Noise makers
Growing up and going to a British school in a former British colony, you come across a lot of weirdness. The British relied on indirect rule to control colonies, empowering select local chiefs and intermediaries to help govern the population, so it is hardly surprising that the same logic appeared in their school system through a hierarchy of student prefects. One of the jobs of a prefect was to help maintain “order” when a teacher was away, and one way it was done was for the prefect to make a list of “noise makers” and hand the list to the teacher when they returned for the offenders to be punished.
I remember wondering how odd this was, a noise maker? How do you even define noise? One man’s Beethoven can be another man’s fingers on a chalkboard. That distinction has become even harder to identify and harder to tune out in the modern day. We are bombarded with information 24/7 from every angle. Even fridges have wifi and screens now. At some point, we decided that even the appliance meant to keep food cold and keep bacteria away had to compete for attention.
Information is the new oil. Entire empires have been built, and are still being built, on the trade of it. A meaningful share of Silicon Valley’s value rests on the sale of attention through advertising. On Wall Street, fortunes are shaped by who gets the right information first. And yet, for all its value, much of what circulates as information is little more than noise: endless data, endless signals, endless stimulation, most of it forgettable, manipulative, or useless by nightfall. The more frequently you check, the worse the ratio gets. Frequency only increases exposure to noise and not vice versa.
One of the most essential capacities a modern human can develop is the ability to filter noise. It may sound simple: switch off the devices and platforms producing it. But short of living alone off the grid, some degree of information consumption is now necessary for survival. The real difficulty is knowing what deserves entry and what does not.
Consider how carefully you filter everything else that enters your life. You would not drink unfiltered water from a stranger or let your child eat random food they stumbled upon of unknown origin. We spend billions filtering water, air, and food, yet allow information to pass straight into the system that governs thought with almost no scrutiny at all. And just like bad food from that restaurant or street vendor you know you shouldn’t have gone to, you only feel the effects after it is already consumed and damage is being done.
Information governs life at the most fundamental level. Cells operate by receiving signals, reading instructions, and responding. DNA is information. Hormones are information. Immune systems survive by distinguishing what belongs from what does not. The body is constantly sorting through signals. Is this nourishment or toxin? Human consciousness is not exempt from this logic. The mind also lives by intake and interpretation methodology. What we absorb shapes how we feel, what we fear, desire, and most importantly what we believe. We might feel like information is background noise but it is more like mental instruction. And when the instructions are degraded, the organism falters.
The density, speed, and sheer volume of information we encounter daily is astounding. In the same way that many modern diseases are diseases of excess because our bodies are not designed for instant access to sustenance and processed foods 24/7, the mental pressures of this age increasingly seem to be conditions of cognitive excess: overstimulation, fragmentation, compulsive reaction, false urgency, and a nervous system tasked with metabolizing far more than it evolved for.
Just as a weakened immune system is more vulnerable to invasion, an overstimulated mind full of noise is more susceptible to distortion, manipulation, and disease.
The difficulty, however, is that noise rarely arrives looking trivial. It often appears quick and urgent trying to grab your attention before judgment has time to intervene. Entire industries now depend on this capture, a word that has become so common in boardrooms and strategy decks that its original meaning has been almost entirely forgotten. Backed by billion-dollar budgets, oceans of data, and algorithms refined to predict and exploit human behavior, the modern noise maker inflames, fragments, and distorts at an increasingly more efficient and effective pace.
The memory of the prefect matters because the logic never disappeared. A child was given borrowed authority to identify the “noise makers,” turn disturbance into a list, and hand it over for punishment. It was an early lesson in control: someone decides what counts as noise, someone enforces the label, and order is preserved through selective suppression. The modern version is simply more advanced. Now the prefect is the system itself, quietly sorting, ranking, amplifying, and burying at a scale. The tell has not changed: noise is whatever demands attention while interfering with judgment. A hurricane warning is not noise. Neither is a call telling you someone you love is in labor. In both cases, the urgency is real, proportionate, and clarifies action. Noise mimics that structure without the corresponding stakes. It may provoke and inflame, but it can just as easily distract and crowd out what matters. Either way, it leaves you less capable than before.
We speak often about freedom in terms of speech, markets, movement, and choice. We speak less about freedom of mind. Yet in an age of engineered attention, that may be the more fragile freedom of all. To filter well is not to retreat from reality and become a hermit in the woods. The immune system does not function by refusing all input. It learns over time, what belongs and what does not. The mind develops in similar fashion: through repeated exposure, and the slow discipline of noticing what leaves you clearer and what leaves you depleted. What the mind admits, it serves. Choose your masters carefully.