Losing the Compass in a Storm of Digital Noise

Zombie apocalypse movies aren’t science fiction. They’re documentaries.

Executive function is the prefrontal cortex’s ability to steer you between the rocks of impulse and distraction, and stay on course. At any moment, your environment floods you with stimuli: raw sights, sounds, smells, micro-choices. Your deep brain scans these inputs, decides relevance, and categorizes them for you. You may notice this low hum of stimuli in the periphery, but can stay on course in your present activity. 

Executive function draws on a set of integrated skills: working memory, inhibition, time management, and more. Together, they form your internal structure for filtering, focusing, planning, and executing. This system is essential to your well-being and success.

Yet our current socio-economic systems are designed to hijack that very function to control attention and sell it to the highest bidder. The results are profound. But the antagonist is not technology. Tech is merely the tool. The problem is how, and for whom, it’s being used.

For example, look at any chat program. Your inbox likely holds messages from loved ones, colleagues, and advertisers, all stacked together with equal weight. There’s no filter. You have to prioritize in real time – and hold those categories in mind indefinitely. The tech deliberately doesn’t help you, like your brain does for sensory input. There’s only off and on, no channels. You either try to remember to respond to certain messages at the right time or be distracted in the moment.

The makers of these chats aren’t interested in creating channels as they know you’d put ads and business messages, crucial to their business model, in a digital drawer that you’d rarely, if ever, check. They need the flood of messages to stay as is.

Chat tech, instead of enhancing communication, has crushed it. Consequently, our communication, even to those we love, tends to be transactional and logistical; we don’t have the bandwidth to even authentically check in.

The joy of communication has been replaced with ambient dread.

Rather than talking to each other, it is common to send memes or links. These would be fine if we actually also had conversations. The consequences mean that we have fewer and fewer meaningful conversations in exchange for being “on call.” It’s even affecting our conversations in person. Without realizing it, we’ve become more connected to our devices than to each other. It didn’t happen suddenly, but through a slow drift into crowded, noisy isolation.

Recently, a friend was telling me how as she got older, she found that jet lag hit her harder. I said that I don’t think it’s actually a result of age. Exhaustion is a refrain I hear from everyone, even the young.

We live in a time of chronic overstimulation. What passes for normal is low-grade anxiety born of over-connectedness. We miss professional opportunities as they are lost in a storm of useless ads, but worse, we’ve lost connection with our loved ones and ourselves.

And it’s not just adults. Students, too, are being trained out of the very functions they most need to build. The world that should scaffold their cognitive development now scatters it instead. 

For the neurodivergent this isn’t just a storm. It’s a digital hurricane. What for others is disorienting, for us can be a hellscape. We are expected to self-navigate in systems actively working against us.

We’re trading the cognitive compass of executive function for technologies “optimized” not for human well-being, but for the gains of a privileged few. 

With higher functions hijacked, our brains are being eaten.

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It doesn’t have to be this way.
The ones who built this system aren’t masterminds — they’re mediocre opportunists.

You’re probably smarter than they are.

You don’t have to surrender your cognitive agency to their small-minded economy.

You can undo what they’ve built.
Return their zombie apocalypse and economy to where it belongs: B movies.