You no longer have an excuse to be on :reddit-logo: outside niche hobby subreddits.
I was thinking about 30 minutes ago that the internet itself is kind of an aberration that really only grew into what it is now because the majority of the societies in which it became a dominant form of communication are intensely alienating places. After my horny screed in the megathread I took massive morale damage and realized I need to log off but then I thought: what is there “out there”? The North American social landscape doesn’t seem all that great to me. I always found it telling that the majority of the most online people seem to always be from suburban hellholes.
People back then didn’t need the internet because outside was the fucking internet. Maybe I’m a cynic but I think of all the time I’ve spent online and I’m not sure that time has been more valuable than time spent outside. Maybe there is something to be said about it being a “cosmopolitan” place where you can meet all kinds of different people, but when 9999099999% of the people you meet are Langley bots spouting racist canards or pretty much no different from the average nerd you can find at your college’s gaming club what the hell is even the point?
Perhaps I am being far too critical.
the whole “This is the bad website, you need an excuse to go on the bad website!!!” shit is terminally online culture-war masturbation
twitter is full of liberals
tumblr is full of liberals
twitch is full of liberals
reddit is full of liberals
discord is full of liberals
the real actual world is full of liberals
The others you’re right about but Tumblr is full of communists and is virtually unmoderated outside of the porn ban
in my experience it’s mostly radlibs and yankee vaguelefts, but that’s just the “mainstream” of tumblr i guess
Quasi-relevant story; During rural electrification in the first half of the 20th century they started running power lines to fairly isolated farmhouses. Like “Your neighbor is a mile down the road, and his neighbor is a mile further than that” isolated. Places where you couldn’t really stop in to chat while you had shit to do. But due to some kind of socialist insanity it was decided that rural electrification was good, so they were running power lines all through these isolated low population density areas. And it turns out that you can run phone lines just as easily as you run power lines, so all these very isolated people were getting phones for the very first time. Back then there weren’t really individual phone lines. The phone was always on. You’d pick it up and ask to speak to the telephone operator, and that person would manually route your telephone connection. But that meant that everyone on the circuit could essentially pick up the phone and either talk or listen in to anyone else on the circuit. So all these rural farmers were basically in a big group chat with each other in the evenings when it was too dark to work but they weren’t in bed yet. People could actually socialize without devoting big chunks of the day to travelling.
Well, what happened is rural suicides plummeted.
Yeah, I feel this. I live in a small city (100k population) where the bus system kinda sucks and I don’t drive / will never own a car. “Go outside” to meet people is a ridiculous idea – there isn’t a single place in this horrible town where other young people actually hang out anymore. To be honest I don’t even know wtf people do to meet each other besides join hiking Meet Up groups… very lonely, shitty town if you are young and especially if you don’t drive.
I don’t meet people outside. I have brief, entirely transactional encounters with people when I buy stuff or work. I never see those people again. I don’t interact with people in any meaningful way otherwise. Being online isn’t the problem. Society is just as isolated and alienating outside as it is inside. Third spaces and places for community socializing have been ruthlessly exterminated across the continent. If you’re not an alcoholic or religious there aren’t really options to meet and talk with people in face to face.
the majority of the societies in which it became a dominant form of communication are intensely alienating places
4chan developed from America’s neoliberal colonization in “post-fascist” (?) Japan
I have also felt similarly for a while. I always think back to that George Carlin piece where he calls out how pathetic transforming the continent to strip malls and parking lots is. I go outside practically everyday it’s nice out and if it’s not the same shitty house copy-pasted thousands of times, then it’s a sea of shitty businesses that are somehow still open mixed in with dilapidated buildings separated by enormous swathes of land dedicated solely to cars. The one constant is a disgusting ambience either from lawn equipment or all of the cars, depending on where you are. That and the poison you have to breathe in from walking within ten feet of cars and weed killer.
