the crisis of the modern era
Recently, I have been facing a sort of existential dread, brought about by thoughts on a plethora of things. I have been struggling to formulate these thoughts into a coherent and explainable blog post, but hopefully writing this will allow for me to organize and meditate on them. I can only speak on my own experience, but perhaps there are takeaways for the general populace.
Today, I went into the office for a mandatory training. As I sat at the desk and opened my laptop, I began to feel hyperaware of the situation I was in. It was almost as if I had woken up from being controlled by some sort of protocol.
I feel that I have been forced into living a life that is not mine. Not by any one person, but by indoctrination from school. It all starts with school. From eight in the morning until three in the afternoon, we were forced to sit at a desk and do work. It’s almost as if the entire school system was preparation for the corporate life. Presentations. Group projects. Every single activity in school has its corporate analogue.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe that education is important, but in my eyes, the current education system creates two outputs:
- High achievers that go on to the corporate life or white collar jobs
- Individuals that are complacent with the status quo
This is important, since output I allows corporations to have suitable workers, while output II results in a complacent population that doesn’t have the capability of checking capitalism. This perpetuates the k-shaped economy present in late-stage capitalism, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, with the “middle class” diminishing.
Now, this might seem like some mumbo-jumbo anti-capitalist and anti-work rambling – and maybe it is, but I promise I have more to ramble about.
Now, this is where things get interesting, as currently, the majority of the population is on social media of some kind. Check out these crazy stats from worldmetrics.org:
“Americans spend 7 hours and 18 minutes daily on phones, tablets, computers, and TVs outside work or school. Adults aged 18 to 29 reach 8 hours and 12 minutes on media each day.”
That is a massive amount of time, and note that this is outside of work or school. So that results in an eight hour work or school day followed by seven to eight more hours of screens. And that’s it. That’s the day. Now, my screen time isn’t quite as bad, but I do work as a software developer, and I do play video games as a hobby. My phone has my screen time at around three to four hours each day.
Regardless, my point is that the social media, and the internet by extension, has the general populace in an absolute chokehold. This by itself is widely known and unfortunately there is little resistance. People have been taught to like the internet. For many, it feels like a “safe place”. As humans, we are genetically wired to repeat patterns that keep us safe and comfortable. However, this results in repercussions that ripple outwards.
One repercussion is that a chronically online individual lives a life of control and comfort. That is to say, one who is chronically online is not challenged to leave their comfort zone. I believe that this is the cause of “self-diagnosed autism” that has become more and more popular nowadays. I also believe that this causes many other problems, such as BPD, anxiety, and depression.
Another repercussion is that the chronically online individual becomes solitary. Humans are social creatures, and this goes directly against our nature. The pandemic accelerated this immensely, and I, for one, am still dealing with (and attempting to recover from) social anxiety issues stemming from COVID. Living a solitary life causes a whole slew of problems, but the main issue I want to focus on is that of dating and relationships.
For the chronically online, there are only a couple ways to meet a significant other, those being through mutual online friends on a platform like Discord or Reddit, or the much more popular avenue of dating apps. Dating apps provide dating-as-a-service (DaaS). Do you hear how dumb that sounds? Not only do dating apps allow individuals to treat dating like a game, but it also allows corporations to control the chronically online. In other words, if you want to be matched with someone, you gotta pay up.
Now, I’ve touched on how dating apps control those who are chronically online. Sure, this is bad, but I think that the recent (I mean it’s been 3 years now) advances in AI escalate this to a very threatening level. When a person is online, they lose context. For example, in real life, I can see someone do a backflip with my own two eyes. They are tangible. I can talk with them. I can appreciate the absurdity of such a thing. However, for those who experience life online, this could simply be an AI imitation. Eventually, there will be no way to tell whether something someone sees online is real or fake. For the chronically online, who live a life in which what they see on the internet is reality, this means that they are experiencing an imitation of real life which is fabricated by AI models peddled by large corporations.
Additionally, AI models reduce the capacity of humans to critical think. It kind of makes sense. Your brain is a muscle; if you don’t work it out, it won’t work as well. This study reports that using AI models for tasks results in the accumulation of “cognitive debt”. In other words, brain connectivity is reduced when using LLMs. A population that cannot think is a population that can be controlled. See 1984.
I believe that if this pattern continues, humans, at least in the United States, will live unfulfilling and regretful lives that are exploited by corporations. However, I also believe that there are many individuals that also feel this way, and that a subset of the population will continue to thrive with a minimally online lifestyle.
This paints a grim picture of the current state of social affairs, but being aware of this makes me feel a few ways. For myself, I’m glad that I captured this idea in this blog post. It really helped me make sense of the ideas I’ve been having as of late, and I hope that I can stop this pattern before it takes hold of me. I’m also feeling tired of the digital landscape of today. As a software developer, I really do think that computing and the internet can create so much good. It’s just in the hands of the wrong people at the current time. I’m optimistic, since I know humanity can pull through. It’s just a matter of getting people to realize what we’re losing when we turn to an increasingly digital lifestyle.