Modern isolation and digital capitalism

In the 21st century, we’ve seen more people than ever before wind-up as recluses, confined to their rooms consuming a vast variety of media content. In a world that is often boring, it’s easy to get sucked into online entertainment because the content is so much more varied and extreme. Sometimes, when you’re on an airplane for instance or have downtime at work, it’s perfectly understandable. However, it becomes more and more of a problem when it consumes more and more of what you do in your off-time, as younger people often use it as a convenient substitute for real life interactions. The rise in the number of NEETs we see today can be attributed to many factors and causes, but digital technology has created an avenue through which people can experience stimulation in their homes, allowing them to ignore the stresses outside those doors. In the 1970’s, when there were three channels on television and you couldn’t order food or other products nearly as easily, you could not be a couch potato. In the 2020’s, being a couch potato is actually easier than being an active, healthy human being and that’s a genuine problem.

Most people today have an online presence, but in Generation Z especially, the online presence of people constitutes the majority of who they are. Whereas in the past, what sports you played, what hobbies you had, what field you worked in, and other things were real-world indicators of what you probably were like as a person, for younger people it can be summed up purely by their sites most visited, how they treat their social media profiles, and the online groups they’re a part of. It creates a softer generation, with more distance from the real-world around them, and in these isolation chambers where they often just hear positive feedback when they agree with the hiveminds of their groups, digital technologies truly start to mold these people. It’s entirely the reason why we have a lot of the social perversions we see today in Weimerica, although unlike the Weimar Republic, these spectacles of depravity have become national talking points and grown far beyond anything the most radical of sociologists in the 20th century have predicted. Almost 40% of Generation Z and even 30% of young Christians identify as LGBT, which is truly frightening to any normal person.

This isn’t because being gay is bad but because those are alarming, clearly unnatural numbers, and if a biologist were to observe these changes in an animal population, they’d certainly worry about that species’ future. When almost half a group doesn’t reproduce, we’d have to almost double birthrates to keep up a stable population, and in the modern world today, where we see birthrates almost universally dropping, that isn’t happening. Those numbers concerning the percentage of Generation Z who identify as LGBT show that either these online groups pressure people into adopting these beliefs about themselves or the hormonal disruptions caused by xenoestrogens, and other chemicals are changing people that much or that porn, with an addiction profile similar to cocaine and more accessible and niche than ever, is rewiring our sexualities. The truth is that the digital era, when combined with the radicalized liberalism of America and the dysfunctional world young people are brought into, creates a very powerful form of escapism for people. Unlike traditional forms of escapism, like D&D and reading, this escapism because of its social elements brings people into participating in communities populated by people with similar experiences, views, and problems. It’s a compounding situation, where the most involved are often the most troubled, partly because of the time they take out of their lives to contribute to these groups and forums, where the dialogue lead by these lumpenproletarians inevitably doesn’t do much to help their impressionable readers.

In a world where we often lack the same opportunities our parents and grandparents had, where the outdoors for many Americans often consist of parking lots and strip malls, it isn’t surprising that many millions of people consign themselves to using the internet as their main outlet for entertainment and communication. It’s just that it’s strictly immaterial, does little to better peoples’ situations, and is akin to drug use, in that it’s a momentary cure to the symptoms of material and social problems. I recently found out about the case of Grant Amato, a man who spent four hours every night while he was unemployed talking to a Bulgarian camgirl, paying her to help him live out a fantasy of a relationship with a far more attractive woman. Grant ultimately murdered his mother, father, and brother, after being caught spending over $200,000 on the camgirl, with money that he had stolen from his family. It goes without saying that if Grant Amato had improved the material circumstances in his life, by getting a new job, to expand his social connections and going to the gym to improve his appearance, that he would never have done what he had. Digital technology, because of its ability to let people play out things in their head, while the world melts down around them, is very dangerous for people in already vulnerable situations.

At the end of the day, I’m all for limiting the use of the internet for some people, because it distracts them from working out their material conditions in the real life, instead diverting their attentions and resources to the inane social conditions of escapist communities. People do deserve to be able to live happy and fulfilling lives, and at the end of the day, if they can’t do that on their own due to things like internet addictions, porn addictions, and alcoholism, then society has the right to cut them off. No humane society would allow for people to wallow in their own misery, no humane society would allow for online communities to assist hurt people into “transitioning genders,” and so on. At the end of the day, the social conditions of the internet take on a hyper-constructivist tone, with trends and thoughts playing off of each other, never needing to address the realities of the material world at all as long as it feeds into the feelings of the users. The digital era has enslaved many people to technology, acting as a crutch for many people that could walk fine without it, and we need to re-examine just who gets to access it.