a peaceful death, while another includes cases in which someone has been pressured to end their life. These people appear to disagree about a moral fact, although their definitions have already placed them in separate conversations. The reference to Socrates in Plato’s dialogues makes the same point through the long work of defining terms before judging a claim.

Disagreement about facts also needs agreement at a higher level about how facts will be settled. Richard Feynman gives the video its scientific example. Scientists can disagree about what an experiment will show because they share a procedure that can settle the disagreement once the experiment takes place. Jürgen Habermas calls the wider condition living in the same lifeworld. The video treats it as a set of base assumptions that people can use when they disagree.

The political example is an election. Two people who accept that their country’s elections are free and fair can disagree about the candidates and still respect the result. They share an institution that can settle one level of disagreement. If one person believes that the election was rigged, the result cannot resolve the dispute because the parties no longer share the rule by which the result should count. Shared assumptions allow people to disagree without violence. They do not produce agreement on every question, though they make disagreement workable within a society larger than a small group.

Han worries that personalised information diets are eroding this background. People can watch material that confirms their views, encounter only exaggerated versions of opposing views and curate a set of facts that feels self-evident. Confirmation bias and tribal loyalty existed before the internet. The amount of online material makes it easier to build a private world around them. Even a claim that challenges this world can be rejected as part of the opposing tribe.

Han describes right-wing and left-wing identity politics as turning identity into a protective shield that repels otherness. The problem reaches beyond polarisation. When people feel that their opponents are irrational and share no facts with them, they lose the means to treat those opponents as rational agents. Words and deliberation then lose their authority. Han sees a risk that coercion and violence will take their place.

Data, autonomy and the human tool

Information has always brought power to whoever controls it. The video recalls the church’s political interest in controlling access to the Bible, alongside the theological reasons that once supported keeping translations from wider circulation. It then turns to the modern problem of treating human beings as sources and victims of data.

Autonomy sits near the centre of Han’s philosophy. He means the ability to make decisions through one’s own will and reason. Han does not reject data. More of it can improve predictions, guide decisions and produce useful results. His concern is the attitude that treats decisions as if they simply fall out of correlations in a dataset. Someone still chooses what to collect, what to leave out and which question the data should answer. Those choices carry values before an algorithm processes anything.

The video attributes a related criticism to the advertising executive Rory Sutherland, who argues that the theories used to interpret data in boardrooms can become too narrow. A decision described as “what the data says” can hide the assumptions behind the collection, processing and interpretation of the data. The speaker puts the practical risk plainly: poor data produces poor results. He points to machine-learning systems that have discriminated in hiring because of the datasets on which they were trained. The video gives no specific system or study, so this remains an example in the speaker’s account rather than an independently checked case here.

Human judgement therefore remains part of data-driven decision-making. It should question the data without discarding it. This matters at government level because people need to understand the reasons behind public decisions in order to make sense of the world they inhabit. A decision that cannot be explained to the people subject to it weakens their ability to judge the institution that made it.

Han is also concerned about “dataists”, who claim that human behaviour will eventually become predictable through sufficiently large datasets. The video says that Han’s main worry concerns the consequences of adopting this picture of people, even if the prediction itself proves possible. Treating people as autonomous beings gives practical support to privacy, political rights and respect for agency. Han draws on Dostoevsky’s view that people need to regard themselves as free in order to live fulfilled lives. The argument can stand without a religious account of freedom. It asks what society loses when it treats people as deterministic systems, regardless of whether that description is metaphysically correct.

The video invokes Plato’s discussion of the social use of beliefs to suggest that a false belief can sometimes have a stabilising effect, while an unfiltered truth can cause serious damage. It presents this as a reason to consider the social consequences of a picture of humanity, rather than as permission to manipulate people. Han’s final concern is ownership. Much human behaviour may be predictable, and whoever has access to the most data about the most people gains power over those people. The video says that this power currently serves advertising in large part, while warning that it can also change public opinion or spread division.

The source quotes Han’s claim that the sovereign is the person who controls information, because the ability to predict and persuade someone becomes a form of power that leaves them little dignity of resistance. Direct coercion gives a person something to oppose. Persuasion that works through their own information environment can make them act on what seems like the best information available. The speaker presents this as a danger Han raises, rather than as a settled description of every data-driven system.

Truth as a social value

The final movement addresses the claim that we live in a post-truth world. The video distinguishes the disappearance of truth from the decline of truth’s social value. Statements can still correspond to states of affairs in the material world. The problem arises when a statement’s truth no longer gives people a reason to accept it, revise their views or censure someone who knowingly ignores it.

In a reasonable debate, discovering that one’s position is false should create pressure to accept the other person’s position. A public refusal to do so can draw the labels “stubborn” or “stupid”. That pressure is optional in the sense that a society can replace it with another value. The video uses a member of Stalin’s inner circle in 1947 as its example. If approval from the leader matters more than truth, a person may accept a false premise because the cost of telling the truth is higher than the cost of letting a lie pass.

Liberal democracy is often valued for allowing true information to circulate without people being imprisoned or killed for voicing an uncomfortable fact. The video also gives a practical reason to value truth. An accurate picture of the material world helps people act within it. Han’s concern about autonomy belongs to the same problem because a person cannot make an informed decision when another actor quietly shapes the information on which that decision rests.

Han calls the declining social value of truth a new nihilism. The connection to information overload and algorithmic curation runs through the idea of internally coherent narratives. People test a new belief against what they already believe. A claim that fits an existing account feels easier to accept than one that breaks it. The video uses an angel as an example. An atheist will resist a report of seeing one, while a devout Catholic may find the same report compatible with an existing set of beliefs.

When groups hold radically different pictures of what counts as true, the social value of truth can move from shared standards to the separate narratives held by each group. Scientific inquiry depends on more than agreement about individual results. Scientists also need shared methods for separating fact from error. If every scientist brought a private test for truth, the process could no longer settle disputes.

The video connects this loss of shared standards to Harry Frankfurt’s concept of bullshit, which describes speech made without concern for whether it is true or false. Calling a politician a bullshitter often means accusing them of saying whatever helps them win an election or gain favourable coverage. Han fears that this mode of speech can become dominant in politics and wider society. The claims remain true or false, yet people stop caring which description fits.

That change widens the space for absurd claims. When people cannot establish what is true, they lose the confidence needed to reject a claim and can only shrug because they are unsure of the world themselves. The video connects this to democratic health, which it describes as depending on many people believing many relevant truths. Information then produces a cycle: the loss of shared truth allows more claims to circulate, and the extra claims make shared truth harder to establish.

Without shared ideas about truth, societies struggle to form narratives that orient their members. The opening confusion follows from the whole sequence. People receive more information than they can process, follow more narratives than they can compare and occupy increasingly separate accounts of what is true. Trust becomes difficult because there is no agreed ground from which to test a claim.

Limits and the unresolved political problem

Han does not offer a clear solution in the work discussed here. The speaker doubts that one could control the proliferation of narratives without giving a small number of organisations the power to decide what may be said and believed. That solution would create an authoritarian danger of its own. The video leaves the tension in place. An open information system lets anyone make a claim and potentially reach millions, while a controlled system lets its owners shape the available picture of the world. Han appears to think that the present combines the worst features of both arrangements.

The captions are automatic English captions, so this note regularises punctuation and corrects clear recognition errors in names such as Byung-Chul Han, Hubert Dreyfus, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Feynman and Habermas. Several claims remain at the level of the video’s account. It gives no primary citations for its examples about information overload, machine-learning hiring systems, dataists, social-media effects or the historical claims about religion and political power. The description supplies chapter timestamps and links to the creator’s Patreon and email list, which are omitted here as promotional material. It contains no links to the books discussed.

Further reading / references

• Byung-Chul Han, Infocracy, the main book discussed in the video.
• Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society, mentioned in the closing pointer to Han’s work.