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Information Overload as Control

The goal isn't to keep you uninformed. It's to make you so overwhelmed that being informed becomes impossible.

Old-fashioned censorship blocked information. The modern version floods it. When every channel is saturated with takes, counter-takes, fact-checks, counter-fact-checks, outrage cycles, and breaking news that breaks nothing — you can't find the signal. You drown in noise. And a drowned person doesn't swim in any direction.

This isn't just a side effect of the internet age. It's an active strategy. Russian information warfare doctrine explicitly aims to create so many competing narratives that citizens give up trying to determine what's true. But it's not only governments — platforms profit from engagement, and confusion generates more clicks than clarity. The result is the same: a population that knows a lot of things and understands very little.

Neil Postman warned about this in 1985. He argued that the threat to public discourse wasn't the suppression of information but its trivialization — that we would be undone not by what we're denied, but by what we're buried under. The avalanche of content doesn't make people smarter. It makes them tired. And tired people default to whatever feels familiar or whoever shouts loudest.

When you feel overwhelmed by information, consider the possibility that the overwhelm is the point.

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