Can The Internet Ruin Your Sense of Self? [Archive Pull]

0:05Mike Rugnetta Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a

0:08 podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta, and we have a personal show for you this week. In this archive pull episode, we have resurfaced a conversation that I had with clinical psychotherapist Kurt White about how the Internet contributes to the formulation of the self. Kurt and I reflect on a number of anxieties. What does it mean to formulate an idea of who you are in a media environment that is always itself trying to formulate an idea of you so that it can serve you endless posts, videos, articles, and advertisements.

0:52 And furthermore, as intoxicating as it is to be online and to recognize something of yourself in what you see in the feed, is it not possible to develop a false sense of the self? One built only upon a false reflection, or stranger yet, the false reflections of others. Kurt and I talk specifically about clinical diagnoses. What does it mean to see videos online about, say, autism or ADHD and think, wait. Is that me?

1:33 Outside of a clinical setting, a setting in which Kurt has lots of expertise. Right now, we're gonna take a quick break and you're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the member feed. But when we return, me, Kurt, and making yourself online. So Kurt, I'm curious if you are familiar with this thing that people say online. It's usually a comment that people leave under a video, and it says, I built this algorithm brick by brick, or I placed this brick myself or things along those lines.

2:22Kurt White No. I don't know about that. What what does that

2:24 mean?

2:24Mike Rugnetta Do you wanna take a guess as to what

2:26Kurt White it might mean? I I I have heard that people have a

2:29 certain pride sometimes in the idea that the algorithm really gets them, you know, that they... That they're careful about the things that they like or even linger on, I think. Right? So that they're only getting that sort of special unique content to them. Is that is that what that would mean?

2:43Mike Rugnetta You absolutely nailed it. Yeah. It's it's a way

2:45 of describing, the work that you put in to training the algorithm on social media, right, usually TikTok or Instagram, to show you really specific things. So I... I've been thinking about this a lot, this like brick by brick idea, alongside I think another much larger and more abstract idea, which is that, like, in the process of being online, a lot of us like figure out like who we are, or we figure out like who we could be, like what the options are.

3:18 And the comparison that I make to myself a lot when I'm thinking about this is that the Internet now is kind of like what the mall was when I was a kid. Just like a place that you can go and you can see lots of different people all at once, and you can kinda get a sense of what your options are, what you might imagine yourself as at some point. Mhmm. And I think maybe there's this thing that's happening, especially in the algorithmic Internet, where people are going to the Internet to make some versions of themselves, building this thing brick by brick, while we also in a sense are built brick by brick by it. So it's this strange, like, funny recursive loop, like, making a feed that influences our sense of self,

4:07 which is then reflected in the feed, which then influences our sense of self, which then is reflected in the feed. Mhmm. We ascribe a lot of agency to this technology, and we say it knows, and it puts you places, and it has figured something out. And it's just doing complicated math. And every once in a while, it's, you know, it's not imagining a version of me. It's it's running an algorithm that will sort of never never be able to know or understand.

4:32Kurt White And the only thing it's really, the sort of way

4:34 it's evaluating how it works is probably very simple, actually. Just are you... Do you stay doing it? How much do you do it? Yeah. And so it isn't necessarily even optimized. I mean, not only is there no mind there, but, right, it's not even necessarily optimized to give us the thing that we'd like the most. It's just optimized to give us the thing that we don't stop doing.

4:55 People often conflate pleasure and and sort of reward. And, actually, they're like related things neuro... Neurobiologically, but they're not exactly the same.

5:04Mike Rugnetta Wait. Can you say more about that just as it

5:06 relates to, like, the feed?

5:08Kurt White Yeah. Sure. I mean, you know, a lot I mean, a lot of

5:11 this stuff I I studied and worked with folks with substance use disorders and addictions for a long time. And I really think an essential way of understanding that is to understand that there's a set of brain circuits that developed with a common ancestor that is so far back in the evolutionary tree that we share this set of circuits in common with as distantly related creatures as things like lizards. Right?

5:37 Sure. Like, it's way before the mammalian branching and things like this. And this was a set of circuits to sort of get like like a lizard can't do meal planning. Right? I mean, it does very poor at that, you know, in a five year plan, absolutely nothing. Right? I mean, really low.

5:50Mike Rugnetta Lizards lizard's not thinking about bacon, a

5:53 bunch of chicken breasts for the week and then Exactly right. Yeah. Credit report.

5:56Kurt White Yeah. But... So you have to develop a a system that

5:59 has nothing to do with conscious thought that involves getting them to eat the right nutrients in the right proportions and kind of do most everything else that it does. It has to reward the things at a basic biological level. And that works so well, you know, as an adaptation to the environment, you know, over millions and millions of years that, you know, it's still kind of like the basic system that most creatures use today.

6:25 But there are hacks to this as it's sort of really how it is. It's an unfortunate chemical accident that some substances, sometimes just naturally occurring and sometimes if you refine the heck out of them, they they sort of tell the brain that the reward part of it is super important when they take that in. Right? Cocaine, you know, like, oh, yeah. It's sort of like, you might feel good, the pleasure part, it's sort of a related circle in the dopamine, but then you take in cocaine and it also...

6:54 Your brain says in a very particular way, I'm pretty sure this is a thousand times more important for me to do than anything I'm I've ever done I'm pretty certain I need to do this again. Right.

7:07Mike Rugnetta Right? I've checked the math. I've looked at

7:08 the numbers.

7:09Kurt White I've checked the math. This... I've I've had this

7:11 I've had this system a long time. Yeah. And I don't know how I didn't know about this, but I've gotta reorient what I'm doing. I kinda don't care about any of that other stuff anymore. And some people more prone to that than others and social context, but we could do a whole thing about that. But but, basically, that that set of circuits is the right way. But drugs is not the only way to overwhelm the circuit, actually. You can you can do it through clever manipulations of people that sort of get your brain to produce its own chemicals that that get you into basically compulsive compulsive action.

7:43 Right? Gambling is the sort of classic one, of course. Right? But if you kinda look at what we've done with a lot of this kind of social social media, algorithmically based social media, it's people who know this and have consciously tried to optimize the algorithm to get as much of that dopamine to release to get you sort of compulsively behaving in that way, to not put the thing down, or to pick it up again as soon as it's down. Put it down.

8:12 Pick it up. Put it down. Pick it up. They don't care if you like it. They don't care if you like it. Right? You... If you do great. Right? I mean, it's like it's like, you know, you like cocaine the first time you try it. The thousandth time you try it, there may not really be much pleasure in it anymore, but your brain still thinks you

8:30Mike Rugnetta need it. I mean, it's amazing the number of sort

8:33 of systems I have in my life to remind myself when I have spent too much time online that it's like, you're... You could be hurting yourself right now.

8:41Kurt White That's

8:41Mike Rugnetta right. It feels like maybe you're having a good

8:43 time, but like, let's check-in with the body and the brain and see. You know, I talk to myself the way that I talk to my daughter, like, how are you feeling? Or we do... Should we take a moment?

8:53Kurt White It makes It requires effort. I mean, isn't it...

8:55 Isn't that wild? Like, I mean, that's what one of the hallmarks of recognizing Yeah. When you're in a compulsive process. Right? Like, if you say... Even if you're not using excessively, like if you say to yourself, when I go out tonight, I'm only gonna have three drinks. Right? Now you're having to put thought into controlling it.

9:11 You don't say to yourself, I'm gonna wake up tomorrow. I'm have only two glasses of orange juice. You don't have to do it. Right? Orange juice isn't that rewarding. It's just not. And so, you know, you just drink the orange juice you drink. Don't have to think about it. Right? Even the effort to control that you suggest how out of control we are.

9:31Mike Rugnetta Right? So how does this construction of self

9:35 or even the feeling of you are constructing yourself through these actions, like how does that relate? Are we... I imagine it's probably different for different people, but is it like we have these compulsive actions and we want to justify doing them because we're just like, like, oh, but this is who I am, or are those feelings just making us feel like this is who I... Who we are because in some way they're positive, and we associate sort of constructing the self with a positive effect.

10:04Kurt White Well, man, I kinda know you were gonna get my dark

10:07 read on this. I know if you're gonna like my answer to this, but I don't... The darkest read of this, which I think is plausible, by is the that all of that is a made up after the fact justification, but on a part of the brain that is just simply doesn't like that it didn't know what it was doing. There's a part of your brain that wanted what it wanted, wanted to pick up the phone, wanted to not set it down, wanted to do this, and it did it. And now you sort of say to yourself, why did I do that?

10:35 And the brain doesn't really like that. You know, we sometimes call it confabulation. The brain doesn't like a big hole in in its set of schemas, but that sort of compulsive part of the brain can connect directly to the motor cortex. It can get you in motion. It can get you doing things without being processed through sort of higher order cognitive functioning.

10:54 You know? Even things just as simple as, like, intention and values and things like that. And so you say... You might say to yourself, I like this because I think it reflects who I am. And maybe that's actually total BS. Like, it's a lie your brain is telling yourself. That's a darkest read. K. But I I do think there's a slightly less dark way of of looking at it, which is that the world can be broad and narrow. And I think the great joy for me in discovering the Internet in 1991 was this sort of idea that the world that I knew in the suburbs of Metro Detroit was no longer the limiting factor in the people I could hang around, the kind of conversations I should have...

11:36 Could have with people, the things that I was interested in, you know, the games that I I had, this love of this Japanese game, Go. Yeah. It's actually a Chinese game, Weiqi. And I found that I could play it on servers in the middle in the middle of the night with people from all over the world, which mostly just crashed at that time. But I...

11:54 But it became like the most important thing in my life for a couple of years like that, like doing that. And there was a real solace to it, you know, and I and I do think that, like, if I hadn't had that, you know, if I hadn't been able to find something, you know, that commune... That group, that sense of self, even if it's playful and exploratory, I probably would have been more depressed than I was as a teenager. I think that's true.

12:21Mike Rugnetta In the middle of all of this, right, you have

12:23 access to this information, these communities that really lets you expand your idea of what's possible both in the world and for yourself. There's all different kinds of things that you can learn about yourself, about the world. Mhmm. An infinite number of ways that you can go. And I'm curious about one particular very narrow, though maybe you'll tell me it's very broad aspect of that, which is something that I see increasingly on TikTok especially, and that is diagnoses.

12:58 Seeing videos on TikTok, commenting in this brick by brick sort of fashion, somewhere between I've worked hard to get this algorithm, but also the algorithm knows some things about me that maybe I don't. And then at the end of that is, has the algorithm given me this video because I have ADHD? Then people being served videos by therapists or psychologists or whoever who aren't diagnosing people online, but who are, you know, talking about symptoms, and then, you know, going to the comments and being like, well, that seals it. That's gotta be me.

13:35Kurt White Yep.

13:36Mike Rugnetta And I'm curious about your perspective about

13:39 this kind of thing that like figuring out this part of yourself using the Internet. Because I imagine, as I said, it's... I imagine it's extremely complicated.

13:51Kurt White I mean, can I give you a weird answer to it that

13:53 backs that backs way up a bit?

13:55Mike Rugnetta Oh my god.

13:56Kurt White Absolutely. One has to see, I think, that the

13:59 history of psychiatry and mental health treatment through the lens of its relationship, its complicated ambivalent relationship with science and medicine, and with the constructs of science and medicine as increasingly the unquestioned sources of truth and reality for us. Right? Freud, for example, was really kind of more of a humanist. You know, he was actually excluded from studying neurology because of antisemitism.

14:34 And so he had to sort of invent psychoanalysis as a way of understanding what people are. And there were ways that his approach was scientific in a sense and in other ways not so. But he used these sort of beautiful terms like soul, you know, psyche. I mean, they just would have conjured that. They use psyche, you know, meaning soul, you know.

14:55 And having those associations more to sort of classical literature and experiences than this. The id is just the it, the I, and the beyond the I. Right? I mean, this is poetry in a way, isn't it? And that kind of played in Europe. But he said when we translate this into English, you've got to think about the Americans. And the Americans are not going to buy this. They're not going take that seriously. And so I want you to use the Latin words for these things because that's what they use in science. They use the Latin words.

15:25 And they'll they'll buy that, you know. So we have ego and id and superego. Right? And the rest. And so sort of ideas that were sort of fundamental to the way that mental health treatment developed in America and the psychoanalytic version of that in particular had to do with this sort of wishing to be more a part of the structure of knowledge power dynamics that come from medicine and science.

15:48 Medicine however never really wanted psychiatry, you know, and so I think there's been this struggle to be taken seriously as a profession and the sort of wish to have diagnoses that, by the way, we have like almost no lab tests for. Right? It's diagnosis by checklist, basically. You know, it's symptoms, and it's a serious business. I'm not trying to poo poo it, but it's different than I think the way you often get diagnosed with a lot of things in medicine.

16:15 The rest of medicine I guess I should say. And so finally maybe it gets to a point where people are sort of saying, oh okay, it's a medical thing, it's like that, I can take it seriously. I can have a medicine. I can have a diagnosis. And then almost right at that moment, on comes the Internet, you know, like a like a damn freight train, you know, and it's like, ah, here we are.

16:37 Here's the... We don't need to decide. We could just have a YouTube video about it, you know. And I... Maybe it's the internal chaos agent in me where I'm like, bring it on. That's great. You know? You figure you out, man. You know? That's okay. These categories, whatever. You know? I I really don't feel like as a representative of the field that I personally don't really wanna to feel gatekeepy about it, you know. Which isn't to say I don't believe in the construct validity of diagnoses. I do actually.

17:07 But I don't really believe that that science and medicine and psychiatry or anyone else gets to fundamentally decide how you divide those things up, how you divide those categories up. And what I see in the Internet, even in this sort of weird versions of it that come out, is this beautiful interstitial intermediary play space version of things where people can toss around different ideas of the self and they can be true for a minute and not true for not even a minute, ten seconds. It could be true for ten seconds, and then you're on to Scottish kids swearing.

17:45Mike Rugnetta You I mean, you almost like took the next

17:47 question I had out of my mouth, which is like, do you worry about people over committing to things that they... This is very loaded, think they've learned about themselves online? It sounds like the answer to that is no.

17:58Kurt White I don't really worry too much about it. Yeah. I mean,

18:01 probably like if you were to study this, you'd find the most common thing is that people kind of toss it around in their mind for a while and think about it, and maybe it gives them a different sense of their self. Maybe they talk to a couple of people about it, but they're not going to go schedule an appointment and and get a prescription for something or go see a therapist. There...

18:20 But probably far more people don't do that than do that. But the experience of it might really mean something to that group too. Right? It may have done something meaningful to them in opening up the sort of window of possibilities of the self just a little bit for them in a way that, like, I don't I don't think we can... We could be in danger of underestimating the impact of that sometimes.

18:41 And if and if some people do, they go, know, like, jeez, like, sometimes it's not subtle. You know what I mean? It's sort of like, yeah, I don't know. Like, I'm I'm seeing people here talking about, I discovered that this is why I have no friends, and this is why I've never turned a paper in on time ever, and I'm not... And I gotten fired from three jobs because of this, and I'm late constantly, and I'm in trouble for that.

19:05 And these are real areas of suffering. And you go like, oh my god. I thought I was just a screw up. You know? And they see that. They said, no. I I went and I saw someone, and I I have this trouble now, but I'm getting help for it and it's not liked anymore. Look, I'm in a relationship, I have a job, it's better for me. And if that person calls the phone and picks up someone and says, I know, do I, don't like great. Great.

19:28 Great. Great. You know? And if you don't have it, what's the harm? Really, what's the harm? They're just labels. We shouldn't be so precious about it.

19:38Mike Rugnetta It's just a... It's a perspective about this

19:41 kind of thing that you just never ever hear online. And it's, I will say, extremely refreshing to hear a professional say, so what?

19:50Kurt White So what? And I don't... You know, I prefer to

19:54 this idea, like if you really want to talk about self, you know, and self, how that develops. You know, I've used this word play a couple of times, not accidentally exactly. Because I think you could say fundamentally that the self develops through play relationships in a developmental way, right, of sort of like you come out of the womb in a symbiotic way.

20:16 You're not really exactly a person, but you develop being a person. You know, you're a person in the sort of usual legal sense of things. I'm not gonna say that. But, like, you know, you don't really have an identity yet. And you develop that in relationship to others and in relationship to the parts of you that are only for you.

20:34 And you do that by trying it on, moving in and out of letting things be true and not true at the same time. That's what play is really. Right? It's you could have it's true and it's not true. And you do that over time, and then that gets... And and then that's the sort of, we think, the sort of psychological basis for development of creativity, actually. That this kind of play structure never goes away. We just learn to do more with it, and we learn more about ourselves in doing that, which is more of a process than a result. Right? The self the self as development rather than the self as a sort of a...

21:08 An entity that way. I built it.

21:10Mike Rugnetta I built the self, and now

21:10Kurt White it's built. That's right. That's... And that's the

21:13 part that's wrong about that. It's not built. It's that you built a prison for yourself. Any rigid idea about yourself is a prison. Any rigid idea. Right? We always... If we don't have playfulness about things, then then we're going to start suffering eventually. Maybe not immediately. And there might be some times we really need to have that rigidity. It's a protective function. But if we can't get it back, then they were in real trouble.

21:38 And I think like the Internet can like... It can be like a seed of that. It can sort of sort of like, I'm not alone. Here's an idea. But you need the relational part of it to metabolize it.

21:49Mike Rugnetta Yeah. Kurt, that's so good. It's making me a

21:52 little emotional.

21:53Kurt White Yeah. I'm glad. I see it in your eyes.

21:58Mike Rugnetta I think the thing that's really beautiful about

22:00 that is that there's a hopefulness to it that especially in this moment, like right now, you know, this week on the Internet is very absent. And it feels agentive in a way that I think a lot of people don't at the moment. People feel really controlled. People feel really hemmed in, and people are really trying to like search for how it is to be themselves. Some people feeling I think like doing that is dangerous.

22:31 And so knowing that there's this like way to think about this, which is just like, look out for you and just pay attention is I think really empowering.

22:41Kurt White Well, I think even the dark moments in in life are

22:46 things that we can bring some some of that quality of openness to if we find the right way to do it, I think, you know, with some people, with some with some community, I think you might find even that sometimes even things like despair, you can have a little bit of playfulness that creates a room around despair where all of a sudden possibility opens up again where there was none for a minute. And I think that's the task of being human, quite frankly.

23:24Mike Rugnetta Even online.

23:26Kurt White Especially online. Why not? Not? Bring it on, man.

23:31 It on. The online is just bad in the way that we're bad. And it's good in the ways that we're good. And if can find ways to use it to open us up, then let's rejoice in that. Let's rejoice in that. If it's bad, then let's work together to put it down when we need to. That's important too.

24:00Mike Rugnetta Kurt, thank you so much for joining us. I really

24:03 appreciate you taking some time to chat with me about these huge, complicated, extremely important subjects. Thank you.

24:11Kurt White It has been a pleasure.

24:12Mike Rugnetta Where can people find you and your work online?

24:16Kurt White Oh, well, we're at the Brattleboro retreat where we

24:19 have a... We have another podcast, Unraveling. If you're listening to this on the Never Post feed, check it out. We have some really interesting stuff going on, and, you can find me primarily on LinkedIn as sort of the only only place I keep a real presence, on on the socials.

24:34Mike Rugnetta Legit. LinkedIn, real hot right now.

24:36Kurt White Oh, yeah. Oh, well.

25:47Mike Rugnetta That is the archival episode we have for you

25:50 today. If you'd like to listen to the original upload with news and interstitials, you can find a link in the show notes. Never Post is primarily listener funded. So if you enjoyed this segment, please consider becoming a member at neverpo.st. You can gain access to an ad free member feed while helping us keep the show going.

26:11 Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rugnetta. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia.