We have destroyed our public spaces, removed places for people to gather, made it illegal for youth to be unaccompanied in many public places, created helicopter parents and insufferable busybodies that call the police if a child so much as wanders outside the home, and have made any kind of IRL socialization either impossible or extremely difficult.
We have influencers and brands flooding social media to show you how worthless you are and how you need to look better, act different, dress this way or that. It creates a sense of anxiety, self-loathing, and hopelessness.
Especially if you’re young, you look around at the state of the world and wonder what fucking hope you have for any kind of future: loans for college that will be a boat anchor around your neck for basically the rest of your life, a climate catastrophe in progress, a fascist coup in progress, the absolute impossibility of home ownership, a job market that’s being torn apart by grifters, and rising inflation and costs of living without any increase in salaries.
The major social platforms are all dominated by algorithmically generated “content” that feeds on rage-baiting. Outside of YouTube, none of the platforms allow for any kind of long-form posts, so you’re limited in what you can say on a given topic, so you reduce it to the most distilled and condensed version. Something is mildly upsetting? Well, 280 characters isn’t enough for nuance, so rage-posting it is. And the more inflammatory, the more engagement it gets, which gets it in front of even more eyeballs.
YouTube actively pushes users down the alt-right rabbit hole.
So you’re already isolated, alone, separated from any kind of sense of community, and you try to find a replacement in social media. But it’s not the same. You’re already feeling hopeless about the world and the future. And this algorithm you’ve been swallowed by is fed by, and rewards, the worst impulses.
It’s not a “kids these days are so addicted to their phones these days and it’s making them depressed or violent” kind of issue. It’s an interconnected web of shit that’s feeding back and forth making everything worse. We’ve made a fucking awful world, and then the place where people are taking refuge is exacerbating all of it.
Oh, it’s not video games and heavy metal anymore?
Could it be waning opportunities, falling wages, rising prices, the erosion of democratic institutions, and the proliferation of fear-based marketing to maximise gun sales? No, surely social media is to blame. The US never had social problems, desperation, or poverty before the demonic internet.
