Amerika

Perhaps even before the COVID-19 freakout, people were pulling away from public life in America. Diversity made it so that you never knew how people might react, which meant avoiding interactions, and polarization created a situation where none of us could be sure the others shared our values.

This meant that few things were safe. You could go to a store and buy things if you did not talk to anyone who did not look like you and act like you. You could go to a restaurant, coffeehouse, or bar. But just about anything else became a hostile minefield.

We all turned to the internet instead because social media and cell phones had made it brain-dead simple to register, log on, and start scrolling through distractions and rage bait. We felt connected again because we were all participating in the same experience, even if in our own separate silos.

The nasty thing about social media is that it appears to be active participation, but in fact is passive judgment. You read what scrolls by, form an opinion and put it in a clever saying, then fire it off, but you are reacting to what is in front of you, not seeking what fulfills you.

Naturally this turned us into a bunch of bitter reactive people who expressed emotions and judgments but rarely any coherent idea of what we would actually like. We just fired back like the world was firing at us, and this made us into a group of contrarian complainers who never liked anything.

Now finally people are getting around to studying social media because it seems to be the way to sell products, meet friends and mates, and get elected. Everything comes down to “what feeds you” at the end of the day. Not surprisingly rage bait seems to be trending:

This paradox lies at the heart of the problem: different platforms say they want to limit violence, but they profit from the elements that make violence go viral. So we’re therefore trapped in an ecosystem where outrage becomes an economic resource and where the most intense emotions fuel visibility.

Social media reflects what makes us react, like those horrible “reaction papers” in our contemporary mediocre government schools. We are asked for our moralization, judgment, social opinions, and feelings about the issue, but never to analyze it. Just, “how does it make you feel?”

Consequently whatever provokes a reaction is good. At first it was cat pictures, because we all love a cute kitty, but those lost their power as too many of them flooded the internet. Dream vacations and idealized lifestyles came next, but no one can afford those. All that is left is rage from resentment.

As a result, what was our increasing division — the few who were not insane pulling away from the Left and diversity — turned into a competition. In egalitarian societies, you start with no status, so any status you build is what gives you a place in society, and any competing vision becomes a hated enemy.

Not surprisingly, this means that if you are Blue Team, you want Red Team dead not because they are right or wrong, but because they are the civic Other and their existence puts in danger your illusion that your existence is the best life you can lead (the fiction-absolute).

Conflict sells. If it bleeds, it leads. And this means that the controversy becomes the only place where the internet comes alive:

Those who perceived a discussion environment to be toxic, disrespectful, or highly polarized tended to remain silent. Surprisingly, however, those same perceptions predicted higher comment counts among active users. In other words, a heated environment may actually motivate the active minority to comment.

Otherwise, we just keep scrolling, making cute comments, throwing out rabid witticisms, or otherwise reacting without real participation. That means that the regular users become the actors on a stage for our entertainment, and we watch them as we might view a television show.

That encourages people who want power to become manipulative and craft content designed to provoke interaction. This furthers the passivity of the userbase; they do not have to think, only wait for something to come along so they can spit out a judgment of it.

Even more, we let social media define the world as we see it, even though it is a tiny subset of all the people out there who are active in social media. We live in tiny fake worlds made of the people we know online, which is more insular of a group than people realize:

“When young people leave for university, their parents’ networks can become less racially and ethnically diverse—perhaps reflecting the reduced opportunity for contact with children’s friends and social mixing at high school activities. Yet sharing social media platforms with their children appears to partially offset this decline,” said Keith Hampton, professor in the Department of Media and Information in the MSU College of Communication Arts and Sciences and lead author of the study.

You are exposed to the people you go to school with, that your family knows, and that you work with, but most people never reach outside of those groups. They have formed an echo chamber of their past history and dwell in it because they feel unthreatened by it. So much for the internet opening up the world.

Sure, at first we met people from overseas, but now we separate out by our interests, curate our friend lists, and stay wary of the unvetted randoms out there who might be willing to say something nasty or report us to the people who will ban us. Social media makes our world smaller, not bigger.

Even more, it alienates us from the idea of community. Since we react to everything, we form moral judgments, and reject anything that does not fit our ideology and lifestyle. This is similar to how committees avoid difficult issues and embrace doing the same thing over and over again.

It turns out that community requires not people who swipe away anything they do not like, but people who embrace the difficult stuff too:

My recent research suggests that when five core “productive frictions” are eliminated from that infrastructure, we strip away the very forces that keep communities strong, productive and together.

A recent study examined emotional intelligence scores from 28,000 adults across 166 countries and uncovered an alarming trend: global emotional intelligence has dropped nearly six percent between 2019 and 2024.

Community is not built solely through connection. It is built through interdependence, and interdependence is a human infrastructure that is deliberately inconvenient.

Maybe it is too easy to blame the internet. After diversity ate culture, nothing remains for us to talk about in public, so social media makes it easier to retreat into our phones and spend all our time in imaginary worlds with people we already know.

Social media creates an attention market where only that which causes a reaction in us gains any traction, so the important issues — usually these are not very stimulating — get bypassed in favor of whatever allows us to assert that our group is the best and our individual lives are the coolest.

As they say, technology does not change you, but it reveals you because now you have more time and choices, and how you spend those reflect what you are inside. If anything, we will never forgive social media for revealing that our civilization is in decline and no one is interested in solving that problem or even talking about it.

Tags: covid-19, fiction absolute, internet, rage bait, social media, trolling