Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Democracy

Christine Merser, June 26, 2025

We have watched MAGA women give up their rights, as if they don’t matter, and some of those women I know. Some of the things they say to me make me shake my head and wonder. It’s almost like they’re not thinking.

And then the data starts to emerge about how scrolling through feeds, rather than reading articles and deciphering what they say, and what we think of what they say, has changed how our minds take in information. Our brains used to pause. Reflect. Debate internally. But this constant stream of input has reduced us to scrolling zombies, flicking past ideas without inhabiting any of them.

Cognitive scientists call this cognitive offloading. We’re not processing information ourselves anymore, we’re outsourcing it. We let algorithms decide what comes next. And once it’s in front of us, we don’t test it for truth or logic. We just store it. A sentence, a meme, a quote, without context or contemplation, becomes part of our internal belief system. We are skipping the thinking step. It’s not full-on atrophy. But it is erosion. And it’s fast.

This isn’t just social media’s fault. It’s also how we use AI. I use it, I use her, Celeste, as a partner in thinking. A back-and-forth. I put in data, I ask questions, I challenge the results. But more and more, I see people type in a question, take the first answer at face value, and post it like it’s gospel. No pause. No interrogation. No time spent letting the words sit in the body for a minute. They’re not asking, does this make sense to me?

I really saw it when I was debating with some friends, people I’ve always considered smart, about the recent Democratic primary in New York City. One very successful friend kept sending me TikTok and Instagram clips. Not one article. Not one piece of long-form journalism. She reads my Substack column and even forwards it to others. But when we actually talk, it’s clear she hasn’t read it. She’s breezed through it, grabbed a sentence or two that supports what she already thinks, and skipped the rest. She often tells me she loves what I write but it’s too long, and I know sometimes it is, but she says I should say it in a paragraph or two. She once said, “Tell me in the first paragraph.”

Look, we all move through a tremendous amount of information in a day. But if we’re not actually thinking about the information, and all we’re doing is filing away everyone else’s thoughts, then all we are is a file cabinet.

And yesterday I accused my fellow New Yorkers, who had the audacity to vote for Andrew Cuomo, of becoming just like the MAGA voters they love to hate. To be compared to them is the biggest insult I could give. But it’s true. Cuomo assaulted women. Got away with it. Then attacked them again. Got away with that too. He blamed it all on a political takedown, as if he were the victim. He covered up nursing home deaths during Covid to protect his numbers. He used state resources to smear his accusers. He obtained and threatened to release their gynecological records. He was cruel, vindictive, corrupt. And still, they voted for him. What’s the difference?

Some attacked me. So, tell me how I’m wrong, I countered? Silence.

We have become a country that doesn’t care who someone is as a human being. We’ll vote for them anyway. And we pretend we’re not doing it. But we are. And the only reason we can get away with it is because we’re not really looking at our own behavior. We’re not assessing truth. We’re not thinking.

Then I got into a back-and-forth with someone who thanked Cuomo for the way he “conceded” on election night. First of all, he didn’t concede. He said Mamdani won the night and that he’d go back and decide whether to run as an independent. That’s not a concession. That’s a threat.

And let’s not forget the campaign he ran. It was dirty. He sent out waves of social media posts and mailers, all coded and cruel, questioning Mamdani’s experience, his background, the spelling and pronunciation of his name. The photos were darkened. He was made to look dangerous. Muslim, which he is, but dangerous. Foreign. Other. That’s not just a dirty campaign, it’s dangerous. It’s Republican playbook politics, and no one called him out on it. On election night, they just thanked him.

Why are we thanking someone who belongs in jail for losing gracefully, when he didn’t even do that? Why are we acting like he was a model of civic decency? Why didn’t anyone ask him the most basic thing, will you support the Democrat in the general election? Because he didn’t say he would. Not once. Isn’t that what someone who loses is supposed to do?

The old Democratic guard is scared. They’re scared of younger candidates coming up fast. But here’s what New York City just taught us. The polls were wrong. The power wasn’t in the social media posts, it was in the people knocking on doors. It was person to person. Conversation to conversation. That’s what won the day.

And they’ve already tried to push the future out the back door. Take David Hogg, for example, a Gen Z gun control activist and Parkland survivor who briefly held a vice-chair seat on the Democratic National Committee. He came in with bold ideas. He openly challenged the party’s aging leadership, called for primaries against ineffective incumbents, (which just worked in NYC) and tried to bring young voters back into the fold. But that was too much for the establishment. They claimed DNC officers had to remain neutral and pressured him out. He stepped down rather than distract from the larger fight. But the message was clear. There is no room at the table unless you play by the old rules. And those rules are exactly what’s breaking the party.

And that’s how we’ll fix this country. People talking to people. In neighborhoods. At kitchen tables. In parks. Holding hands. Forming lines to block buses dragging away neighbors into detention centers with no food and one toilet for seventy people. That is not the America we’re going to accept.

There are questions that must be answered. The press needs to ask Bill Clinton why he endorsed Andrew Cuomo. Why he looked past it all. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who once led the charge calling for Cuomo to resign, said absolutely nothing this time. People waited for her to speak up, to say he should not be running, but she stayed silent. That silence has to be accounted for. And Michael Bloomberg? He did endorse Cuomo. And he poured millions of dollars into helping him try to take back power. That needs to be called out too. Cuomo must be asked to publicly tell his voters to support the Democratic nominee. Anything less is sabotage.

And where was the press? Where were the questions? When Cuomo’s campaign launched and big-name Democrats lined up behind him, why didn’t reporters ask how they could possibly support a man with a record like his? Why weren’t they asked to explain how they reconciled their public values with private endorsements? They weren’t asked because the press, like the party, often protects power over principle. And silence, once again, did its job.

If the Democratic Party wants to move forward, it has to act like it knows where the future lies. Because the young man they threw out of the party for saying the old guard had to go? He was right.

And if New York City does nothing else, it makes that clear.