The Noise Machine
Inside the incentive structure that keeps the internet loud, shallow, and endlessly distracted
Some days, it feels as if the internet is yelling.
Not at you, exactly.
Around you. Past you. Through you.
Every scroll is a new demand:
Watch this. React to that. Click here. Care about this, urgently, for the next twelve seconds.
We blame people.
People are shallow.
People have short attention spans.
People just want drama.
It’s a comforting story because it quietly excuses the system.
But the noise isn’t a personality defect. It’s architecture.
The internet is doing exactly what it was built and paid to do.
Treat this as a content problem and you stay exhausted.
Treat it as an incentive problem and the shape of the thing comes into view.
This isn’t a list of tips for managing your feed.
It’s an X-ray of the machine that manufactures the noise in the first place.
1. Cheap to speak, costly to listen
Imagine a town square where anyone can install a megaphone for free.
You pay nothing to shout.
Everyone else pays with their hearing.
That is the modern internet.
Publishing is almost free. Sending is cheap. Broadcasting is trivial.
The cost has shifted from the speaker to the listener.
Time, attention, and cognitive load are the new taxes, and they are paid almost entirely by the audience.
Noise flourishes inside that imbalance.
If it costs you nothing meaningful to push something into the world—no money, no reputation, no real risk—then the default is more.
More posts. More launches. More “might as well.”
We talk about the “content explosion,” as if content were weather.
What we rarely say is: there are almost no consequences for wasting someone’s attention.
If speaking carried a real cost, people would think twice.
If wasting attention carried a penalty, people would design differently.
Until then, the cheapest move will always be to keep talking.
2. Disposable identity, disposable responsibility
Noise loves a fresh start.
New handle. New domain. New page. Same behavior.
When identity is disposable, so is accountability.
On most platforms, your name is a costume. You can swap it, duplicate it, abandon it.
You can rebuild from scratch after you’ve burned trust somewhere else.
The system doesn’t remember you; it only remembers the account.
So every platform must re-learn who you are, from zero.
Every community has to re-discover whether you’re worth listening to.
That constant re-learning is not neutral. It is noisy.
The alternative is uncomfortable but essential:
Identity that sticks, even if it is pseudonymous rather than public.
Reputation that accumulates across contexts, not only within one app.
If your standing could burn when you mislead, spam, or exploit, you’d treat other people’s attention differently.
If high-signal contribution built durable credibility that followed you, you’d treat your own voice differently.
Without meaningful identity and reputation, every room is full of strangers who may or may not be who they say they are.
And strangers shouting is another name for noise.
3. Engagement is the wrong scoreboard
If you want to understand a system, watch what it celebrates.
Most feeds today celebrate one thing: engagement.
Clicks.
Watch time.
Comments.
Shares.
Outrage.
The machine does not ask, “Was this true?”
It asks, “Did this keep you here?”
Outrage is cheap.
Novelty is cheap.
Confusion is cheap.
Thoughtful change is expensive—expensive to create and expensive to measure.
So it loses.
A ranking system tuned for engagement will amplify whatever hooks the nervous system quickest.
That doesn’t always mean cat videos.
It can just as easily mean moral panic, conspiracy threads, or performative conflict.
What would a different scoreboard look like?
Imagine feeds tuned for:
Better downstream decisions: Did this information help someone choose more wisely?
Correction of error: Did it revise a false belief?
Sustained satisfaction: Are people still glad they saw it a week later?
Those are awkward metrics.
They require time, reflection, and explicit feedback loops.
Clicks are simpler.
So we count clicks.
And the noise machine keeps spinning.
4. Feeds that serve the platform, not the person
Most of what you see online is curated for someone else’s goals.
Keep you on the site.
Show you more ads.
Guide you toward behaviors that matter to the business model.
You can mute, block, unfollow, and fine-tune settings, but those are small knobs on a large engine you do not own.
You have a mission. Build something that matters. Protect what you love. Learn what you need next.
Your feed, however, is not aligned with that mission.
It is aligned with one metric: “don’t leave.”
Now imagine you had an agent—software, yes, but loyal to you.
Not a glossy “assistant” that still optimizes for the platform’s revenue.
A quiet filter that knows what you are working on, what you are trying to protect, what you have already learned, and what you have no bandwidth for right now.
It would ingest the firehose and then decide:
This you need.
This can wait.
This you never need to see.
Your internet would become a workshop bench, not a casino floor.
Technically, we are close to this.
Strategically, we are far, because an internet filtered for your goals is less profitable than an internet optimized for your compulsion.
The question is not, “Can we build it?”
The question is, “Who controls the filter?”
If the answer is “not you,” expect the noise to continue.
5. One big shouting room vs. many small intentional rooms
There’s a reason most meaningful conversations don’t happen on the global stage.
You don’t attempt family reconciliation in the middle of a stadium.
You don’t design thoughtful policy by yelling across a highway.
You choose a room.
You define who is invited.
You agree on why you are there.
The internet scaled the opposite model: one big shouting room.
Everybody can talk, at once, in front of everyone else.
The rules are vague. No one is really in charge.
Of course it is noisy.
Well-run communities—online and offline—look nothing like this.
They are purpose-bound:
We’re here to learn this.
We’re here to build that.
We’re here to care for these people.
They are membership-bound:
Not everyone belongs here. That’s not cruelty; that’s clarity.
And they are norm-enforced:
There is a real cost for low-signal behavior.
You can’t spam, derail, or inflame without consequence.
Your right to speak is tied to how you use that right.
We already know this architecture works.
High-trust forums, professional circles, long-running communities have been doing it for years.
What we haven’t done is scale this architecture.
We scaled the open shouting instead.
If we want less noise, we don’t need more inspirational posts about kindness.
We need more rooms with doors, thresholds, and stewards.
6. Evidence as infrastructure, not decoration
Noise is not just volume. It is also weightlessness.
Claims float past without anchors:
“This is what the research says.”
“Experts agree.”
“This has been proven.”
Often, there is no link.
If there is, it’s broken, circular, or opaque.
Nothing in the system insists on more.
The platform doesn’t ask, “Where did this come from?”
It asks, “Will anyone respond to it?”
Imagine an internet where evidence isn’t a flourish at the end but part of the rails underneath.
If you made a factual claim, you would attach:
A source.
A dataset.
A trail that could be checked, by humans or by machines.
Ranking systems could then give preference to content that carries its own verification scaffolding.
Unsupported assertions would still exist, but they wouldn’t be privileged by default.
Would this erase misinformation? Of course not.
But the baseline would change.
The starting assumption would shift from “everything is equally weightless” to “claims with structure travel differently than claims without it.”
Right now, the effort required to verify something is far higher than the effort required to say it.
That discrepancy is fertile ground for noise.
When evidence becomes infrastructure instead of decoration, the balance starts to move.
7. When discovery and persuasion are tangled together
There is one more twist in the noise machine: the way we’ve braided discovery and persuasion into the same feed.
You search for information and are offered ads.
You browse social updates and are offered campaigns.
You click a recommendation and discover it was a funnel.
None of this is accidental. It is how the system is paid for.
But it has a side effect: you don’t know, in real time, whether you are being informed or steered.
Noise thrives in that ambiguity.
If discovery layers—search, reference, recommendation—were clearly separated from persuasion layers, you would know what game you are in.
Here is where you look for facts.
Here is where people try to sell you something.
Both can exist.
Both can be useful.
But they are not pretending to be each other.
This would require clear labeling in the design, not 6-point gray text at the bottom of the box.
It would require audited ranking systems and hard rules about what can and cannot be blended.
We already do this, imperfectly, in older media.
You walk into a library and know which shelves are reference, which are fiction, which are sponsored displays.
You open a newspaper and, at least in theory, can distinguish reporting from opinion and advertising.
The internet, in contrast, has collapsed these categories into one blended stream where motive is blurred.
If signal and persuasion had to stand in separate lines, the volume would drop—not because there are fewer messages, but because there is more honesty about what those messages are for.
What do we do while the machine keeps running?
It’s tempting to read all of this and reach for coping strategies.
Turn off notifications.
Take a digital detox.
Curate your sources more carefully.
None of that is wrong.
It is simply incomplete.
Those moves are like wearing noise-cancelling headphones in a city that keeps installing more sirens.
The deeper work is to see the structure and then make different choices inside it.
You can treat your own publishing as if attention carries a real price, even when the platform doesn’t charge you.
You can choose rooms over feeds whenever the work or the relationship actually matters.
You can reward evidence in what you share, not just what feels right in the moment.
You can keep asking, each time you click, “Is this trying to inform me or move me?” and “Do I consent to that?”
None of these choices will rewire the commercial internet this year.
But they will begin to rewire something closer: your participation.
The noise machine isn’t disappearing.
There is too much money riding on its current settings.
But systems begin to shift when enough people stop pretending they are neutral.
The internet is not loud by accident.
It is loud because volume is profitable, responsibility is cheap, and the architecture rewards the fastest reaction, not the deepest response.
We won’t fix that by shouting above the noise with “better content.”
We begin to fix it by designing, joining, and protecting the kinds of spaces, tools, and agreements where wasting attention is finally expensive—and adding real signal is remembered, not just briefly rewarded.
If you’re building quieter rooms
If this piece gave you words for something you’ve been feeling online, don’t let it stay abstract.
Start small:
Name one “room” you want to protect—your team, your classroom, your community, your own mind.
Decide one new rule for how attention will be treated there.
Share that rule with the people who share the room with you.
If you want more explorations like this—about systems, incentives, and the unseen architecture behind everyday life—subscribe to Deep Thoughts and forward this article to the one person you know who is secretly tired of the noise but still trying to do meaningful work inside it.
And if you’re at the point where you don’t just want language for the problem but partnership in building a different kind of room—online or on the ground—reach out to me at Connect@MasterCoachA.com to explore what moving forward could look like for you, your team, or your ecosystem.
We gain clarity and wisdom not from learning more but from minimizing noise.
Protect your brain, be in a ThirdPlace.
Thank you, Master Coach A.
Thank you for this Master Coach A. I agree that the internet becomes more and more noisy everyday not by accident but because they earn from it. And we have to protect intentionally our space and do the deeper works to make a difference.