The Collective Syntax Machine

March 2nd 2025

The problem about ideas in a specific context like a subreddit or on a LinkedIn post is that the fact that you’re seeing it there tells you how you should feel about the idea in the first place.

Do you see a LinkedIn post on r/linkedinlunatics? You’re already supposed to hate it. See a piece of information on r/conservative about Joe Biden? You already know how you’re “supposed” to feel about it simply by where you’re seeing it. See the same story but on r/politics or r/news? You’re supposed to feel a different way about it. See it on Fox? CNN? A leftist/alt-right instagram page? The process ends up being the same regardless.

In the sacred format of the infinite doomscroll, your job isn’t to process the information yourself and form an opinion: it’s to figure out why the thing itself is bad or good because of the environment you saw it in. All that your brain does after enough scrolling is learn to associate the correct symbols with the correct context and respond accordingly. The actual meaning behind those symbols becomes irrelevant after participating in that process long enough.

The thesis here is this: On the internet we’ve stopped dealing with semantic content directly. We now play a syntactic game that resembles dialogue or information, but the meaning behind it is being created for us by someone else, intentionally or not.

This is the process:

  • See a piece of information
  • Does the context that it was provided in decide it is good information or bad information?
  • Feel happy or vindictive or angry or silly etc. based on the context and the words
  • Move on to the next thing

We can do it right now, it’s not hard, I’ll list a concept and a context in which it’s spoken about:

  • Elon Musk, Fox News => Good
  • Elon Musk, CNN => Bad
  • A Post About B2B sales, LinkedIn => Good
  • A Post About B2B sales, r/LinkedInLunatics => Bad
  • Democrat, Fox News => Bad
  • Democrat, CNN => Good

Information should be processed out of a desire for authentic opinion and fact based assessment, but we’re not actually dealing with meaning and parsing that meaning through our own set of internalized values. We’re seeing the right syntactic set of symbols in the correct context and responding in the way that context demands we respond. We can’t have meaningful discussions anymore because we’ve associated a specific set of sybmols/contexts with a certain group identity, and all we do is respond negatively to content against our current groups and positively to content for them. The quick and easy emotional response of a feed has sapped our desire and ability for intellectual honesty. The actual semantic content is gone, we just learned to abuse the collective syntax machine in a process that only resembles actual learning and dialogue.

Or maybe that’s all we’ve always done, and the internet has accelerated the process exponentially.