We had never had so much information. We had never been so disoriented.
For a long time, we believed that more information would automatically mean more awareness, more freedom, and more democratic societies. The logic seemed obvious: if people have access to knowledge, they can think better, make better decisions, and better resist manipulation.
But something very different happened.
Today you live surrounded by constant information: endless news, constant content, notifications, opinions, analyses, videos, stimuli, headlines, algorithms, contradictory narratives. And yet, more and more people describe mental exhaustion, an inability to concentrate, diffuse anxiety, difficulty thinking deeply, extreme polarization, a loss of meaning, and an inability to distinguish truth from emotional shock.
We are entering what philosopher Byung-Chul Han (2022) called infocracy: a system where power is no longer exercised primarily through force or censorship, but through information saturation and the capture of attention.
Contemporary domination operates through fragmentation, not prohibition. It is enough for it to break thought into a thousand brief stimuli to neutralize it.
Han's thesis: power no longer controls bodies, it controls attention
Han develops this idea with a precision that deserves further examination. In the classic disciplinary societies described by Michel Foucault, power functioned through visible surveillance, hierarchy, and direct control. The body was the object of control: it was watched, punished, and imprisoned.
Infocracy operates very differently. Han (2022) argues that contemporary power produces constant noise rather than imposing silence. It buries truth under layers of indistinguishable information rather than prohibiting it. It fragments dissent, disperses it, and turns it into just another opinion among thousands of interchangeable ones, rather than suppressing it.
In The Burnout Society (2010), Han had anticipated this movement by describing how the contemporary subject voluntarily self-exploits, convinced that they are acting freely while being directed by invisible imperatives. Infocracy adds another layer: the subject is also exhausted by consuming information, giving opinions, reacting, and being permanently available.
And here emerges one of the most important ideas of our time: information overload rarely generates awareness. Often, it destroys the capacity to have it.
The human brain did not evolve to live in a state of overstimulation.
Cognitive neuroscience has been documenting something fundamental for years: human attention is limited.
The brain does not process infinite information neutrally. It prioritizes threat, novelty, immediate reward, and intense emotional stimuli—exactly the elements that digital platforms exploit.
Modern algorithms are designed to capture and monetize your attention, not to help you better understand reality. And to achieve this, they use deeply neurobiological mechanisms: variable dopaminergic reward, infinite scrolling, constant interruption, emotional polarization, visual overstimulation, and reinforcement of cognitive biases.
The result is a permanently activated nervous system. Your brain ends up living in a state of fragmented alertness. And a fragmented brain loses metacognitive capacity: it loses the ability to observe its own processes, to evaluate them, to correct them.
Johann Hari (2022) accurately documented this phenomenon in Stolen Focus After interviewing more than two hundred experts in attention: the average ability to concentrate in developed societies has fallen significantly in the last two decades, as a systemic effect, rather than as an individual failure.
The fact that changes the conversation: the first generation to score lower than the previous one
In February 2026, neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath testified before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. His testimony was based on a finding unprecedented in the history of modern psychometrics.
Since the 1930s, Western generations had been increasing their scores on cognitive tests at a rate of approximately three points per decade, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. Each generation scored higher than the previous one. Until now.
Generation Z, born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s, is the first to reverse this trend. They score between two and four points lower than millennials on standardized intelligence and cognitive tests. The decline is observed in sustained attention, working memory, reading comprehension, mathematical reasoning, executive function, and problem-solving skills. The phenomenon has been documented in studies in the United States and Europe, and is replicated in more than 80 countries, according to Horvath.
The additional data is consistent with this reading. Microsoft estimates that the average attention span of Gen Z is 8 seconds, compared to 12 seconds for millennials. PISA 2022 showed that students with more than five to seven hours of daily recreational screen time consistently score worse on academic assessments. Oxford chose brain rot as word of the year 2024, with an increase in the use of the term from 230% over twelve months. Denmark announced in February 2025 a total ban on mobile phones in primary schools for the 2026-2027 school year.
What's happening isn't ideology. It's policy. And the policy points in a direction that should be taken seriously: what a century built cognitively seems to be eroding in a single generation.
Horvath was careful in his testimony. He doesn't claim that Gen Z is biologically less intelligent. He claims that the cognitive conditions in which that generation has developed—screen-mediated education, fragmented content, scattered attention, reading replaced by scrolling—produce worse measurable cognitive results than those of previous generations. Intelligence depends on both innate ability and use. And that use is atrophying.
Information democracy slowly destroys the ability to think
Thinking requires time, cognitive silence, attentional continuity, emotional regulation, and the ability to sustain complexity and ambiguity.
The current digital ecosystem is designed in precisely the opposite way. Everything pushes toward immediate reaction, rapid outrage, extreme simplification, compulsive consumption, and instant emotionality. The consequence is psychological, political, and civilizational all at once. A society incapable of deep thought becomes extremely easily manipulated.
Han (2022) puts it bluntly: informationocracy produces subjects who believe they are informed precisely because they are misinformed. The sheer quantity of data creates the illusion of understanding. But understanding requires integration, prioritization, comparison, and time. Without these processes, information accumulates as noise, without transforming into knowledge.
Emotion is gradually replacing truth
Here another central feature of infocracy emerges: truth loses importance compared to emotional impact.
The information that circulates most is that which triggers fear, generates outrage, provokes reaction, produces dopamine, polarizes, and simplifies. Algorithms quickly learn which emotions keep users engaged and end up reorganizing public space around constant emotional stimuli.
An overactive nervous system loses its critical capacity. When the body is constantly stimulated, prefrontal regulation decreases, impulsivity increases, binary thinking intensifies, and tolerance for complexity declines. The perception of reality becomes organized around reaction, rather than reflection.
Manipulation no longer requires coercion
One of the most disturbing aspects of infocracy is that people believe they are acting freely while they are being continually guided by invisible systems of behavioral capture.
Here, Han's theses converge with those of Shoshana Zuboff (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff documented how surveillance capitalism monetizes behavioral data to predict and modify human behavior. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman (1988) had explained decades earlier, in Manufacturing Consent, how media systems shape perception and consensus.
The difference is that today the process is much more intimate, personalized, and neurobiologically precise. Contemporary manipulation operates directly on attention, emotion, impulses, cognitive biases, and physiological states. It functions below the threshold of consciousness, without the need for a visible ideology.
The population no longer needs to be coerced. It is enough to keep them distracted, exhausted, and emotionally reactive.
The collective dysregulation of the nervous system
The problem is no longer just individual. We are witnessing a large-scale collective deregulation.
Current environments produce chronic sympathetic hyperactivation, diffuse anxiety, cognitive exhaustion, loss of sustained attention, inability to rest mentally, sleep impairment, and constant emotional fatigue.
The human organism needs pauses to integrate experience. Information overload continually destroys those pauses. And without integration, there is no deep thought. Only reaction.
Perhaps one of the most profound damages is this: many people have lost touch with their own inner selves. Every free second is automatically filled with screens, audio, content, information, distraction. But consciousness needs silence. Creativity needs emptiness. Emotional regulation needs pauses.
Without those internal spaces for slowing down, human beings progressively lose clarity, intuition, deep perception, and the capacity for self-observation. And then something very serious happens: identity begins to be constructed from constant external stimuli.
Modern resistance is neurobiological
In the face of informationocracy, resistance is today a neurophysiological as well as an ideological issue.
Regaining the capacity to think requires protecting attention, the nervous system, sleep, mental silence, concentration, and emotional regulation. An exhausted brain cannot think critically. An overstimulated nervous system cannot sustain complexity. A fragmented mind compulsively seeks immediate relief, while the truth remains elusive.
True contemporary freedom today consists of preserving the ability to think autonomously amidst the constant noise, beyond simply being able to express oneself.
And that demands something radical in our time: to slow down. To regain sustained attention. To return to the body. To reclaim depth. To tolerate silence. To hold complexity without reacting immediately.
Information democracy dissolves consciousness through excess, without the need for prohibition. And perhaps the most revolutionary act of the present is precisely this: to inhabit once again a mind that still belongs to you.
Sources and references
Han, BC. (2022). Infokratie: Digitalisierung und die Krise der Demokratie. Matthes & Seitz. PhD in philosophy, professor at the Berlin University of the Arts.
Han, BC. (2010). Müdigkeitsgesellschaft (The Burnout Society). Matthes & Seitz.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs. PhD, Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School, Sociologist.
Chomsky, N. & Herman, E. (1988). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books. PhD in linguistics, professor emeritus at MIT (Chomsky).
Postman, N. (1985). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Viking. Cultural critic, professor at New York University.
Hari, J. (2022). Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again. Crown. Journalist and author.
Horvath, JC (2026). Testimony before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on cognitive development and educational technology. PhD, neuroscientist and educator.
Bratsberg, B. & Rogeberg, O. (2018). Flynn effect and its reversal are both environmentally caused. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 115(26), 6674-6678.
Pietschnig, J. & Oberleiter, S. (2024). Inconsistent Flynn effect patterns may be due to a decreasing positive manifold. Intelligence, ScienceDirect.