People seem so pleased with their cleverness now, and I think that’s a mistake. We shouldn’t be proud. We should be deeply ashamed. All of us. Stop building statues. Stop carving faces into mountains. Leave the fucking mountains alone. 

I’m sure we’re smarter now than ever before, though at the same time it seems a more shallow intelligence. We are far too entertained, all binge and no purge, and there are an awful lot of bright people focused on very silly things. Want more clicks on Twitter? Now that’s a kale-turkey chopped salad! Chrissy Teigen is a social media genius! If that’s the cost of everything being so decentralized, it’s likely a worthwhile one. But, still…

From Douglas Coupland in the Financial Times:

Today I wondered, “If the internet had an IQ, what would it be?” And so I made a guess: 4,270 — a four-digit IQ. Yes, I know the internet is just a tool and not a sentient being. But one can dream. …

I think people are smarter now than they were in, say, 1995. I’ve touched on this before: we all feel stupider yet I think if we were to compare IQs from then and from 2015, we’d find that our new standard IQ is more like 103. People time-travelling from 1995 to 2015 would probably speak with us for a few minutes and then quietly excuse themselves and go meet in the kitchen and wonder what drug we’re on. “They have no attention span, and the moment you tell them even the slightest fib, they reach into their pockets, pull out a piece of glass, dapple their fingers over it and then look up at you and tell you that your fib was a fib. What kind of way is that to live life?”•