this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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The real brain melter was the societal culture shift.
I grew up witnessing "the end of history" with my own eyes. People were getting wiser and kinder year after year, decade after decade. It was like a feedback loop of positive changes, the only way was up.
Then 2010s hit and I'm still processing the 180 degrees shift. I read dozens of books about nazis, authoritarianism, societal memory, cults, fucking roman empire. But I still have cognitive dissonance every time I open news feed.
Fucking thank you! This has been hard for me to put into words. (I'm on the older end of Gen-X)
Eh, I still think people are generally pretty nice to each other. The problem is that when that same nice person goes online, they behave differently. The more time we spend online, the more impact that "alter ego" has on our "IRL" personality.
So what we need is more IRL connection, but we're instead spending more and more time online.
That is just not true. Plenty of nice people online and plenty of assholes since before online was even a thing for the average person. In fact if anything it feels like those assholes from before are re-asserting themselves.
Is it though? I find myself being a lot more combative online and more agreeable in person. That separation of my actual identity and lack of physical repercussions really makes me more confrontational online.
That theory was mentioned often in the early 2000s when most people stilled used pseudonyms online but it has been debunked since then by the many people who feel perfectly fine spouting the same kind of hate on social media under their real name and sometimes even in video form.
Physical repercussions do not exist in the real world for anything but the most extreme of actions. If anything the culture of lying to each other's face (a.k.a. being polite) and looking away when abuse happens makes abuse very common in the real world, just ask your average minority or retail worker.
If that's the case, then I guess it's just exposure to more people so you're more likely to directly interact with a sick. I would be interested in some statistics showing that the incidence of cyber bullying and other forms of abuse are comparable to IRL abuse. It just seems incredibly plausible that people are more outspoken from behind a keyboard than IRL.
Facebook and unregulated social media. Up to now most governments in the world don't even have a clue or idea that the internet is a very powerful tool that should actually be regulated because there are very evil people who will always act in bad faith to manipulate others for power and control. The Golden era of the internet is definitely over, I think 2016 was a defined shift that will be recorded by historians.
In fairness, most internet users would have been extremely against regulating social media until quite recently
it's all about how the regulations are designed... for the benefit of corporations? or regular people?
for example, there could easily be rules placing caps on the amount of advertising that's allowed on any given platform. no fucking way now the government will ever put that cat back in the bag now that the 20 percent of GDP comes from tech monopolies fueled by advertisements.
Early internet was very much regulated. I wish we could all just go back to usenet and no internet on phones.
it was only regulated by its uselessness.. it was the wild west of shit otherwise.
Regulated by my uselessness...
KICK MIDWEST.SOCIAL cabinet_sanchez "Fuck youu'
From "The Hunt for Red October", to "you shouldn't have started the war against russia then."
Red Dawn to half+ our leadership bowing down to him, and a president calling him a good guy.
God damn what a wild ride.
The internet came way too quickly, or at least it evolved way too quickly for us. We should still be on 56k and surfing Limewire for what may or may not be what we're actually looking for. 24/7 access to everyone all around the country, and world, was too fast as well. We can't acclimate that fast. Our brains weren't ready for it.
That's the saddest thing about people born after the 90s. We expected the future to get better. Kids now are just hoping we don't destroy everything.
Holy shit thank you. You finally put it into words for me. The shift of 'the internet is the greatest tool for knowledge, to what it is now, some cancerous corpo bloated bullshit that ignorant people are harnessing just to find others to support their shitty beliefs. Been such a hard thing to watch and understand how the fuck we got here.
Spot on.
The worst part is that anyone who wasn’t around for the first 10ish years of the web has never seen how real and optimistic and grass roots and delightfully human it was.
We really lost a lot.
We used to think pop ups were the worst that could happen. Good god were we wrong.
To be fair 90% of the corporate bullshit we are looking at today is born out of the same mindset as popups.
I think it's lack of empathy as the root for everything.
Which I believe is opposite of human nature but here we are.
I’m reminded of this article from a couple of days ago in the Globe and Mail, specifically as a response to Musk’s anti-empathy comments: Empathy is not a Weakness, it’s a Strength
Empathy is easily used for propaganda as well. All those "immigrants are going to r your wife" and "radical elites transing your children" are the appeals to empathy that work very well (there are examples from the left too lets be honest, they're just less unhinged)
IMO you need empathy, rationality and introspection: empathy to feel for your fellow human, rationality to not fall for the grift, introspection to realize in what ways you were an idiot and self-correct.
The wave of scepticism that will inevitably come in 2030s will weed out the grifters, but I doubt it'll last. Time is a flat circle afterall.
I see your point but I don’t think you’re describing empathy as much as fear in your examples.
There are some who think time is shaped like a Jeremy Bearamy...
Nice, you're spot on. We bonded for a while.. now we're in entropy!