I guess it took me a very long time to learn that there are people who are absolutely glued to instagram and TikTok the way I am to everything on my phone in general. I also started thinking about how all of the people I’ve met since my junior year of college (2020) have been people I only knew online, then I transitioned to work which is completely online, and here I am, still meeting more people online through dating apps, discord, instagram, and TikTok. I truly can’t grasp the absurdity of it all, I am living a cyberpunk reality (and I know I’m not the only one).
For the longest time, I thought to myself “Nah everyone else still goes out and meets people, I’m one of the weird ones.” But then I went outside. And I saw people doing what I’m doing right now in the comfort of my own home.
Makes total and complete sense why billionaires invested so highly in crypto and the metaverse. It’s actually another form of class war but applied to the digital realm 🙃
How much longer until we can consider technology, which should’ve been nothing other than a tool, as the new opiate of the masses
I think the really crazy thing about the online world is the separation of all the different spaces and the alienation that comes as a result.
In the real world, it’s physical space. You gotta go through the city to get anywhere, see other people and see the world (even if it’s only a tiny slice of it). The people around you necessarily have similar experiences because you’re in the same physical space.
Online, though, everyone can be isolated into a completely abstract Skinner box of dopamine shots administered at the frequency of their choosing. Your experience is your own, and only your own, with interactions with other people made as atomizing as possible by various mechanisms. People have to be consciously reminded that the people they talk with online are real humans behind a screen, because otherwise it really is just a sea of usernames vomiting text and media.
The online world is so effective at atomizing its users that they forget there even is a society, it just becomes niche subcultures where other individuals are barely even perceived.
It adds this whole other dimension to interacting with strangers; yes, the bulk of us are all terminally online – but what sort of terminally online are you?
This should’ve been the post. Much more eloquent and concise than I could ever be
Ngl bro this awareness I had at like 12 AM (which brought about this post) feels like class consciousness on steroids
To be honest some of the memes even shared on here make me go because I don’t live on twitter.
Dude it is so fucking wild. Like a different reality entirely
Makes me feel a lot better though, I thought it was a personal failing on my part, but I’m truly just doing the same thing-going about my life while occasionally checking an obscure leftist forum instead of twitter or instagram
I kinda like anime, I’d even go so far as to say that I am a “bit of a fan.”
Once, my partner and I worked at the same place but in different departments.
Once, my partner mentioned to another of our fellow employees that I liked anime when listening to them talk about anime.
Once, this other employee started talking to me about anime. During this conversation I realized I had no idea what most of the things he was talking about were and that I am nowhere near as much of a fan of anime as I thought I was.
My life’s experience with meeting other anime fans IRL or engaging in the broader anime culture in general has always been this: I know basically nothing about most popular anime, and most fans of popular anime know basically jack shit about the anime I like, and so any deeper conversation than just “anime is cool sometimes” immediately falls apart. It’s hard being a cutesy slice of life girl in a blood-splattering shonen action world!
I dunno if that’s necessarily your experience you’re describing, or if this was a guy who was using all sorts of specialized terminology or whatever, but yeah it just made me think of that
Wasn’t terminology, fortunately. They just rattling off all sorts of anime titles and I had to stop them and admit that my consumption of anime was limited to watching things like, “Vampire Hunter D”, “Neon Genesis Evangelion”, “Robot Carnival”…
I’m gonna be honest with you, out of those three I am only familiar with Evangelion.
I feel like I can sorta tell what type of online people are by taking to them irl.
Damn. So do you think we’re all going to be online 24/7 in like ten years time unless something drastic changes
(Hey, sorry, I wrote way more than I had planned to.)
Sorta? ‘Online’ is just kinda where most information is. The problem isn’t really the internet or being on it too much, although I guess screens are bad for your eyes. I think the thing you’re picking up on gets referred to as ‘human attention as a capitalist frontier’ in that attention-based social media and advertising companies make money through views. So the strategy for all of them is to be as reflexive and ‘addictive’ as possible.
Kinda in the way that you open your phone and your thumb reflexively clicks on some app (hexbear maybe?, lol). Or that when you go on your computer you open a web browser (cause like what actually is a computer for) and you just go to some website as a page to look at because the alternative is about:blank or a homepage, etc. Modern (but also non-modern) capitalism puts a lot of pressure on time because of efficiency and everything, so it makes lots of people uneasy to sit idly for basically any prolonged period of time (like in line or on the train). Even more so if they’re in view of other people (please do not perceive me xD <3) . There’s a pretty common response to ‘always on they damn phone’ which is a picture of a bunch of people on a train reading newspapers, but it really misses the point. Being ‘online’ all the time is an attempt to blur capitalist-productivity mindsets with leisure and extend the accessibility of what marketers refer to as “content”.
So the reflexive, online, social media content becomes accessible at almost every moment of our waking lives, which allows an outlet for the capitalist-productivity anxiety. Scrolling / Doomscrolling doesn’t really do anything to address the underlying anxiety, partially because most content exists outside of oneself, but more importantly the underlying structure of social media, especially capitalist social media is arranged to monopolize human attention. For an extreme example, platforms encourage and push conspiracy content because the paranoia it creates makes it difficult to ignore and there is an infinite wellspring of further details for people to scroll through and click on or whatever. But it’s not even really the ‘content’ itself that makes people interact with these platforms in this way. There are a lot of systems decisions that are way more important. The easiest example is asking “How often is there something new here?” For instagram, twitter, reddit, tik tok, etc, etc, etc, the desired corporate answer is: every few minutes. And they all follow similar-ish ways to make that happen. Lots of platforms just mark things as ‘read’ when they’re rendered then save an index of ‘read’ content as a cookie (essentially).
A person who checked their phone 10m ago and scrolled instagram (because you’re gonna check your phone and just look at the time? no that’s silly there’s content on there.) Well, yeah, they go and re-check instagram and it shows different content than the previous stuff because if there wasn’t they wouldn’t need to check, because the new-ness will make it seem as though their feeds are moving fast, because new stuff is on there, because the world is moving fast, because there’s a lot to see, because every moment someone you follow is posting something, and because the anxiety of capitalist efficiency requires it. Also - this is kinda an aside, but I’m already writing this giant wall of text so I might as well - dating apps have extremely manipulative algorithms to keep people on the app as long as possible. Essentially they use like/dislike ratios to feed based on the variance of average dwell time.
If it’s any consolation, the monetization and advertising angle of this may not actually work profitably or even at all. I’m not really sure what the future is for these platforms are when capitalists admit that this kind of monetization doesn’t work, but they might just be head-in-the-sand forever because it’s kinda a superstructure-superstructure interaction. A concession that these kinds of platforms are unprofitable or just e-waste can’t really happen while it’s still the economic foundation of like quite a few countries. So yeah, I guess it depends if capitalism wants to have a new artificial frontier, which was sorta trying to be crypto, but that seems kinda out, so idk. Maybe it’ll be something more nightmarish like imagination lol.
