Bandwidth Economics

Author

Oltac Unsal
April 19, 2025

You only get 150 social relationships, give or take, before your brain throws up the spinning beachball of death.

That’s not my opinion—it’s Dunbar’s Number (1), and it’s been haunting humans ever since we tried cramming more than a few tribes’ worth of people into a group chat. Our brains didn’t sign up for this. Evolution handed us a 2GB RAM wetware processor and said, “Good luck managing democracy, climate change, and 1,200 Slack notifications.”

This essay is about what happens when we blow past our natural bandwidth. Not in terms of internet speed or attention span (though, lol, obviously those too), but in how we structure society. Think of it like this: If economics is the study of scarcity and trade-offs, bandwidth economics is what happens when the scarce resource is not money—but mental capacity.

Society as a JPEG

Every functioning society is a big messy ball of people trying to make sense of each other. And because we can't all hold everything in our heads at once, we cheat. We compress.

  • Hierarchies say: You don’t need to track everyone. Just your boss.

  • Rituals say: You don’t need to decide what to do. Just follow the script.

  • Ideologies say: You don’t need to weigh every moral trade-off. Just pick a team.

  • Bureaucracies say: You don’t need to negotiate every time. Just fill out the form.

These are not signs of social failure. They are features of social survival. Compression is how we scale a species that evolved for gossip around a fire into a civilization of 8 billion people, airports, tax codes, and vibes-based hiring.

The anthropologist Joseph Henrich (2) has written extensively about how cultural evolution depends on "cognitive offloading"—basically outsourcing knowledge and behaviors to shared rituals and norms. Compression, in this view, is not just helpful—it’s civilization’s OS.

But there’s a catch: Every compression is lossy. Just like a JPEG, it throws away nuance to make the file small enough to fit in our heads.

As societies grow more complex and the data stream accelerates, we start to see the compression artifacts: ideological rigidity, performative politics, algorithmic extremism.

The Glitching Age

We are now living in an era of bandwidth overflow—a kind of societal buffer overrun. What used to be manageable now feels like a torrent:

  • Political polarization? Everyone’s trying to compress a wildly diverse world into one emotional heuristic: good guys vs. bad guys. Daniel Kahneman calls this System 1 thinking—fast, emotional, intuitive (3). It’s efficient, but often brittle.

  • Activist burnout? You’re watching 40 global injustices per day scroll through your feed—none of which your nervous system evolved to process. Mullainathan and Shafir's work on scarcity (4) shows that cognitive load isn't just a nuisance; it warps judgment, memory, even morality.

  • Collapse of shared reality? Our old compression codecs (institutions, norms, journalism) can’t keep up with the sheer throughput of noise. Clay Shirky said it best: “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure." (5)

We blame this breakdown on malice, stupidity, tribalism. But maybe it’s not evil or ignorance. Maybe it's just bad compression at scale.

Our brains are bottlenecks. And our legacy social structures are like old zip files trying to unpack into a 4K, real-time world.

The Hidden Economics of Cognitive Load

Let’s be clear: Bandwidth is economics.

  • Every moral judgment is a trade-off between nuance and action.

  • Every social rule is a bet on where to spend attention cheaply.

  • Every ideology is a cost-saving shortcut so we don’t have to start from scratch.

Herbert Simon predicted this back in 1971 (6): "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."

So when people seem irrational, it’s often because they’re rational under constraint: constrained by attention, emotional energy, and memory. It’s not that people don’t care—it’s that they can’t care about everything.

We’re trying to cram too much high-fidelity social reality into too narrow a pipe.

What Comes After the Crash?

  • In “End of -isms,” we talked about how traditional ideologies are losing their grip. That’s not just philosophical—it’s a compression failure (7). We’re watching high-level moral abstractions crumble under the weight of nuance they can’t encode.

  • In “Human Purpose,” we argued that humans must shift from doing to interpreting, from executing tasks to creating meaning. Why? Because in a world of overflowing data, meaning-making becomes the ultimate compression skill (8).

So what’s next? The future belongs to better compressors.

That might mean:

  • Localism over universalism – Smaller communities where people can actually track each other.

  • Narrative over ideology – As Yuval Noah Harari notes, humans are storytelling animals. Stories carry moral weight with fewer bytes.

  • AI as real filter, not amplifier – Algorithms that help synthesize rather than sensationalize.

  • Emotional intelligence as infrastructure – Not just a soft skill, but a necessity for managing social throughput.

Maybe even new rituals, new mythologies, new roles: vibe curators, context framers, semantic routers—humans who specialize in signal extraction from chaos.

Final Metaphor (because obviously):

Think of society like a multiplayer video game running on a 1990s dial-up connection. Too many players, too much data, not enough bandwidth. Lag spikes. Desync. Eventually, rage quits.

Bandwidth economics says: before you blame the players, check the framerate. Maybe the problem isn't that people are bad—it’s that the system is trying to render in 4K on a potato.

Let’s stop expecting infinite emotional bandwidth from finite minds. Instead, let's build smarter compression. Not to dumb things down—but to keep the game playable.

Footnotes

  1. Dunbar, R. (1992). Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution, 22(6), 469–493.

  2. Henrich, J. (2015). The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton University Press.

  3. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  4. Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Times Books.

  5. Shirky, C. (2008). It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure. Web 2.0 Expo NY. https://www.cnet.com/culture/shirky-problem-is-filter-failure-not-info-overload/

  6. Simon, H. A. (1971). Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World. In M. Greenberger (Ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest (pp. 37–72). The Johns Hopkins Press.

  7. "End of -isms." Add Shortcut. https://addshortcut.beehiiv.com/p/end-of-isms

  8. "Human Purpose." Add Shortcut. https://addshortcut.beehiiv.com/p/human-purpose