There was a time, not all that long ago, when the Internet was going to solve everything. The truth was out there, freely accessible, and could no longer be hidden. All you had to do was look, and if you remained ignorant, it was both an intellectual and a moral failure.

But the era of Internet optimism (which includes the origins of this fine blog and others like it) didn’t live up to expectations. In the 2010s we woke up to how the Internet could be abused for disinformation. In the 2020s, some key people have decided that disinformation is less of a risk than an opportunity. In the Postinformation Age, the threat isn’t that we’ll lack information, but that we’ll be overwhelmed by disinformation in a way that leaves us less informed, less able to act, and less able to experience the world than if we had never read anything at all.

Easy access to information is of course a modern miracle. The primary sources I can work through from my living room in my spare time for free far outstrip what I used to be able to accomplish with a solid year of international research funding. But we also now understand that our ability to judge the quality of sources is much more limited than the full range of information we need, and that facts often come embedded in agendas that are difficult to recognize, let alone account for.

Two decades ago, people turned to social media for connection unlimited by geographic distance. And it really does happen! But it comes at the price of industrial-scale privacy violations, bot swarms, and engagement campaigns staffed with fake accounts from around the globe. The algorithms keep people coming back not for connection, but for their daily jolt of anger. In other words: If you aren’t careful about where you look, you’ll be subjected to a stream of fake information, manipulated images, and rage bait that will leave you more ignorant than you were before.

A corollary of the end of Internet optimism for religious faith and practice is that healthy and authentic religious experience now depends not just on what we learn, but on what we avoid. Being a believer in the Postinformation Age means excluding information that would impair our ability to feel awe, experience authentic spirituality, or perceive each other as fellow spiritual beings in a divinely imbued cosmos. To use a food analogy, the danger is not that we won’t take our vitamins or even that we’ll consume empty calories, but that we’ll select a diet of sweetened toxins that will eventually render us unable to taste or enjoy food at all.

We grasp the threat of disinformation when it comes to pornography. We recognize that pornography isn’t the truth about human sexuality. Instead, if given the time and opportunity, it will rewire our perceptions of other people and our social interactions to conform to the pornographer’s lens.

What would be the spiritual equivalents of pornography? I have some suggestions that I suspect apply more widely than just to me personally, although I wouldn’t call them universal, and I’m certainly missing some important things.

• One of the concepts that gained currency twenty years ago was the distinction between chapel Mormons and Internet Mormons, or the happy but ignorant believers versus the smaller set of informed online members. But I’ve become deeply suspicious of anything that says: You are one of the wise and enlightened church members, so your views bear special weight and you should not feel constrained by obligations to those people stuck in the chapel. I don’t reject the idea because it’s abhorrent to me, but because it’s attractive and I have to keep reminding myself that it’s a lie. The Internet enables the formation of self-selected communities, but attending church in person means being in communion with people whose lives and perspectives can be very different from mine, and it means accepting that others’ need for spiritual nourishment is as valid as my own.

  Other people are fine with Facebook, but I avoid most social media so I can relate to other ward members as whole people rather than as holders of wrong opinions, and so they can accept me the same way in return.

• The Internet promised to grant us access to the unvarnished truth about Church history, doctrine, and internal operations. I don’t know if it has succeeded. But it has certainly exposed every aspect of the Church and of members’ lives and beliefs to endless criticism and complaint. One way to avoid feeling personally threatened by the flood of criticism (and this is true of everything, not just criticism of the Church) is to affect absolute cynicism about everything, in the theory that no one can accuse you of being a rube if you refuse to believe or support or have earnest affection for anything at all.

  It’s better to just turn off the spigot. The Internet excels at instilling the feeling of shame, and there is a whole industry devoted to trying to make you feel ashamed for your association with the Church. If there’s a building full of people pointing and mocking, why would you willingly choose to listen to each new episode of their podcast? They have the appearance of providing information, but consuming it makes you less able to relate to other Church members as the collective body of Christ.

• Authentic temple worship – going up to the house of the Lord to worship him and enter his presence – is probably impossible unless we consciously avoid contact with media that trivializes the experience. We can’t virtually profane the temple for 29 days and then hope to physically enter a sacred precinct one day a month. We can prepare ourselves to be overwhelmed by God’s presence, or we can prevent that from happening, and the choice is very much in our hands.

Perhaps this is what Elder Gong and Elder Bednar have been getting at in their recent talks about misuse of AI. Just as other capabilities of perception or cognition atrophy from disuse when people turn too quickly to electronic alternatives, the abilities honed through long wrestling with doubt or despair can be lost if we immediately @grok, ignorant of how the technology functions, the training data it’s based on, and who’s pulling the strings behind the curtain.