A flood is just water

Sometimes it rains for days. You go outside and everything’s a puddle, the sewers can’t take it and push the water back up into the street. Annoying, nothing worse than that. Other times it rains hard enough that the rivers burst their banks and the roads go under, the yards with them. And sometimes it doesn’t stop — the dams break, whole villages drown, the water rises to your shoulders at night while you sleep, the doors and windows give way, everything you built left too soaked to save. Or the ground moves under the ocean and sends a wall of water in from the open sea, no banks or dams to slow it — houses erased, cars dragged back out when it retreats. Same water every time.

But sometimes it’s not the water, it’s the words, the images, the information itself that drench the world. Most of it cheap and worthless, piling up, drowning everything with a grain of worth. Drowning people, especially now, so much that they start calling it what it is — a flood. But they are not the first to think of this. The first was Plato.

Plato, in Book X of the Republic, treats poetry and storytelling (Homer included) as a degraded, third-hand product. This flood was seen after him too: in novels, the low-effort stories Coleridge waved off as mere daydreaming; even closer, in Fredric Wertham, who blamed comics for juvenile delinquency; and most recently in Wikipedia and web 2.0, which Andrew Keen watched in The Cult of the Amateur as a flood sweeping away good journalism and documentation.

i. The water

Water is the same thing it ever was. The same regardless of the volume, regardless of the speed, regardless of the depths it reaches. It is just water.

Same for information. Regardless of its purpose, its structure, its volume, it is information. It has no morality in itself — neither does water. We attribute to it whatever morality seems right to us at the moment we receive it, the same as we do with water.

What we call nature is neither good nor bad. The rain, the earthquakes, the tsunamis they spawn are no different — a normal part of it, with the same non-moral character. They are neither good nor bad. Water is, and always was.

Information is no different. In itself it is neither good nor bad — it just is. But the moment it reaches us — the source we took it from, the message it carries — we make it good or bad.

Yet we get angry at the water, or upset — though it has no intent, it chooses nothing. For water there is nothing right or wrong, no choice in completely drowning a village.

So too with information: it has no intent of its own. Whatever intent it carries is inherited — from the creator, or from the receiver. Take celebrity gossip magazines. The creator gives it an intent: to celebrate (or denigrate) the “extraordinary.” The reader takes that and applies their own — to feel connected, to escape into glamour. But the words themselves carry nothing on their own. Somebody ate a burger at a store.

We have a name for the water we’ve decided is worthless. We call it slop. The word fits better than we know — before it ever meant content, slop was swill, the waste you pour into a trough, dirty water by another name. So when we call the flood slop, we are, without meaning to, calling it what it always was. Water.

But as we discussed, water just is. So slop is a verdict, one we give once we’ve decided the information is worthless — and the judgment of worth is yours, not the water’s. Which is why no one can measure it: there is nothing in the water to count, only how much of it you have decided to resent. The same words are treasure to one reader and slop to another, and nothing in the words has changed — only the judge.

ii. The drowning

You can drown in water if you sit in it long enough. What about information? You can drown in it too, the same as water — just sit in it long enough. But here you have an advantage: you can choose not to. You can choose not to look at the magazine, or the TV, or the internet, and live without the slop. Or you can choose to accept it and see it for what it is — a flood of information you judge as slop.

But what about waterboarding? Is that something you can choose to ignore? Maybe not so much. The sensation of suffocation is instant; the brain immediately recognizes it can’t breathe, triggering uncontrollable terror and a frantic fight-or-flight. And that we cannot compare to slop. For slop there is no fight or flight, only the overwhelm.

Slop is just a flooding. An immeasurable wall of water coming at you continuously — but it is just water. It can overwhelm you and it can drown you, but it will not waterboard you.

And yet water can be aimed. That is what waterboarding is — water with a hand behind it, put to a purpose. Some slop is aimed too: made to deceive you, or built to keep you, pointed at you on purpose. It is still a flood and not a suffocation — you can still ration it, still step out. But now there is a hand. And the hand changes who is to blame, not what the water is. The flood that drowns a village by accident and the slop poured at you on purpose are the same water; what changed is the hand. The lie, the bait, the engineered feed — the words are still inert. What is wrong is the one who aimed them. The aim does not put morality into the information; it only shows you where the morality always was.

And your defense does not change, it only matters more. Against the blameless flood you ration what you take in. Against aimed water you ration too, and you look for the hand: who is pouring this, and why. To distrust the source is the whole of the defense, and it costs you the looking. It will not catch everything — some aim is good enough to beat a careful eye. But when it does, the fault is the hand’s, never the water’s, and never the one who was fooled. The lie belongs to the liar, always.

The flood is endless. It always was. No one was ever going to drink the sea, no one was ever going to read every book, watch every reel, see every painting — there was always more of it than one life could hold. So the endlessness is not the new thing it pretends to be. The flood is infinite; you are not. You take in what you take in and you stop, not when the water runs out but when you’ve had your fill. The infinity belongs to the water. The budget belongs to you. It was never your task to meet all of it — only to decide how much of it you let reach you.

And the distinction matters, because you can see the wall of water from miles off. You can recognize it and run from it, or build dams and banks to redirect it. But it will drown you if you let it.

iii. The Dams

We have fought water for millennia, and we will go on fighting it, regardless of what that water actually is. It is just itself.

We can build dams. Dams are good at stopping floods, and we have learned to build them well. We can do the same with the slop — build a dam that holds the flood back.

Dams are expensive. They take resources and time, that’s true. But if you don’t want the place you live to change, the dams are mandatory. The same goes for you: it takes time to curate your feed, it takes discipline and resources to keep ignoring what you’ve judged worthless and to keep choosing what you let in. It takes maintenance.

And the dam is not only a wall against how much gets through. It is a choice of whose water you let through at all. Against the blind flood it spares you the volume. But against the aimed bucket — the water poured at you on purpose — it is the whole of the defense: you take from the hands you have judged worth trusting, and you keep the rest out, the accidental flood and the pointed one alike.

And that’s good. It’s a reminder that you will keep fighting the flood every day, because you see it as destructive and you need to protect yourself from it. It also means you’ve chosen to stay in the path of the water and shape its course, rather than flee it or drown in it.

Poetry, novels, comics, AI art, YouTube videos — they are all the same. Information with no moral value, no innate intent, inheriting their morality and their worth from our judgment. Whatever it is, whatever it becomes, someone will impose their judgment on it: good or bad, valuable or worthless, low effort or a masterpiece. In the end it is only ever judgment.

And we have the choice. Build the dams against the water thrown in our faces, or drown in it.

But it is, and it will always be, just water.