We live upon the remnants of the old ways of human gathering and collaboration. The current dystopia of culture and community was conceived from it and is in the process of dismantling what’s left of the old ways. This new way, like any child, while they have their own unique traits and abilities, they retain some traits of their parents. However, concepts such as culture, community and society are not organisms. Therefore, they can cast off or manipulate the inherited traits of its ideological forebears.
Ideology or intellectual theory can exist indefinitely as long as a sentient being either teaches it to another being or stores this information for another being to discover. The oldest way to store this information is through the written word, and, through the innovation in technology, has allowed for the retention of knowledge developed by our ancestors to become more efficient and effective. For thousands of years, humanity has attempted to develop better ways of recording, storing and transferring intellectual concepts.
It is important to remember this because texts by influential writers, like Aristotle, have been lost to history or fragments of texts are found hundreds of years later. In today’s world storing information has become so simple and effective that we do not even think about this, which shows how much work has gone into storing information. This is how democracy, for example, survived a slumber of over 1500 years to reappear suddenly 1776 and then continue spread across multiple civilizations over the proceeding centuries.
With the advent of computers, artificial intelligence, digital media and the metaverse, humanity has accelerated the process of a new way of being. It has transformed the way humanity functions shaping how we work, communicate, educate and store information. The digital plane, discovered—not even 100 years ago—has grown rapidly and, with more innovations on the way, threatens to swallow up and devour the biological human plane of existence. The plane of human origin that has sustained and shaped us is being abandoned as if it is “outdated” or irrelevant.
The digital plane is a trojan horse, precisely because it can be shown to have brought many positive outcomes to society. It has led to an explosion of enhancing knowledge, research, communication and entertainment. It also allows anyone in the world with the access to a device, that has internet connection, to participate in this world. However, it specifically seeks to manipulate all the foundations that human existence has used/created to grow and survive as a species. It is tampering with foundations that took our ancestors thousands of years of trial and error to achieve. My back-of-the-napkin theory is that as the digital plane of existence continues to grow the human plane of existence will continue to corrode. In other words, the more humanity spends time building “social” networks online the weaker the human social networks become in the physical world.
Some may wish to see proof, but I argue that there is no need; for all can see this pain of digitalization. We are all glued to our phones, watching tik toks, reading tweets, losing ourselves in the scroll of the news feed. We fear our human interactions, especially that terrible moment of silence in conversations, where we quickly turn to our phones for comfort. We walk around “neighborhoods” not knowing who even lives 3 doors down from us, yet we know all about the lives of influencers that most of us will never know and will never speak to one on one. We watch their thoughts without ever sharing our own on equal footing. For a more detailed examination of what social media is doing to our mental health and societies, an excellent book explaining the corrosive effects of social media is Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.
Regardless of the initial intention of social media and, I would argue, the internet, the digital world has become a cesspool of community. The reasons it is this way is hard to say, but it is safe to say that the economics of the internet definitely played a large role in shaping what the digital world has become today. We are led to believe the internet and the websites we visit are free of charge, but you would only be half right. For you, yes, most sites will not charge you money to join their site. The question is how do these companies and websites afford to pay the bills? How can they make a profit if they don’t charge you anything to use their site?
The answer is that they sell the data you provide. You are the product they sell to other companies and governments.
Exposes have been done on how companies make their sites addicting to consumers with the goal to keep you engaged on the site for as long as possible. It has been reported that they use psychology to design their sites in a way that will keep you coming back for more. The way you scroll on your site or the swiping mechanism are designed to trigger gambling and game theory response. It isn’t about supplying you with the best experience while using the site, they do that only if that corresponds with keeping you on their site longer. The goal isn’t to make your life better or healthier. On the altar of profit your mental health is sacrificed and instead of acknowledging this we are told to pop an anti-depressant or anxiety medication to feel better. We are told that something is wrong with us, when, in fact, more likely than not, there is nothing “wrong” with us, but with how the internet is structured and sustained.
Your brain and body are trying to tell you something. Both are attempting to warn you about this digital world and this lie of society; of community. It knows it’s poison, your subconscious does at least, but the addict in us hates to admit this. The addict wants that rush of dopamine, and the companies designed their sites to be this way to keep you consistently coming back for more. This way they can keep collecting data on you and build a revenue model to keep existing and allow you to have a free from payment service to enjoy. In turn, we can see that there is no such thing as a free lunch and, if we keep this revenue model system, society will continue to degrade.
Finally, I would like to highlight one key difference between the digital plane of existence and the human plane of existence. The human plane of existence has no human master, the universe has its own operations that humans adapt, and attempt to, manipulate. Digital plane is different. It was created by humans and therefore is controlled by human thought and human action. This means that we do not all have an equal say on how the digital world operates because all of the websites and games we play online have owners of the domain and the intellectual property. They can do whatever they want and you have no say.
The assault on the freedom of speech has already begun. If a social media company finds you or your content to controversial, they will remove your post or your channel/account. There is no system of accountability, but even more critically, there is no way to stop this process from happening in the digital world. If you google wants to hide your website or content from its search engine, it can do that, and it is like you never existed. In the real world they can’t stop you from speaking and sharing your opinions.
Yes, they can throw you in jail or worse, but they can’t stop you from existing; they can’t control the human plane of existence. You can go outside, stand on a street corner and speak or distribute reading material and no one has the ability to stop your action from happening. They have to physically do something to stop you, but that is a reaction to you action, not a proactive move. It might seem irrelevant, but that ability to be proactive and have that freedom is becoming, and will be, more vital as time goes on. Online, they can just delete and censor everything you have ever done or said with a use of an algorithm.
Their ability to control what is or isn’t allowed is omnipotent in the digital world, to the point where people are self-censoring their speech so that they will not get punished by the algorithm. If that isn’t evidence of effective social control, then I don’t know what would be. If this is what is happening at the digital world’s infancy, what’s going to happen in the future? And if the digital world’s goal is to keep us obsessed staring at a screen rather than at the people around us, what is the benefit?