THIS writeup lingered on my computer like an unfinished conversation.
After much reading and discernment, I share it not as instruction, but as reflection – not the voice of a communication expert, but of a field man turned observer, guided by common sense, lived experience and a growing unease about how we now speak, listen and misunderstand.
And I ask, not without discomfort: when common sense began to retreat, did stupidity quietly take its place?
When I was a student at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, I had close friends in mass communication – komunikasi massa, as we called it then.
I was a science student, happy among test tubes and plant tissues, and barely understood that communicating with the many could be a formal discipline.
Yet, I was quietly amazed by what they studied – media theory, persuasion, audience psychology. I often joked that I had taken a wrong turn at the faculty junction.
Looking back, I’m certain what they learnt in the late 1980s would be almost unrecognisable today. Technology has rewritten the entire playbook.
That unease deepened when my son handed me George Orwell’s 1984. I knew the book –Big Brother, the Thought Police, the rewriting of truth – but it took my son to finally make me read it.
By the third chapter, I realised it was no relic. What chilled me was not brute violence, but how truth itself could be edited, questioned and forgotten.
When I finished, I told him, “This isn’t about the future. It’s about us today.”
Orwell’s world collapsed not because people were stupid, but because they lost the habit of questioning.
In handing me that book, my son handed me a mirror.
The monk and the press
Picture a medieval monk in a dusty scriptorium, quill scratching against vellum by candlelight. For centuries, such monks were custodians of truth, knowledge and memory. Their monopoly was not of armies or gold, but of ideas.
Then came the printing press. With movable type, that monopoly collapsed.
Ideas escaped cloisters and flooded marketplaces and salons.
With print came literacy, dissent and debate. Authority shifted from pulpits to pages.
Power was no longer tied to the scarcity of information.
People could read, argue, question kings and form movements. The monk did not grow less intelligent, the public simply gained access.
Radio, television and mass newspapers inherited that power. It was imperfect and sometimes manipulated, yet it created something invaluable: a shared public reality.
At eight o’clock, a nation watched the same news on RTM or TV3. At dawn, it read the same headlines. We argued over interpretation, but the facts lived in the same room.
Today, that room has fractured into millions of private cubicles.
From deity to expert to celebrity to ‘me’
Across history, the trusted messenger kept changing form.
Once it was priests and shamans. Then experts and scientists. Then celebrities. Social media completed the final transfer: the messenger became “me”.
Trust shifted from institutions to individuals. “I trust people like me.” “I trust those who share my fears and my anger.” Everyone became a micro-broadcaster. At first, it felt empowering. Who doesn’t want a voice?
Yet, when trust becomes fully personalised, institutions become disposable, shared narratives thin, and social contracts weaken. The problem is not that we trust ourselves. The problem is that we trust only ourselves, and those who sound like us.
From broadcast to mass self-communication
For much of the 20th century, media was centralised. A handful of newspapers, radio stations and TV channels shaped national conversations and a collective “us”.
Then the needle skipped. Digital networks turned everyone into a publisher. Communication became many-to-many, peer-to-peer – what scholars call “mass self-communication”.
A post from a kampung in Sabah can now travel as far as a speech from Washington. Planters, politicians, influencers and students all share the same megaphone. The promise was breathtaking.
But revolutions rarely come with warning labels. Editors and ombudsmen were replaced by algorithms.
These are automated rules that decide what you see online based on your behaviour and engagement. Judgement was replaced by code. The gatekeeper did not vanish – it became invisible.
Echo chambers and perfected ignorance
The most powerful invention of social media was not the “share” button. It was the filter.
Every like trains the algorithm. Every click sharpens your digital profile. Soon, you are not browsing the Internet, the Internet is browsing you, feeding you what you already agree with.
This is how the echo chamber is built – not with bricks, but with comfort.
It is an online space where we encounter only views that mirror our own, reinforcing what we already believe while quietly filtering out all opposition – or what we Malaysians might call the syok sendiri syndrome.
Disagreement grows rare. Contradiction feels hostile. Nuance feels almost offensive.
Welcome to the Age of Stupid: not because people lack information, but because we increasingly lack the means, or the will, to hear views that might correct us. Ignorance is no longer censored. It is designed.
When complexity becomes a villain
Few sectors suffer digital simplification as painfully as the palm oil industry.
On the ground, reality is complex: smallholder livelihood, certification, labour shortages, carbon footprints, biodiversity trade-offs.
Online, much of that collapses into a three-line script: oil palm destroys forests; oil palm equals extinction; boycott equals virtue.
Algorithms prefer villains to systems. Outrage travels faster than understanding. So entire industries become caricatures, while the poor quietly vanish from the storyline. Enlightenment without understanding is merely upgraded prejudice.
In the old kopitiam, arguments required presence.
You disagreed loudly – but still met the other person the next day. On social media, there is only “block” and “unfriend”. We did not lose arguments; we lost the habit of staying seated when contradicted.
Contradiction is uncomfortable. It is also how thinking grows. Without it, we become intellectually flabby.
More data, less wisdom
It is fashionable to call today’s youth shallow. I disagree. They are not shallow - they are flooded. Before history, they learn hashtags. Before balanced debate, they absorb polarised monologues. They are taught to “speak their truth”, but rarely how to test it. The tools are powerful. The guardrails are weak. If we offer no maps, we cannot scold them for being lost.
The phone in your pocket today holds more computing power than what once sent humans to the moon. Yet we feel more fragmented than ever. We drown in data but starve for wisdom. Information arrives without hierarchy or pause. We snack mentally, rarely dine.
Those who work in plantations learn an unforgiving truth: systems are complex. Touch one variable and consequences ripple elsewhere. Society works the same way. When we touch communication, we touch everything - politics, religion, race, mental health and family life.
When institutions appear slow, screenshots replace affidavits. Viral posts replace peer review. Once institutions are discarded, we lose the anchors that once slowed emotion long enough for reason to catch up. Truth becomes tribal. History becomes negotiable. Policy becomes theatre.
Why “Stupid” Is Not About Education
This is not about IQ or exam results. The Age of Stupid is egalitarian. Many of the most insular people today are also highly educated - brilliant inside their echo chambers and blind outside them. “Stupid” here is the luxury of never needing to say, “I might be wrong.”
We have moved from deity to expert to celebrity to the individual. The next step is the most unsettling: removing the individual entirely. Enter the bot. It is software that automatically performs tasks or mimics human actions at high speed and scale, without human intervention.
Soon, machines will increasingly supply our news, opinions, advice and even moral reassurance. We may come full circle - from divine oracles to digital ones. If that does not worry us, it should.
I come from a world of open doors, shared meals and neighbours who scolded your child as their own. Trust was a handshake, not an algorithm. Today, I watch with quiet unease the thinning of communal purpose and mutual restraint. The Age of Stupid threatens not just our intellect, but our togetherness. And if we lose what remains of Muhibbah, we lose more than arguments - we lose the very possibility of nation-building.
The Last Open Mind
Every communication revolution brought both hope and peril. Each time, humanity learned painfully to tame the technology. We do not need to reject the machine. We need to remind it who is the master.
Subscribe to a newspaper you disagree with. Read writers who irritate you. Sit in a kopitiam and listen. Ask yourself, regularly, “What if I am wrong?” The mark of an open mind is not certainty, but the capacity for doubt.
Most of us have received that WhatsApp message - old, debunked, yet dressed as breaking news. If a lie is forwarded long enough and wrapped in enough outrage, it graduates into “truth”. By the time corrections arrive, the damage has already travelled. And at the end of the forwarding chain, almost always, there is no accountability - only confusion stamped “forwarded as received”.
Perhaps wisdom returns not through another app, but through the stubborn human act of showing up for one another - offline, uncurated, unscripted. Because if we surrender fully to bots, algorithms and convenience, we may not notice until thinking itself becomes optional.
And then, what will remain of us?
Joseph Tek Choon Yee has over 30 years experience in the plantation industry, with a strong background in oil palm research and development, C-suite leadership and industry advocacy. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
