1 Introduction
When Socrates wandered the streets of Athens asking people what they meant by justice or courage, he wasn’t trying to humiliate anyone. He was exposing something structural: that most people don’t think their own thoughts. They perform them. They carry opinions the way they carry coins — received from elsewhere, passed along without inspection, valued not for their content but for their currency.
Twenty-four centuries later, the situation is not merely unchanged. It is industrialised.
I am a teacher. I stand in front of young people every day, and I watch them arrive with opinions so strong they could punch through walls — on politics, on food, on identity, on economics, on what is right and what is wrong. They speak with conviction. They speak with heat. And then I ask: What do you mean by that?
The room goes quiet.
Not because they are stupid. Let me be unambiguous about this: they are not stupid. They are some of the most perceptive, creative, and alert people I have ever worked with. They can detect hypocrisy at forty paces. They know when they are being patronised. They are capable of extraordinary thought.
They have simply been robbed of the opportunity to practice it.
2 The Machinery
There is a system — let us stop calling it “social media”, which is a branding exercise in itself — that operates on a single principle: engagement is profit. Not understanding. Not dialogue. Not growth. Engagement. Which means the system is structurally optimised to produce reactions, not thoughts. A reaction is fast, emotional, binary. A thought is slow, uncomfortable, and often inconclusive. The system has no use for thoughts. Thoughts don’t generate clicks.
This system delivers to a sixteen-year-old, every waking hour, a stream of confident-sounding claims about the world. Short. Punchy. Emotionally loaded. Designed not to inform but to recruit — into a position, a tribe, a consumption pattern. The claims arrive without context, without history, without counter-argument. They arrive as conclusions. And the young person, who has never been given the tools or the time to interrogate a conclusion, does the only rational thing available to them: they adopt it.
Now multiply this by every waking hour of every day for the duration of their adolescence.
What you get is not a generation of thoughtless people. What you get is a generation of people who have been industrially deprived of their own thinking.
3 The Older Machine
But let us not pretend this began with algorithms. Mass media — newspapers, television, radio — has operated on the same logic for over a century, with only cosmetic differences. The authoritative news anchor does not invite you to think. The anchor tells you what happened, what it means, and how you should feel about it, all within ninety seconds, bracketed by advertisements. The newspaper editorial, the panel discussion, the “expert analysis” — these are not thinking. They are the performance of thinking, designed to produce in the audience the feeling of being informed without any of the cognitive work that actual understanding requires.
The manufacturing of consent, as Chomsky and Herman (2002) described it, is not a conspiracy theory. It is a structural analysis. You do not need a secret room of elites deciding what people should believe. You need only a media system where ownership is concentrated, where advertising revenue dictates content, where access to power depends on not challenging power, and where the professional incentives of journalists align with reproducing the ideological framework of the institutions they serve. The propaganda is emergent. It does not require intention. It requires only structure.
What the algorithmic platforms did was not invent propaganda. They democratised its production while concentrating its profits. Now anyone with a camera and an algorithm-friendly take can manufacture consent at scale. The old gatekeepers were replaced not by freedom but by a new, more efficient, more granular system of manipulation — one that tracks your eye movements, measures your emotional responses, and adjusts its output in real time to maximise your engagement. This is not a communication tool. It is a behaviour modification infrastructure with a profit motive.
4 The Socratic Gap
Socrates made a distinction that we have collectively decided to ignore. He separated doxa — opinion, belief, what one happens to think — from episteme — knowledge, understanding, what one has actually worked through. Doxa is cheap. Episteme is expensive. It costs time, discomfort, and the repeated willingness to discover that you were wrong.
The entire architecture of modern information systems is designed to produce doxa at industrial scale while making it feel like episteme. You watch a ten-minute video essay and walk away feeling like you understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the ethics of veganism, the collapse of late capitalism. You don’t. You have acquired a position. A position is not understanding. A position is a destination you arrived at without making the journey, and because you never made the journey, you cannot retrace your steps, cannot explain the terrain, cannot even describe why you are standing where you are standing.
This is why the opinions collapse under the simplest scrutiny. Not because the person holding them is foolish, but because there is nothing behind the façade. The opinion is a mask with no face underneath.
5 Cognitive Dissonance and the Shame Trap
Here is where the system becomes truly vicious.
A person holds contradictory beliefs. This is not unusual — it is, in fact, the default human condition. We are not logical machines. We are biological organisms that evolved to navigate social environments, not to maintain philosophical consistency. Holding contradictory beliefs is normal. It only becomes a problem when the contradiction is surfaced.
And when it is surfaced — when someone asks the right question, or life delivers an experience that makes the contradiction undeniable — the healthy response would be to sit with the discomfort, examine both beliefs, and revise. But this requires something the system never provides: psychological safety. It requires the quiet, unpressured space to be wrong without being destroyed for it.
Instead, what surfaces is shame. And shame is not a thinking emotion. Shame does not say let me reconsider. Shame says protect yourself. So the person doubles down. Rationalises. Attacks the questioner. Deflects.
And then — and this is the recursive cruelty of it — if the person becomes aware that they are doing this, the shame deepens. “I am the kind of person who cannot face my own contradictions”. Which is itself a threat to the self-concept, which triggers more defensive cognition, which produces more shame. The trap tightens with every attempt to escape it.
The system profits from this. A person caught in cognitive dissonance is a person primed for engagement. They are anxious, reactive, seeking validation. The algorithm will happily provide it — not in the form of resolution, but in the form of more content that reinforces the position they are defending. The dissonance is not resolved. It is monetised.
6 The Well-Educated Are Not Exempt
There is a comforting myth that education inoculates against this. It does not. A university professor can hold flatly contradictory positions for decades, protected by a social environment that never forces the collision. A well-read adult consuming “quality journalism” may simply have access to more sophisticated rationalisations for the same unexamined beliefs.
In fact, the well-educated person may be more vulnerable in one specific way: they have more intellectual tools available for motivated reasoning. They are better at constructing post-hoc justifications. They can cite sources. They can deploy jargon. They can build elaborate frameworks around a conclusion they reached for entirely non-rational reasons. Intelligence does not protect against propaganda. It merely provides the propaganda with better camouflage.
The fifty-five-year-old watching cable news is subject to the same dynamics as the sixteen-year-old on TikTok. The formats differ. The function is identical. Both deliver pre-packaged conclusions, both reward certainty, both punish revision, and both make every position a public performance from which retreat feels like humiliation.
7 The Radical Question
If we take this seriously — if we accept that the infrastructure of modern information is structurally designed to produce strong, unsubstantiated opinions and to trap people inside them — then the problem is not people. The problem is the machine.
Blaming individuals for failing to think critically inside a system that is architecturally hostile to critical thought is like blaming a fish for not climbing a tree. You can do it. It is technically a valid observation. The fish, indeed, cannot climb. But the observation tells you nothing useful, and its primary function is to make the observer feel superior.
The radical critique is not “people should think more”. People have always struggled to think. Socrates documented this twenty-four hundred years ago. The radical critique is: who profits from the mass production of thoughtlessness, and why do we allow them to continue?
The platforms are not neutral tools that people happen to misuse. They are extraction machines. They extract attention, emotion, data, and — most importantly — they extract the time and cognitive space that thinking requires. Every hour spent in the scroll is an hour not spent in the kind of slow, uncomfortable, unproductive-looking staring-into-space that is the precondition for an original thought. The machine does not want you to have original thoughts. Original thoughts are unpredictable. Unpredictable behaviour is bad for engagement models.
8 What Remains
I do not write this from a position of superiority, but I should be honest: I am not fully inside the machine either. More than ten years ago, I rejected social media. Not out of moral superiority, not because I saw through it faster than anyone else, but because I noticed what it was doing to me. It was robbing me of boredom. And boredom, I realised, was where my thinking lived. The empty stretches, the unstimulated gaps, the long walks with nothing to listen to — that was when my mind actually worked. The platforms were filling that space with noise, and the noise felt good, which made it worse. I remember the rush. I do not pretend I was above it. I was fully in it. I simply reached a point where I understood the trade: I could have the rush, or I could have my own thoughts. I chose my thoughts.
I was born in the late eighties. I grew up in the nineties and two-thousands, before the smartphone, before the industrialisation and commodification of sociality. I remember what it was like to be bored as a default condition — waiting for a bus with nothing but your own mind for company. That experience is now almost extinct for anyone under twenty-five. I do not own a smartphone. I carry a phone I use for phone calls. This is not asceticism. It is self-defence.
Many of my generation were not so lucky — not because they are weaker, but because the machine was designed to be irresistible, and resisting it is not a matter of character but of circumstance, timing, and blind luck. I do not blame them. I blame the machine.
And I should be honest about something else: even outside the machine, I catch myself holding opinions I have never examined. The infrastructure of thoughtlessness is not only digital. It is cultural, historical, linguistic. It is in the air. No one is fully clean of it. But I have — by accident of profession — a daily practice of asking people what they mean and watching what happens. That practice keeps me honest. Not because I am better, but because the question keeps being asked.
My students are not broken. They are not lazy. They are not the “dumbest generation” or whatever slur the professional commentariat reaches for this decade. They are people — young, alert, capable — who have been immersed since birth in an infrastructure whose sole purpose is to replace their thinking with its content.
The act of teaching, in this context, is not the transmission of information. That model is dead, and the machine killed it — it will always transmit faster, louder, and more seductively than any teacher can. The act of teaching is something more subversive: creating a space where someone can discover that they do not know what they think they know, and where that discovery is not a catastrophe but a beginning.
That is a radical act. Not because the teacher is radical, but because the machine cannot tolerate it.
When the only profitable thought is a fast one, slowness becomes resistance.