Welcome to the Internet. Here is a raccoon learning to play jazz on a cute little piano. Here is a hot debate about whether Italians are white. A self-proclaimed business guru is giving you the secret to effective communication (shocker, it’s kindness). A Real Housewives meme. A truckload of political rage. Was the dress blue and black or white and golden? Here is a one-hour YouTube video analysis. What sort of a hand gesture did he make, after all? Here is a two-hour YouTube video analysis. An insurance commercial. Here is a talking dog followed by an unhinged tweet from an elected official. Here is a clean girl morning routine.
Global Village On Fire
The internet is a trainwreck that deeply troubles and constantly entertains us, the global village on fire. A thing so new yet predicted into existence by a Canadian philosopher and a sociologist H.M. McLuhan, way before the US Army was able to connect two computers and create Web1.0. In the 1960s, McLuhan wrote two fundamental books on the theory of communication, “The Gutenberg Galaxy” and “Understanding Media” that fundamentally reshaped and re-described what it means to be a human on earth.
“After more than a century of electric technology, he said, we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village with insatiable tastes for gossip, rumour, and personal malice.”
McLuhan also pointed out that the global village does not necessarily lead to harmony; instead, it can result in “maximal disagreement on all points” due to the close proximity of diverse views. “Where everything affects everyone all the time,” he said, “Terror is the normal state of the society”.
TLDR; We live in a global village, and it makes us unhinged.
But within this cacophony of doomscrolling, there are still pockets of pure, absurd, chaotic joy—places where the human mind, completely untethered, just floats into the code-powered void, finds beautiful connectivity with the world, and poses the dumbest, yet most freeing questions.
There is an Instagram account “A View From A Bridge” that records people sharing their views while standing on the bridge. There’s a rural Chinese family that teaches us how to cook on an open fire. Someone just rates dogs (all good boys and girls). It’s the Internet where people engage in public service by creating serious conversations around politics, pop culture, and books. People organize on the Internet, and although this practice is mostly toothless and often takes away from real action, it’s an inevitable first step towards significant changes.
For me, one of the most fascinating consequences of building a global village is a peculiar little subreddit: r/StonerThoughts. Here, the Internet grants universal access to something that was once either a private or a limited phenomenon, born in the haze of curiosity, unbothered by academic rigor and delightful in its simplicity; a thing that shaped our civilizations and gave a start to everything we know about how our societies are structured: philosophy.
Who Even Gets To Think?
Is this a good time to mention my grandfather was a PhD in philosophy? A Doctor of Philosophy in philosophy, that’s right. His whole life, he taught the subject to STEM students: engineers, math theorists, and nuclear physicists. The type of young folk who are either way too into the abstract questions about our reality or couldn’t give less shits. More of the second. Every mathematician would tell you that math is the queen of science, every chemist would argue that the atom is the foundation of our existence, and every quantum physicist would laugh in their faces. My grandfather, though, would say: “Right, and whatcha gonna do with all that knowledge? Are we the type that builds deadly weapons, or are we the guys who develop cancer treatments? Shouldn’t we find out?”
Because of this fundamental positioning, philosophy isn’t scholarly by nature; instead, it is relevant, close to the nerve, and performed by anyone who bothers. Shop mechanics and coin collectors, elementary school teachers and birdwatchers, construction workers and goths are the people who make up the bulk of thought from which philosophy is born. Everyone who has access to any platform can create philosophy. It was always the way, and it is the way still, just go to r/StonerThoughts to clock that.
With 142K users, this subreddit captures the many thoughts that drift through our minds when we’re a little—or a lot—stoned, letting our brains just do the thing. If you pop on there, you’ll see a string of strangers sharing their wonderful minds with each other:
“No wonder Bob Ross spoke in hushed tones, there is a sacredness to making and partaking in creation.”
“It’s so weird knowing you existed before you remember you did.”
“Doing pushups is like bench pressing the earth.”
All hot takes, in a way, and the threads are lively. As lively as the places where philosophy historically happened.
What Is Love, And Who Got The Best Abs?
It’s easy to imagine philosophy as a horribly dull affair. True, it is an ongoing dialogue between some opinion-having, vibe-murdering “well-actually” type of guys. But it’s also a process that is a little different from what happens at your local get-together spot.
Let’s look at the classics: the ancient Greeks. Sure, they wore robes and said things like “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” They also were petty, chaotic, deeply normal people, tipsy on diluted wine. They didn’t smoke cannabis per se, but let’s not pretend that they wouldn’t if given the opportunity: we are talking about people who argued whether love was a ladder or a God. Perhaps, if they did smoke cannabis, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are currently in.
Ancient Greeks gathered in various settings, often in a public place (like Stoics who hung out at stoas, kind of covered public walkways, or porches with no houses to attach to), and shared their ideas about virtue and morality until a rowdy townie showed up and yelled, “Yeah? What if I punch you in the face right now? Would that be virtuous?” which totally changed the vibe.
Even the more formal gatherings—symposiums—were just wine-fueled salons for the elite to relax and bounce ideas off each other. “Symposium” as a Greek word literally means “to drink together”. Plato, Socrates, Xenophon, and other rockstars of ancient Greek philosophy, a foundation of Modern Western civilization values and ways, were avid symposium-goers and recorded the topics of discussions in great detail.
In Plato’s Symposium, they try to keep it classy for a while by debating the nature of love and desire, but inevitably, someone named Alcibiades gets a little too excited and starts shouting about how sexy Socrates is.
In Xenophon’s Symposium (also called The Banquet, which is telling), they covered a variety of topics: whether money is moral, whether beauty is objective, who had the best abs in town, and other intellectual pursuits. There were dancers. There were courtesans. There were donkeys eating figs. According to the legend, one of the goers, Chrysippus, laughed himself to death at his own punchline.
So, philosophy isn’t and never was purely the endeavor for old men doing old men stuff. Philosophy is honest, messy, social, deeply human, even necessary. It’s the execution of free speech.
Free Speech Is The Right To Wander
These days, there is no porch with columns where everyone you’ve ever met meets to discuss what justice actually means and whether existence is a mistake. We see each other less; we don’t know much about each other. Our collective spaces are being invaded by hustlers and political pundits, controlled by an algorithmic code, and although we are overstimulated, even dinner parties are somehow dull now.
Free speech—the right to wonder out loud in good faith—is targeted, and the spaces where we can exercise it are shrinking, all while we can’t even define what free speech is because we don’t talk about it enough. We’re self-censoring. We’re curating. We’re deplatforming. We are second-guessing our impulses to share and connect. It’s a mess. A McLuhanian nightmare, if I may.
We don’t know how to stop this, but the result is that even the most basic, beautiful form of human connection—curiosity—is moving towards the fringes. Yet, there are places where it is okay to reveal yourself to the public, like r/StonerThoughts. In my recent memory, it is the only somewhat massive Internet gathering where people talk politics without being politicized, share their experiences without being dismissed, theorizing without being put in their place. You can post the dumbest thing that ever came to your mind, and get thoughtful people to have a discussion. You can post the most profound idea that ever occurred to you, and you’ll get genuine involvement from strangers.
We should cherish those moments of uninhibited clarity and connectivity. You know what moments I am talking about. Everyone on r/StonerThoughts knows. You have a little edible and all of a sudden the skin on your hands, draped in those little threads, is the most mysterious thing you’ve ever seen, a complex piece of art, and now you are interested in how it came to be, and you want to talk about it. That sensation—that curiosity cleared from ego or performance—is philosophy. You’re doing it.
