British mathematician turned philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, made the following statement that, over time, has matured into a famous quote:

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead made the above statement in 1911 and it is astonishing, over 100+ years later, to see just how insightful and prophetic his statement was. If we had to map out transit routes for all our outgoing mail before sending them, or we had to understand the internals of a combustion engine before driving a car, or had to write logic gates and manipulate bits before we could send and receive email, we’d be collectively mentally exhausted and stuck in a civilization that’d look nothing like what our current one looks like, at least in the west. User interfaces, logistics services, programming abstractions, API’s are just a few examples of innovations that have succeeded in stowing away a lot of the complexity that powers our current civilization. With these innovations, driving a car, sending a package, and sending emails just work.

Now, I’m not sure Whitehead could have imagined in 1911, the sheer number of things the average individual, living in the west in 2022, does (or can do) without thinking about them. With his smartphone, modern man can run his life on autopilot without having to bother about details and particulars. Even more alarming to Professor Whitehead would be the fact that the average modern person has added “thinking” to this list of important operations we can perform without thinking about them.

I don’t think Whitehead would want any place in a society where the operation of thinking , especially about difficult topics, that should be an active one of questioning, writing, and even physically walking is being reduced to passively clicking, liking, and sharing content. Ease of discovery(ads, influencers, bottomless feeds), ease of consumption(smartphones, wifi, unlimited cellular plans), ease of proliferation(share button, like button, globalization) have made it possible that a fair amount of the educated class have outsourced their thinking to curated memes, screenshots, and 20 second video clips.

In this era of thought as a service, individuals skilled at writing, acting out, or curating bite sized, heavily summarized, truth laundered, and easily digestible material, mostly recycled from other “thinkers” like them, package these canned thoughts and put them on the internet or on television. In fact, the more difficult the subject, the more “digestible” they make the material. The audience just has to find these thoughts that have already been thunk, glance at them, and like/dislike/share them to complete their part of this thinking process.

Just like the original model T, thought as a service is designed for mass production. There’s no time on its factory floor to account for false negatives/false positives, to iron out contradictions, to make qualifications and concessions, to particularize some general assertions and to generalize some particulars, to assemble supporting and detracting evidence. The goal of thought as a service is to write once and share many times. Not unlike many of the complexity-hiding innovations that power our modern civilization. The big difference here is that thought as a service is the terminus. It is the womb that carries the Nietzschean last man. With it, there will be no more civilization advancing innovations as these kinds of thought do not come in the straight jacket fashion that thought as a service provides.

With this in mind, we’ll add the following addendum to Whitehead’s original quote:

Civilization regresses by extending the amount of ways in which individuals can pretend to think without actually thinking.

C.D Anya