The art of believing everything you read online: debunking ‘revolutionary’ online theories

Knowledge is a fundamental factor for human progression. It’s a tale as old as time: we learn to live just as we live to learn. So, why now, in an era with unprecedented access to knowledge, does it feel like the ‘homo-idioticus’ is on the rise? Put differently, why are we experiencing a cognitive decline? Still not landing? Fine – why, exactly, is it that we’re getting stupider?

We’re immersed in a relentless, speedy flow of never-ending updates, engineered to make us feel like we’re falling behind, yet the content we’re consuming rarely ever stays with us

Well, the answer, it seems, lies in the creation of a paradox stemming from this influx. With search engines, AI summaries, and next-day delivery at our fingertips, we can summon centuries of wisdom in seconds – yet our capacity to absorb any of it remains limited. We’ve become connoisseurs of shortcuts: skim-readers, headline-hunters, consumers of ChatGPT-style digests. We gather information without ever fully grasping it.

Worse still, this paradox is amplified by the media landscape we’re currently submerged in. Information feels boundless – like a sphere of billions of colliding, fragmented ideas. With each idea, there’s this dominating sense of immediacy. We’re immersed in a relentless, speedy flow of never-ending updates, engineered to make us feel like we’re falling behind, yet the content we’re consuming rarely ever stays with us. It’s overstimulating.

We are not navigating intellectual knowledge but instead drowning in a mass-consumption of conceptual noise – a dizzying blur of truths, half-truths, and outright distortions. It’s like opening a million tiny mental tabs that are never fully processed, nor ever closed. And in this chaos, we’ve blurred the line between information and relevance –not everything is intended for everyone, and that’s perfectly fine. A history student doesn’t need to master advanced econometrics, just as an engineering student has no reason to become an expert in medieval literature. Knowledge has value only when it’s grounded in the right context and aimed at the right audience.

This is where buzzwords are mistaken for theory, and how a single shallow idea can metastasise into an online ‘movement’

But here’s where the real danger begins. The problem emerges when undereducated voices preach to an equally undereducated audience that takes their word as gospel. In an ecosystem built on skimming and regurgitating, misinformation becomes indistinguishable from insight. And suddenly, the loudest person in the room becomes the most ‘credible.’ This is where buzzwords are mistaken for theory, and how a single shallow idea can metastasise into an online ‘movement’.

For example, I thought that the now-infamous Vogue piece, asking the urgent question, “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” would be a perfect place to start. The article exploded online, hailed as some form of groundbreaking sociological revelation, a fresh feminist manifesto for the digital age. But I can’t help but feel that when you peel away the glossy presentation, there is nothing there. No framework, no analysis, no lineage of thought. There appears to be no engagement with the decades of feminist thought that came before it. Just the same recycled vocabulary of social media pseudo-theory: words that shimmer on the surface but evaporate under the slightest analytical pressure.

Take the now-iconic cry: “We need to decentre men.” A catchy slogan, yes, I suppose. A piece of revolutionary feminist theory? Absolutely not.

What does it mean? What is the actual substance of the article? Should women emotionally withdraw from men? Replace them? Renegotiate boundaries? Is the article making a feminist argument or simply dressing a mood in feminist language? It gestures towards theory without understanding the theory it’s gesturing to. And here’s the irony: the notion of decentring men is hardly new. Bell Hooks said this in 1984, just as Simone de Beauvoir said this in 1949, and Virginia Woolf in 1929. The idea has a rich, rigorous, carefully argued history. But in the churn of online discourse, it reappears stripped of nuance – reinvented as an aesthetic framed by shallow imagery and a perfectly curated brand identity. Our cultural conversation is losing its intellectual memory. And that’s the real issue at the heart of all this. It’s not that Vogue published a bad article or that the notion of decentring men is problematic. It’s that millions of people consumed it as if it were a serious intellectual contribution. They took a slogan, mistook it for theory, and never once paused to ask where the idea came from, who developed it, or what it actually means. The piece never cites a single academic, never gestures to the theorists who built the foundations it casually borrows from, never offers substance beyond a regurgitation of feminist-sounding language. And yet this is what so many people are using to form their worldview. We’ve somehow lost the ability, or maybe the patience, to understand any of it.

So yes, maybe the real embarrassment isn’t having a boyfriend. Maybe it’s that a glossy, citation-free column is now what passes for feminist theory and that we’re all nodding along as if it’s profound. The homo-idioticus isn’t just on the rise. It’s going viral.