A Treatise on How to Use the Internet Without Committing Philosophical Suicide
A guide on using the internet without losing critical thinking and personal agency. It warns against algorithmic outrage, performative debates, and reactive consumption, advocating for intentional habits like curating information, slow reading, and recognizing engagement traps to preserve philosophical depth.
Background
- This essay argues that the internet's firehose of decontextualized, morally outrageous content distorts our sense of reality and leads to chronic despair — "philosophical suicide," a term borrowed from Albert Camus (abandoning reason in the face of absurdity), here meaning abandoning hope due to online distortions.
- It responds to thinkers like Jaron Lanier (algorithms degrade empathy) and the concept of "context collapse" (online speech lacks the social cues that regulate offline conversation).
- The author's proposed remedies: aggressively curate your feed, recognize manufactured outrage, practice "epistemic hygiene" (be careful what sources you trust), remember the internet is not the real world, and seek out slowness, nuance, and offline life.
The ELIZA Archaeology Project documents the original 1960s MIT chatbot ELIZA, created by Joseph Weizenbaum. The project explores the program's code, history, and cultural impact, including the "Eliza Effect"—the human tendency to attribute intelligence to simple computer systems—which remains relevant to modern AI like ChatGPT.
Yuval Noah Harari argues that critics who say AI is helpless outside narrow human-built environments overlook that all intelligence depends on a specific ecosystem—just as a human dropped on Mars would perish as quickly as a chess AI without electricity. He made the remarks during the 2026 Tanner Lecture on Human Values at Oxford.
A 1973 transcript published as an RFC by Vint Cerf documents a conversation between two early AI chatbots: PARRY, designed to simulate paranoid schizophrenia, and ELIZA (DOCTOR). The exchange shows them discussing topics like bookies and racketeers, offering a humorous look at early chatbot interactions.
A Kickstarter campaign for 'Searching for SmarterChild', a documentary about the AOL Instant Messenger chatbot that once had 30 million users, is in its final week and still short of its funding goal.
The author recounts a recent interaction with a web-based recreation of ELIZA, the early AI chatbot, and shares a transcript of the stilted conversation. He expresses skepticism about ELIZA's historical reputation and criticizes anyone who found it useful as a virtual therapist, calling such people "suffered-a-permanent-head-injury wrong."