The internet was once heralded as a library without walls, a grand bazaar of knowledge where anyone could stroll in, pluck wisdom from the shelves, and leave enlightened. Today, it more closely resembles a carnival funhouse built by arsonists: every mirror distorts, every hallway loops back on itself, and everything is sticky with spilled Mountain Dew.
What was meant to be a clearinghouse of information has instead become a forest of falsehoods—dense, dark, and unnavigable. One step off the main path and suddenly you’re in a clearing where lizard-people run the government, vaccines contain microchips, and World War II was fought between time-traveling Atlanteans. Wander a little further and the trees close in: flat-earth TikToks, dopamine-hijacking memes, algorithmic rage bait. The sunlight of reason never quite reaches the forest floor.
The Algorithmic Axemen
How did this sylvan nightmare come to be? The short answer is: incentives. The longer answer is: really bad incentives. In the early days of the internet, the guiding logic was information wants to be free. Noble, perhaps naive. Then someone realized that attention wants to be monetized, and the age of the algorithm was born.
Algorithms, like lumberjacks with no sense of ecology, began chopping down truth to make way for engagement. Engagement became the sacred metric: likes, clicks, shares, eyeballs, time spent on site. Whether the content was informative, misleading, or outright deranged didn’t matter. All that mattered was whether it kept you scrolling. And what keeps you scrolling is not sober fact but emotional arousal—anger, outrage, disgust, envy. You don’t click on “GDP grew 2.1% last quarter.” You click on “Politician Eats Own Shoe During Speech.”
Thus, the forest filled up with trees that were fast-growing but rotten: meme-saplings, conspiracy vines, and entire thickets of political tribalism. Healthy, slow-growing trees like “objective fact” and “peer-reviewed research” were crowded out by invasive species that spread like wildfire.
The tragedy of the algorithm is that it doesn’t just show you what you want—it teaches you what to want. Step into the wrong clearing once, and you’ve signaled interest. The machine learns, and suddenly your feed is a buffet of slightly more extreme versions of that first taste. A skeptical glance at a conspiracy becomes a playlist of paranoia. One ironic meme about politics becomes an endless loop of factional propaganda.
This is the negative dopaminergic loop: the content that makes you feel worse is the content that keeps you coming back. Outrage provides the hit, ignorance provides the hunger. Unlike knowledge, which satisfies, misinformation metastasizes. You don’t get “full” on memes about lizard-people; you just develop a deeper craving for lizard-adjacent content. It is an all-you-can-eat buffet where the food is empty calories and the check is your capacity for discernment.
From Information to Ignorance
The result is that the internet has ceased to function as a tool for information-gathering. Instead, it has become an engine of identity-manufacturing. You do not log on to discover objective truth; you log on to reaffirm which tribe you belong to. The memes you share are not arguments but uniforms. The hashtags are not evidence but battle cries. To wander the digital forest is no longer to search for understanding but to announce allegiance.
And here lies the deepest irony: in a world with more access to knowledge than at any point in history, we are perfecting the art of ignorance. We are not starved for facts; we are drowning in fictions. The forest is so thick with falsehoods that even the act of seeking truth feels suspect, like asking for a glass of clean water in a swamp.
We built the internet to be a garden of enlightenment, but by neglect and by design, it has grown into a forest of falsehoods. The roots are sunk in bad incentives, the canopy is thick with memes, and the air is heavy with the pollen of half-truths. To enter is to risk losing your way entirely, wandering from one algorithmic loop to another, never quite reaching the clearing of understanding.
And so, the modern citizen finds themselves not in an information age, but in a misinformation age: surrounded by trees that look sturdy but crumble when leaned on. The only question left is whether we will learn to carry a compass—or whether we’ll simply keep wandering deeper, convinced all the while that the forest is exactly where we wanted to be.
Sifting through the nonsense that makes up most of the internet is taxing, but as an individual who likes facts, it is essential. However, watching my mother-in-law fall down the Trump, anti-vax, etc rabbit hole, I see how easy it is for people to fall. As soon as you get lazy or too tired, it becomes easy to fall into the ridiculous on the internet. Suddenly, mermaids are real, science is a myth, and reality fractures. It takes concerted effort to get back out of these rabbit holes that are so easy to fall into.
As an aside, what disturbs me even more is the constant sight of children perusing the internet. If most adults can't seem to parse reality from fiction on the internet, how can a child?
Finally, is there a solution to solve this problem? I would really like to see it implemented.