The Original Sin of Everything

There’s a genre of internet criticism that goes something like this: 

“The internet has ruined everything. It’s made us more polarized, shortened our attention spans, and turned us all into dopamine-addicted scrollers. We need to return to a simpler time, when people had real conversations and read actual books.”

And there’s a corresponding genre of internet defense:

“Actually, the internet is humanity’s greatest invention. It’s democratized knowledge, connected the world, and given everyone a voice. Previous generations would have killed for this kind of access to information and opportunity.”

Both of these views miss something fundamental: the internet isn’t some alien force that descended upon us. 

It’s just us, but bigger.

I.

Consider the following stories:

1. In 1439, Johannes Gutenberg introduced movable type printing to Europe. Within decades, people were complaining that the proliferation of books was overwhelming readers with too much information, degrading the quality of scholarship, and spreading dangerous ideas too quickly.
2. In the 1920s, critics worried that the telephone would destroy meaningful human connection by replacing face-to-face interaction with distant, impersonal communication.
3. In 2024, we worry that AI will replace human creativity, that social media is destroying democracy, and that smartphones are rewiring our brains.

Notice a pattern?

Every major communication technology has been met with the same basic criticism: it’s changing how humans interact in ways that will destroy what makes us human. 

But in every case, the technology didn’t create new human behaviors — it just amplified existing ones.

II.

Let’s play a game. I’ll describe something, and you guess whether I’m talking about:

A) A medieval village marketplace

B) A modern social media platform

• People gather to exchange information and goods
• Rumors spread rapidly through the community
• Social status is publicly displayed and negotiated
• People form cliques and engage in public disputes
• Reputation can be made or destroyed through gossip
• There’s a mix of useful information and sensationalist nonsense
• The authorities occasionally try to regulate what can be said

The answer, of course, is both. The marketplace and the social media platform are fundamentally the same thing — human social behavior organized into a system. 

The only real difference is scale.

III.

Technology is more mirror than transformer.

When we look at the internet and see polarization, addiction, and misinformation, we’re not seeing new problems — we’re seeing ancient human tendencies playing out on a larger stage.

This is the Original Sin Theory of Technology: everything we build inherits our flaws because we’re the ones building it.

• Democracy is flawed because voters are flawed
• Markets are flawed because traders are flawed
• AI is flawed because its training data (us) is flawed
• The internet is flawed because users (also us) are flawed

IV.

Scale isn’t neutral.

When you take flawed human behavior and multiply it by billions of interconnected individuals, you get emergent properties that couldn’t exist at smaller scales. It’s like how adding more particles to a system can suddenly create phase transitions — water becomes ice, or a random collection of neurons becomes conscious.

The internet hasn’t fundamentally changed human nature, but it has created new emergent properties of human interaction:

• Viral phenomena that can reach millions in hours
• Communities formed around hyper-specific interests
• Collaborative projects involving thousands of strangers
• Information networks that can fact-check in real-time

These aren’t new behaviors (people have always shared stories, formed groups, worked together, and verified claims), but the scale creates qualitatively different outcomes.

V.

If the Original Sin idea is correct, then:

1. We should be skeptical of both utopian and dystopian technology predictions. New tools will amplify both our virtues and our vices, just like every previous innovation.
2. We should focus less on the technology itself and more on the human behaviors it’s amplifying. Want to fix social media? Work on human tribalism and status-seeking.
3. We should expect that any sufficiently large-scale system will develop emergent properties we couldn’t predict — some wonderful, some terrible.
4. We should be humble about our ability to “fix” these systems. They’re as complex and flawed as we are.

Perhaps the most important insight is this: when we criticize our technology, we’re really criticizing ourselves. And when we try to imagine better systems, we’re really trying to imagine better ways of being human.

The internet isn’t broken because it failed to live up to its promise. It’s working exactly as it should, given what we are. It’s a mirror, not a window to some better world.

The question isn’t “How do we fix the internet?” it’s “How do we become the kind of people who would build better things?”

And that’s a question as old as humanity itself.