Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Maybe I’m not the only one scratching my head, but it really feels like over the last fifty years humanity has somehow managed to get dumber.

Now, before anyone fires up their keyboard and writes a 37-tweet thread explaining why I’m wrong, hear me out.

The Internet was supposed to be one of mankind’s greatest achievements. Every book, every scientific paper, every historical document, every piece of knowledge ever assembled sitting in your pocket twenty-four hours a day. The sum total of human understanding available with a few taps of a screen.

And somehow we used it to argue about whether the Earth is flat.

It’s like giving a starving man the keys to the world’s largest library and watching him spend eight hours looking at cat videos and conspiracy theories about how pigeons are government surveillance drones.

The technology itself isn’t the problem. The Internet is amazing. The problem is that mankind clearly wasn’t ready for it. We handed every village idiot a global broadcasting platform and then acted surprised when the village idiot started attracting followers.

Which brings us to MAGA.

In theory, “Make America Great Again” sounds perfectly reasonable. Who wouldn’t want their country to be great? It’s a slogan that works because it’s simple, optimistic, and vague enough that everyone can project their own fantasy onto it.

In reality? It’s been about as relaxing as giving a toddler three energy drinks and the launch codes.

What started as a political movement somehow evolved into a loyalty test, a religion, a reality television show, and a never-ending family argument all rolled into one. Facts became optional. Expertise became suspicious. Outrage became a hobby.

The truly remarkable thing is that we have more access to information than any generation in human history, yet people seem more determined than ever to ignore it.

Maybe that’s the lesson. Technology doesn’t automatically make people smarter. It just gives them faster ways to be wrong.

And if that’s true, then perhaps the Internet wasn’t humanity’s greatest invention.

Maybe it was the world’s largest IQ test.

And we’re still waiting for the results.