March 2026

The Self as Information Processor

The most prominent output of the everything device—the smartphone—is the dissemination and digestion of information. Adam Greenfield dubs the internet of things “the colonization of everyday life by information processing,” speaking specifically to the relentless data collection from Fitbits to Siri to cities blanketed with invisible sensors, and the use of all that data to explain, predict, sell, influence, and control.

For the average person, self-optimizers aside, consumption is their primary relationship to information. Greenfield writes that a guiding assumption of omnipresent data harvesting and modeling is that the world can be perfectly understood. Both the motivation and result of this are the drives to optimize, control, and grow. What is the individual’s perspective of a world that is knowable, if not already known?

One consequence is that the mystery is removed from the world, as you always have the answers in your pocket, your extended mind. When we’re removed from the mystery, we risk losing the capacity to wonder, to be curious. The answers, after all, seem to be only a few clicks away—they are practically known, which may reduce curiosity (tied into the drive to know). This is an empirical claim, but I think it's worth testing.

If true, this dynamic reinforces what I discussed in a previous post, from Kohak’s Stars and Embers, which is the reduction of first-personal, embodied, emotional experience to a conceptual relationship to the world. We experience the world as deferred to a network of ideas, not directly as embodied subjects.

The Churchland’s eliminativism argues that we should speak about specific neurons firing rather than “anger,” or “happiness,” arguing emotions are of folk psychology. I wonder if this is just an extreme example of the same pattern I’m discussing. Perhaps it is more useful to do so, and maybe more useful still to discuss the specific movement of atoms, if we could know and interact with them, rather than mere neurons. But while this may help with diagnostics and treatment, does it remove us further from the direct interaction with reality, and which modality affords more agency? After all, we do not experience our neurons firing—a mere theoretical event to a conscious subject. Rather—we feel the relief of getting negative test results, joy at playing with a laughing baby, and pain at stubbing a toe. A "neuron firing" is something we observe from the outside, even if, to a reductionist, an emotion is exactly that.

This way of speaking (“my c-fibers are firing” rather than “I feel pain”) seems more accurate for its appeal to objectivity. The mode that says “I feel pain” is caught up with all the distortion we are prone to in our subjectivity: the sun looks like its setting, the stick looks bent in our water, we’re primed to hear “x” when our partner really said “y.” The switch in modes results in reducing the subject (smudging out phenomenal consciousness) to an information processing vector, a kind of asset stripping of the mind. 

An initial question to probe here is also empirical: is there a deep change to “what it's like” to be a person, when we’re reduced to information processing units. More pressingly, we must ask, are we as subjects more than information processing units? If we are not, then the internet of things, the quantified self, and eliminativism as a framework all seem like welcome additions to our extended mind. But if we’re something other than information processing units, it seems whatever that additional stuff is risks getting annihilated in this endless scroll of data. What is at risk of being lost is the reality of experience.

Does phenomenal experience demand its own kind of value as an ends in itself? Does it warrant an existence independent of what can be gleaned from it about objective, mind-independent reality? What can be tweaked, optimized, quantified, and controlled? Is conscious experience not something to just be enjoyed, rather than explained and reduced? If it’s allowed to exist on its own, what is it worth? What are experiences—emotional, colorful, the stuff of qualia—worth on their own? Should we understand qualia as units of data to be transmuted into something else, something easier to understand, to model the world, to help control and predict the world? Or is a sunset just that?

The answer for most people would be quick and easy: of course experience has value in and of itself; or at least, good experiences do. But the fact that we increasingly live less to value phenomenal consciousness as an ends and increasingly as a means for processing data, or rather something to be distrusted and eliminated, speaks, I think, to the productivity-obsessed culture we live in. It is, of course, something that’s been around since Plato or before. Socrates saw the sensory realm as a barrier to understanding the forms—deeper truths independent of time and space (though whether he would have extended this to all aspects of phenomenal consciousness, of sensory experience, rather than just typical pleasures and pains, I’m not sure). Yet, the current emphasis on the mind as a data processor, including about itself and the body, is not the result of everyone having become Platonists. I think, again, it’s because of the demands of work culture and the porous barrier between the realms of play and work.

It's ironic the role that one of the most famous thought experiments in contemporary philosophy brings to bear here: the philosophical zombie. In the philosophical zombie case, we’re asked to imagine a being that does all the same things we do: walk, talk, pick up a cup, row a boat, respond—without any conscious experience. Because it’s all “dark” in there, and we can imagine this without contradiction, we’re lead to accept that consciousness is something extra—something independent of physical processes. Or at least, it could be. The irony, like I said, is that we’re all turning into philosophical zombies, as we subordinate our first-person experience to the world of objective data, accelerated by the internet of things.

(Sidebar: is there more to the self—not just experience—than experience and awareness (higher order representation) of experience? Which is to say, is there a “self” that is missing out when we reduce experience to information processing? Or is the self simply being eroded by this process? Worth further investigation).

Information vs Knowledge

I used to like getting lost. A friend pointed out recently how that can’t happen anymore. In his chapter on Smartphones, Greenfield points out how we always know where we are because of GPS, though the world that is presented is also individuated, based on the data collected on us: what the platform thinks matters to us, what it thinks it can convince us to think matters.

The experience of wonder, discovery, curiosity, enchantment – all of it is drained away in the internet of things, in the putative omniscience of the device in our pockets at all times. Does this matter? And why are we always so at the ready to learn more, to process and consume more information?

Some say it may be for the love of learning, and others that “knowledge is power.” I have to wonder, though, whether the feverish, fiendish, relentless consumption of information counts as knowledge at all. The news, articles, recipes, recommendations, weather and traffic reports, diagnostics—all of it is disseminated, encoded, and enacted. Is there a missing step? There is the perspective – or the illusion – that everything can be or is known, and we’re processing information constantly. But does any of this actually amount to knowledge to begin with?

To encode a fact (or, more likely, where a fact can be found: Google, Chatgpt, etc.)—to remember it, to regurgitate it, to enact it—this seems to be only ever part of the story for what counts as knowledge. There’s a further step which is to actually do the thinking, the reflecting, to take a concept and manipulate it and combine it with others, to measure it against the impending, sensory reality of one's experience: to work on it through speaking, writing, painting, dreaming, meditating—holding the thought in awareness, and again, juxtaposing it with others. What comes out of all of this is still something that is never fully settled, but seems to inch closer to what might count as knowledge.

That’s not what the internet of things encourages. We are instead constantly being inundated by data points—data points that are never really metabolized, explored and worked through, expressed and acted upon in the way described above. This is assisted by the fact that (A) the platforms are designed to be addictive, and the promise of offering greater productivity (and therefore, money? Power? Freedom)?; And (B) the urgency that data is often coupled with or contextualized by, a world that always seems to be on fire. The content of said fire—both access to it and, to an extent, the fire itself—is a symptom of the very same internet of things. It affords constant exposure to the world in its state of chaotic and violent flux. I often wonder, what would the 24-hour news cycle, and its mental health impacts, have been like in the Middle Ages? To this, there is the imperative to grab attention and achieve monetary and political ends through digital media, which motivates a certain presentation of a world that is more chaotic than it actually is.

In a word, the internet of things is making us better information-consumers, but perhaps not better information-processors in the full sense. We may not have become better knowers. As within the education system, we learn perhaps what is needed to stay busy and productive, and anxious, and to then channel that anxiety back into being productive. We channel anxiety (symptoms of the isolation and aforementioned 24 hour news exposure via internet) into productivity, which can always be done as the boundary between work and private lives disintegrates (Byung-Chul Han, Varoufakis)—again, largely thanks to the internet. A small group of people have grown their wealth enormously from our “productivity” and consumption, when we, despite all this information, do not necessarily grow in knowledge.

Consent to Tech 

The explosion of digital technology in our lives is not like other tech explosions, and the internet / smartphone / social media trifecta is not like other inventions: the microwave, the steam engine, penicillin. Its closest cousin is the radio and television, which transports one’s attention and engages one’s imagination, such that one is both in this world and another world at once. By this, I mean that one’s mind is engaged, on one level, with sensory input in the immediate world: the sound of a car horn honking, the feeling of wind on the face, the smell of bread baking. On the other level, if they’re listening to the radio or watching TV, their attention is in the world of that program or story, as well. The same, perhaps, could be said for novels and other works of fiction, but I think they would differ considerably by degree. The trifecta differs by kind.

It differs by degree, also, and the degree is considerable, like the difference in degrees between muskets and assault rifles. But it differs in kind because of its integration into the web: work, socializing, dating, planning, banking, and entertainment. The integration is increasingly seamless. It’s not only engaging our imaginations, so we live vicariously or experience dream belief in another (digital) representational realm, which can be said for novels, radio, TV, etc. It is doing that on steroids, but it’s also that our normal everyday operations are woven into the web, again, accelerated through smartphones and social media.

Those operations happen concurrently with the escapism, the entertainment, the psychic immersion discussed previously. They effectively happen at once, as we switch back and forth so quickly between “work” and “play,” so that the boundary collapses (like alternating images of a hat in a cat, resulting in a single image of a cat wearing a hat). This, importantly, leads to burnout culture and further, invisible exploitation by employers and platforms.

The smartphone—internet—social media trifecta has split our minds. We live partially in this world, partially online. The collapse of the boundary between work and play also sometimes happens literally simultaneously, as people can, of course, earn money and accomplish other tasks by consuming and creating immersive and escapist content (notice how many platforms are gamified or appeal to a kind of narrative self). We didn’t consent to this, and we didn’t select this life, it was given to us by tech companies and law-makers, like a tide that has taken us away.

And yet, outside all this, a part of one's mind remains firmly and necessarily rooted in the world of material impressions – smell of bread, dog barking, etc. What is the effect of inhabiting this dual reality? Can the two worlds ever be fully integrated? Should they be?

Regardless of the answer to these questions, I think it’s important to see that we never consented to any of this, but were rather swept away by it. Tech companies were empowered in the early 2000s by cheap credit and deregulation, while austerity and the recession (caused by predatory lending and deregulation) ripped apart communities. The world that was rebuilt was firmly in the grip of tech. There is not an inevitable march towards a more technologized world. It happened through planning, through both action and inaction on the part of those in power. It may not have been a conscious plan or conspiracy—I don’t believe there was an “end game” that had us all enslaved to digital technology. But I also don’t believe it’s a checkpoint in the “inevitable march towards progress,” which isn’t real. It was a decision to bail out the banks, it was a decision to lend money (downstream) to tech companies at 0% interest rate, to increase funding to the police while cutting social programs.

All of this has been covered already (Klein, Doctorow), the point I’m making is that we were thrown here, where we are dependent on tech and our minds are effectively bifurcated, and we live split lives. We didn’t walk in on purpose.

Are there further psychic costs to this fact? The fact that our minds have been bifurcated as a symptom of social organization, rather than conscious choice?

Tech is integrated into our work and social lives, into the fabric of our lives. If you opt out, you’re a hermit, and probably broke. There’s little option to not participate. The platforms are also built to be habit-forming, to rewire the parameters within which we feel comfortable living (i.e. they’re addictive). Phones are made to be as difficult to put down as possible. Habits and compulsions are not decisions in the same way that other choices are. Neither is pulling the slot machine lever, or pushing a needle into a vein.

Tech is constantly there, in our minds, in our language, in our built environments. What is lost when we live much of our lives online? How does it distort time and the self? One way to experiment with this is to remove yourself from it, for as much as you can, even for an afternoon, and compare states. If / when (and in what degree) you return, let it be a choice.