Alert! New forms of diabetes on the rise

Even as GLP-1s seem to be a useful response - if not a “cure” - for type-2 diabetes, I wonder about two other, newer forms of diabetes that I keep encountering: information diabetes and money diabete$. I’ll take them in turn, but all three forms have a common underlying cause: the substitution of real things with processed, artificial versions. Whole foods are replaced with ultra-processed packaged stuff. Human connection is supplanted by internet-/AI-mediated people and information. Value is neglected in favor of money and wealth. Their artificiality disturbs our metabolism, making it difficult or impossible to process or manage the real versions: healthy food, genuine information and human connections, and the satisfaction you get from true value - other people in real life, nature, and just the general joys of life, such as getting in the pool and teaching your kid to swim.

Information diabetes

Information diabetes is about the information we receive and ideally how we “process” or digest it. We do not - or should not - simply “consume” it. So often it comes to us in “feeds” or streams; we don’t choose it. It simply grabs our attention and then diverts it to advertising or to marketing-driven messages: “You aren’t as pretty or as healthy as the rest of them, but if you just wore this garment or consumed this supplement we happen to have a link to… you could be.” Information, like food, needs to be absorbed and incorporated into your system. You can’t just stick good information into your brain; you need to insert it into what you know, and perhaps even change what you “know” in response to that new information. Once you discover, for example, how much an advertiser pays to provide you all this free content, you begin to understand what they are buying: not just your attention, but your ability to make up your own mind.

Ultra-processed information is designed to make you react, not think. It’s a trigger for emotion rather than a prompt for learning, reducing your “information metabolism” and interfering with your ability to build up your own understanding of our incredibly complex world and the people in it.

The way we teach children to learn contributes to the effects of information diabetes. All the talk about “cheating” in school or college is sadly mis-directed; the cheating harms the students themselves. They are responding to a system that mostly tests what they have memorized instead of seeing how well they can incorporate and make use of new knowledge. Learning is a recursive process, not a transfer of consumable, memorizable content.

Likewise damaging but in a different way, there are the artificial humans (often “influencers”) that we encounter more and more online. Social media has encouraged people to create ultra-processed versions of themselves: prettier (according to some weird metrics lately), happier, more successful, surrounded by happy babies or signs of carefree wealth… LinkedIn posts of humble gratitude have become a thing [no, auto-correct, NOT “of the past”!].

Then there are the genuinely fake, AI-enabled sycophantic bots, which almost always tell you how great you are and how well you are doing…unless you ask for criticism, which may cause you to retreat in shame or shrink into psychosis in extreme cases. Social media and sycobots seek out the vulnerable, but they also create vulnerability in otherwise healthy minds - deceptively promising a “safe space” where there are no obstacles to overcome, so that any minor obstacle becomes a world-shattering event.

Money diabete$

And finally, money diabete$. We live in a world where, to quote Oscar Wilde (in Lady Windermere’s Fan, 1892), people “know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” So often, we price what we should value. The stock market is no longer a place to invest in value-creating companies, but increasingly a place to gamble and to leverage various forms of hedging combined with tax avoidance. Instead of appreciating the community-strengthening value of cheering for our local sports team, we bet on the outcomes of games or a particular player’s performance. Or, more recently, we bet on acts of war, assassinations and the like. For many, this gambling can lead to de facto addiction and the loss of much more than money - a job, health and family connections.

Beyond this sort of gambling, we have a more personal form of money diabete$, where people make money doing things they know are harmful to others - whether sucking up to a politician they once despised, or working for Facebook/Instagram knowing that they are addicting children: “We’re basically pushers.” Yes, people can hide it from themselves for a while, but money diabete$ - collecting money by doing harm - erodes the moral metabolism. This affects workers, many of whom need the money for their own families, and bosses, who may not need but want the money because they have been taught to value themselves for their wealth and their status, not for their kindness or sheer human goodness. They can ignore it for a while, but eventually (I hope!) it catches up with most of them, and they realize all that money has brought them little of true value.

Addressing contagion

Now, what can I say to cheer you up? The first step of change is for us to pay attention to these problems. My voice here is not alone. People are beginning to notice and take action - with lawsuits, cell phone bans, and the like. Everywhere there are startups that at least claim to want to help - and that need investors and board members and staff who will fight against the moral erosion of money diabete$. Parents are beginning to recognize what slop, social media, and bots are doing to their children - and to realize that they are not alone.

The trick will be to find a solution that does not create a new sort of problem. Type-2 diabetes may be treated with GLP-1s, but there are still questions about how much they create a new dependency vs. help the body to adjust itself. For what percentage of the population do they actually work? And what are the good or bad side effects? For better or worse, GLP-1s don’t just pour a missing substance - insulin - into the body, but rather prod various receptors in the gut, brain, and pancreas to adjust themselves. We have also seen negative side effects in society more broadly, including increasing obsession with “perfection” through cosmetic surgery, the return of skeletal “heroin chic,” and all kinds of “looksmaxxing.”

As for the other forms of diabetes (along with COVID, cyclospora and the like), we need to get a better understanding of how these diseases are spread. It’s pretty easy to blame information diabetes on smartphones and the social media they enable. There are statistics showing pretty strong causation, not just correlation: smart phones first, country by country, demographic by demographic, and then a rise in various kinds of mental distress. There is also a recent study on brain rot from short-form videos, using MRI data as well as human observations.

All three kinds of diabetes have the same root cause: parasites. More specifically, it’s parasitic people, driven by business models that are less about trying to harm us and more about keeping us alive so that they can keep living off us. A marketing MBA would call that “customer retention.”

Here’s the challenge: It’s our culture, stupid! The underlying fallacy of our obsession with the quantification of everything - test scores, stats from our wearable trackers, number of online fans or friends or followers, the GDP (which counts both good and harmful revenues), lifespan, and of course money and wealth - is that if something is good, you can never get enough. That’s actually a hallucination: Enough is enough. In reality, life is full of trade-offs between things that cannot easily be measured or compared. We need to understand that money shouldn’t control us, and laws can only go so far; so much of the parasitic behavior I describe above is not against the law - though some of it could and should be. We need norms and morals as well. Human values matter, even as more and more of the world is focusing on what we can count or define in a courtroom.

In a truly free society, people understand the accountability that freedom imposes on them. So where to go? It’s time to start talking to school boards, politicians, investors, and voters to help them see the reality of what we are doing to ourselves. We need a movement and a culture shift, not just committees and laws. Those who genuinely do not have enough - those with low wages or no jobs at all - need help to sustain themselves. Meanwhile, those with too much need to share back not just with money but with work to achieve system change…and if you think I’m talking about you and about myself, well, maybe I am. It’s up to us to think more long-term and more concretely about the world we want to live in.