Memes are a form of file compression

And not all information is compatible with our operating systems

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that it had created a new form of matter and harnessed it in a chip capable of powering quantum computers.

In a 12-minute explainer video, a parade of techies and scientists elaborated: Microsoft is building computers that “can accurately model the laws of nature” and we are now “on the cusp of a quantum age.” What to make of these claims?

The New York Times attempted to explain the news to its readers in a brief article. I love pieces like these because the writer is put into such a terrible position. Editorial policy forces the writer to assume that the audience might not know how regular computers work. And yet their job is to explain quantum mechanics and the invention of an even more magic type of computer. That’s tough work.

How would you expect regular people to make sense of this information? The Times comments section can be revealing for questions like these, especially when you sort by “Reader Picks.”¹ And in this case, the commenters mostly seemed frightened and confused. Lilly from New Hampshire earned a top-ranked comment with a dark rant about Russian and Chinese spies and “enemies” that must be kept away from this powerful new technology:

This is strange, right? Trump and Musk are in the news a lot, but what do they have to do with this story?

Meanwhile, Beldo from Portland argued that Microsoft is playing with dangerous and incomprehensible forces:

The suggestion that we should just stop inventing confusing new things is an impulse anybody can understand. Hey man, let’s slow it down with the magic computers. The regular computer is still giving me hell. I feel that, Beldo.

But, with respect to the final sentence, I’m not sure this is actually a story about corporate monopoly power—it’s not even clear yet if there are viable commercial applications for quantum computers. So, again, this is sort of a confusing take from the Times commenters.

Let’s see what Hobbes from Colorado has to say:

For Hobbes, this story about the funny computer chip is proof that we need to enact immediate measures for population control. What would placing “hard limits on the growth in our population” actually look like? It’s not clear to me, but 532 people agree with Colorado Thanos: it’s time to uninstall Excel and install the chastity belts.

So what is going on here? Why is the Times comments section crashing out?

Here’s my theory: All of us have a sort of ideological operating system that we use to process new information. Most of the time we’re able to neatly fit stories and news into our worldview and file them away properly. Our brains are constantly compressing large amounts of messy information down into smaller sized ideas that connect with the other things we know. If we do this well, we’re able to rearticulate and share these ideas with others—we make memes, in other words.

This is the normal function of comments sections, whether on the Times website, or in Reddit threads, or in the replies on Instagram or TikTok or X: Reading the comments allows regular people to process their own reaction to new information by observing how others have reacted to it. Most of the time, it’s not even necessary for us to go through the somewhat painful effort of thinking through our own response. It’s easier and more practical to scan through the replies and find one that roughly matches up to what we think. If somebody in the comments absolutely nails the response in a concise and well articulated way, that feels like a gift to us. It comes as a relief—doesn’t it?—for another person to say what you’re feeling, without you having to go through the effort to express it yourself. This is why we reward those commenters with likes and upvotes. Thank God, we think. Someone else sees the world the way I do. I’m not crazy. I’m not alone.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this. A common observation about comment sections is that it seems hardly anybody reads the associated articles, and it’s true. Think about how annoying articles are. They’re long and complicated and—if they’re honest—they probably complicate the issue. A good article writer highlights nuances and exceptions and background information and multiple perspectives. Processing all of this is an enormous psychological burden. We don’t have enough time or energy to digest this level of complexity unless it’s for something that’s really important to us. For everything else, we just want to cut to the chase. So we skim the source material and upvote the person whose compression algorithm works most similarly like ours.

But what happens when we encounter information that’s so strange and unusual that it doesn’t fit within our usual framework? What do you mean Microsoft created a new state of matter? How are people supposed to compress that information down? It’s as if our brains have encountered an unfamiliar filetype. We don’t know how to handle it.

When people are unable to compress down information into a usable, sensible form, we default into relating the news into whatever issue looms largest in our minds. This is what we see in comments sections like the Times quantum computer story. Lilly from New Hampshire is worried about Trump and Elon. Beldo is annoyed by the hubris and unchecked power of corporations. Hobbes is concerned about the environment. The world has problems, and in our internal psychodramas, we can easily become obsessed with one big bad problem above all others. We image the ways that issue connects with everything else. This, too, is a form of file compression. If you’re like Hobbes and you’re running “PopulationBombOS,” every issue is downstream from the “too many people on the planet” issue. So you filter and file away new information accordingly. But in doing so, you risk missing most of what’s happening in front of you.

We look at the comments section in part because we want to know what a socially-validated response to the news looks like. But we also want to find a meme that compresses down the real meaning of the story into something that fits in our heads. But in doing so, we risk missing the bigger picture.

This is the beauty and the risk of any idea: they function as compression algorithms that filter your world. Even an idea like memes are a form of file compression can be dangerous. The next time you encounter weird and bizarre comments online, the temptation will be to compress down all the messy chaos of a real human’s attempt at expression into something like: This person is just trying to compress a really big file that’s not compatible with their operating system.

And maybe that’s right. Or maybe it’s missing something.

Zip.

That’s it for this week. I’ll see you next Friday.

1. Basically Reddit mode, with the most upvoted comments shown at the top.