Age of Stupid: Connected everywhere, grounded nowhere

WHEN I was a student at UKM, I had friends in Mass Communication – Komunikasi Massa, as we called it then. As a science student happy among test tubes and plant tissues, I barely grasped that communication itself could be a formal discipline. Yet I was quietly impressed by what they studied – media theory, persuasion, audience psychology – and often joked that I had taken a wrong turn at the faculty junction.

Looking back, what they learnt in the late 1980s would scarcely resemble today’s curriculum. Technology has rewritten the playbook.

What follows is a humble reflection, guided by common sense, lived experience and a growing unease about how we now speak, listen and misunderstand.

This is a humble reflection guided by common sense, lived experience and a growing unease about how we speak, listen and misunderstand today. And I ask, not without discomfort: when common sense began to retreat, did stupidity quietly take its place?

When my son introduced me to 1984

It was my son, during his IGCSE years, who placed George Orwell’s 1984 into my hands. “You should read this, Dad,” he said. I had long known of the book – Big Brother, the Thought Police, the rewriting of truth – but like many classics, it had waited patiently on my mental shelf. Thanks to him, the day finally arrived.

I began reading it as one reads a dystopian relic. By the third chapter, I realised it was no relic at all. What unsettled me was not the boot on the face, but the quiet manipulation of truth. In Orwell’s world, reality itself could be edited. Memory became fragile. Language was shrunk so that people would eventually lose the capacity to think rebellious thoughts. Control was not enforced mainly through violence, but through narrative, fear and fatigue.

I told my son, “This isn’t about the future. It’s about us today.” Orwell imagined a single Big Brother watching the people. Our version is far subtler. Today, power is diffused through platforms, algorithms and screens. We no longer need to be watched. We voluntarily report ourselves, minute by minute – through our handphones, Instagram, Facebook and many platforms.

What chilled me most was this realisation: Orwell’s society fell not because people were stupid, but because they gradually lost the habit of questioning and discerning. And that, I fear, is where modern “stupidity” truly begins – not in ignorance, but in the silent surrender of critical thought. In handing me that book, my son did more than suggest a novel. He handed me a mirror.

The monk, the Gutenberg press and the first collapse of authority

Picture a medieval monk, perched in a dusty scriptorium, his quill scratching against vellum under the flickering flame of a single candle. For centuries, such monks held the mantle of meaning. They were custodians of truth, knowledge and memory. Their monopoly was not of wealth or armies, but of ideas.

Then came the mechanical press by Johannes Gutenberg. With a clang of metal and an army of movable types, the monopoly crumbled. Ideas escaped cloisters and flooded marketplaces, taverns, cafés and salons. With the printed word came not just literacy, but reason, dissent and debate. Authority shifted from pulpits to pages.

The printing press did something profound: it broke the link between power and scarcity of information. Once books could be reproduced, ideas could no longer be locked up. People could read the Bible, argue with priests, question kings, form movements – because the public gained access.

Fast-forward through centuries and the baton passed to radio, television and mass-circulated newspapers. These new media did not abolish authority; they redistributed it. A few broadcasters, editors and institutions curated what whole nations would see, hear and believe. It was flawed, imperfect and sometimes manipulated – but it created something priceless: a shared public reality.

For example, at eight o’clock, Malaysians watched the same news bulletin, RTM or TV3. At dawn, it read the same headlines. Malaysians might quarrel over interpretations, but at least the facts lived in the same room.

But today, that room has been subdivided into millions of private cubicles.

From deity to expert to celebrity to ‘me’

Across history, the “trusted messenger” has changed costumes many times. In ancient societies, the message came from the deity – interpreted through priests, shamans, astrologers. Later, during the Enlightenment and the age of science, trust shifted to experts: scientists, academics, technocrats. Then came the celebrity age – the trusted voice was not necessarily the most informed, but the most visible. Social media now completed the next step: the messenger became “me”.

Trust migrated from institutions to individuals. “I trust people like me.” “I trust those who sound like me, think like me, share my anger, my fears, my tribe.” The line between professional and personal, between public and private, dissolved. Everyone became a micro-broadcaster; everyone a node of influence.

At first glance, this feels empowering. Who doesn’t want a voice? But there is a hidden tragedy here. When trust is privatised and personalised, institutions become disposable. There are no longer institutions, no social contracts to bind society together or any shared narratives.
The problem is not that we now trust ourselves. The problem is that we trust ONLY ourselves and those who sound exactly like us.

From broadcast to ‘mass self-communication’

For much of the twentieth century, media operated under a centralised model. A handful of newspapers, radio stations and television channels acted as curators of public life. Media informed, educated and entertained. It shaped national conversations. It created a collective “us”.

Then the needle skipped. Digital networks turned every user into a publisher. Communication became many-to-many, peer-to-peer, self-directed – what theorists now call “mass self-communication”: masses talking, but each voice broadcasting from its own little tower.

A post from a kampung in Sabah could travel as far as a speech from Washington. An oil palm planter, a politician, a TikTok influencer and a student activist now can share the same megaphone. The promise was breathtaking: democratised voice, borderless exchange, a richer public sphere.

But revolutions seldom arrive with warning labels. What rose in place of editors, ombudsmen and curators was architecture – algorithms. What replaced judgement was code. The gatekeeper did not disappear. It became invisible.

Echo chambers and perfected ignorance

The most powerful invention of social media was not the “share” button. It was the filter. Everyone is asking to be “liked”. Every “like” trains the algorithm. Every click sharpens our digital profiles – not only what we enjoy, but what keeps us scrolling. Soon, we are not browsing the internet. The internet is browsing us.

And it delivers what we already agree with. This is how the echo chamber is built – not with bricks, but with comfort. We begin to encounter only those who confirm our views. Disagreement becomes rare. Contradiction feels hostile. Nuance feels like a personal attack. In this space, ignorance is not the absence of information. It is the absence of interruption.

Welcome to the Age of Stupid, not because people are misinformed, but because we “lack the means to hear other views that might correct our own illogic or misinformation.” If everyone in our feed agrees with us, how will we even know if we are the ones who are wrong? Ignorance then is perfected. Not by censorship but by design.

Paradox of plenty: More data, less depth

If you are holding your handphone right now, you probably hold more computing power than what sent humans to the moon, and access to more information than any country leaders in the 1960s. Yet we feel more confused, more fragmented, more disoriented. We drown in data, but starve for wisdom.

The problem is not that there is “too much information” – it is that information comes without hierarchy, context or pause. Our attention is sliced into microseconds. We snack endlessly and rarely sit down for a proper mental meal. We scroll. We skim. We outrage. We move on.

In this environment, institutions begin to look slow, clumsy and irrelevant. Why wait for a press conference when some anonymous account can leak a screenshot? Why trust a peer-reviewed study when a viral post gives us an easier villain?

But once institutions stop mattering, we lose something more than formality. We lose the anchors that once held societies together. Courts, parliaments, universities, professional bodies, religious communities – all of these played a role in filtering, correcting, slowing things down just enough for reason to catch up with emotion.

When those anchors are mocked or ignored, truth becomes tribal. History becomes negotiable. Policy becomes theatre.

Why ‘stupid’ is not about education

It is tempting to blame this on a lack of education, as if stupidity is confined to those who failed exams. But the Age of Stupid is strikingly egalitarian. Degrees are no immunity.

Some of the most insular people we know are highly educated, but live entirely within their algorithmically curated worlds. They are brilliant within their own echo chambers and clueless outside them.

“Stupid” here is not lack of IQ. It is lack of exposure to serious contradictions. It is the comfort of never being forced to reconsider. It is the luxury of never having to say, “I might be wrong.”

The coming ghost in the machine

We have probably reached the end-point of the individualisation of communication: the message moved from deity to expert to celebrity to the individual.

The next step is the scariest part – to remove the individual entirely. Enter the bot. We are standing at the edge of the AI Age. Increasingly, the messenger will not be a person at all, but an intelligent system we consult for news, opinions, investment tips, health advice, even moral reassurance.

The more we outsource our thinking to these tools, the more control over reality drifts out of our hands and into invisible architectures of data and model training.

In a strange way, we may be going full circle. The message once came from the deity above. Then from the expert. Then from the celebrity. Then from “people like me”. Soon, it may come from a machine that we treat like an oracle – inscrutable, efficient, comforting. If that does not worry us, it should.

Malaysian reality and the digital tinderbox

Once, disagreement required presence. In the old kopitiam, you raised your voice, someone raised an eyebrow, another lifted a glass. Arguments could be sharp, even heated, but you still had to look each other in the eye – and return to the same table the next day.

That obligation mattered. It forced restraint. It taught us how to be contradicted and stay seated. Disagreement was uncomfortable, but it was also how thinking grew.

Online, there is no next table and no tomorrow. There is only unfriend and block. We did not merely lose dialogue; we lost the habit of enduring contradiction. Without it, we become intellectually flabby – rich in opinion, poor in reflection.

This loss weighs heavily in a country like Malaysia, where social cohesion has always depended on care, courtesy and quiet negotiation. I come from a world of plantation fields and parish halls, of schools and neighbourhoods in the 1970s and 1980s – shaped by Muhibbah, shared meals and noisy choir practices.

Trust was not abstract. It was a handshake, a borrowed motorcycle, a neighbour who scolded your child as if he were his own. Even today, as I write about industry, agriculture and sustainability, I do so with affection for what is rooted and enduring – and with sadness at the thinning of mutual respect, communal purpose and the willingness to place collective good above individual gain.

In an earlier media landscape, when words strayed too close to sensitive fault lines of race or religion, there was at least some friction. Editors paused. Community leaders intervened. Social norms acted as natural brakes. Social media has flattened many of those brakes. A provocative line typed in private can now ricochet across thousands of screens in minutes.

Algorithms reward speed, not context. Emotion outruns verification. Nuance often arrives too late. Increasingly, the young encounter identity not through lived experience or family stories, but through viral arguments and digital caricatures – turning identity into something to defend rather than to understand.

The same violence of simplification plays out in sectors like palm oil. On the ground, reality is complex and messy: smallholder livelihoods, labour shortages, replanting cycles, certification demands, carbon and biodiversity trade-offs.

Online, much of this collapses into slogans – villains preferred over systems, outrage over understanding. In the process, communities and trade-offs quietly disappear from the narrative.

Malaysia has endured because cooler heads eventually prevailed. The risk today is not passion itself, but platforms designed to reward heat over reflection. When complexity is flattened and Muhibbah eroded, we lose more than arguments. We lose the possibility of community – and with it, the deeper work of nation-building.

Why it is not too late?

Yes, the Age of Stupid marches on. Algorithms grow sharper, echo chambers louder, and illusions of consensus harder. Yet human societies are not passive sand dunes. We adapt. We resist. We learn.

Every communication revolution – from the printing press to radio, television and the internet – arrived with both promise and peril. Each time, civilisation found ways, slow and imperfect, to tame the technology through ethics, education, civic norms and institutions worthy of trust.

This challenge weighs especially heavily on the young. It is fashionable to dismiss Gen Y or Gen Z as distracted or shallow. That is unfair. They are not shallow – they are flooded. Before they encounter history, they learn hashtags. Before balanced debate, they absorb polarised monologues. Before real failure, they are sold curated success.

They are urged to “speak their truth”, but rarely taught how to test whether that truth holds water. The tools in their hands are powerful; the guardrails around those tools are weak. If we do not offer maps, we should not be surprised when they struggle to navigate the flood.

We do not need to reject the machine. We need to remind it who is master. Our digital spaces must remain open, porous and self-questioning. Platforms should reward correction, not just reaction. Institutions must earn trust through transparency.

And all of us, including our children, must learn not only how to speak, but how to listen. None of this will be quick or convenient – but civilisation never has been.

So the choice before us is simple. Do we retreat into cynicism and nostalgia, muttering that “kids these days” are doomed? If so, we share that same fate. Or do we take responsibility for the feeds we curate, the voices we amplify, and the institutions we strengthen or weaken?

Start small. Read what unsettles you. Listen to people who irritate you. Ask, often, “What if I am wrong?” Refuse to let your feed become your reality.

Because if we surrender fully to bots, algorithms and convenience, we may not notice until thinking itself becomes optional. And when that happens, what will remain of us?