The Internet Broke Society

Yeah I know, everyone says it. But are they wrong?

I am not the first to make this argument, but I present it nonetheless because I believe it too. The switch to the online world is breaking the physical world.

Humans are not wireless, but the online world is. And that is the crux of the issue. It isn’t one technology that tears at society, it’s the aggregate use of all of them.

Even before the pandemic, there were worrying stories about the increase in violence in our young in schools. But health care was seeing the same increase, as we saw the same in other public settings. The pandemic, when everything shifted online, caused a noticeable uptick in this problem.

“When I was a child” we had many social conventions that caused us to be with others, to be with strangers. Church, School, Social Clubs, Scouts/Guides, Sports etc. As time passes, more and more of these are being stripped away and replaced with digital alternatives. The arguments for each have merits, but in the aggregate, at what cost?

Since the pandemic, the biggest social change is work from home. I choose it because everyone has strong feelings on it. In isolation, coherent arguments can be made for and against, and the ‘for’ side is very, very strong.

But…

We now have a world where it is entirely possible that your only physical interactions are with family or close friends. Your physical interactions could easily be limited to literally a handful of people. And even those interactions could be few each week. From birth until death. That could be your entire life now. Other than school, it already was that way for my kids. And then the COVID pandemic took school away for a long time…

Now, I am not saying return to the office is the only way to save society from total anarchy. It is a sad point that the corporate office is the last refuge of social interaction with random people. Making that argument is missing the forest for the trees. So this is not that. The example chosen is a single tree in the forest that is the problem.

Evolutionary we were never designed to be a wireless society. What curbs the excesses of our nature is the society that nurtures us. The norms and conventions that continuously evolve to create a civil and peaceful society. With the advent of online tools, we have pushed that society as far away as possible. We also are pushing away the opportunities to learn the norms and conventions that allowed us to be civil. We didn’t and don’t learn everything from our parents. All those social interactions at other places played their part in shaping us, and thereby growing the society that we live in. (I guess in the dim recesses of the techbro mindset there is the recognition of this fact, hence the woeful and misbegotten Metaverse once again.) As we no longer shape ourselves with physical interactions, social evolution halts. And even starts to decline?

I have always argued that specific technologies do not create new human behaviour; they amplify them or make them visible where they were hidden. Video games do not breed violence. Social Media didn’t create anti-social behaviour. But what I am appreciating is that the total absence of the alternative methods, the physical methods, of interacting with each other are manifesting very negative consequences for society as a whole. We’re more anti-social with each other, and all too often, violently so. We don’t know how to socialize in person, because we never have to. For some time now we actively prevent our children from doing so , an unsupervised child playing outside is now considered neglect.

If this all sounds familiar and mirrors what you have read somewhere else, and you find yourself nodding in agreement, then why do we keep following this socially destructive path? If it is so obvious and intuitive, why do we keep doing it.

Because we are selfish, and because what is good for the individual (remote learning, work from home, streaming entertainment, food delivery, etc.) in aggregate causes harm to the social bonds we make with each other.

Are you going to return to the office so that you do your part to save society? Of course not. That’s an absurd sacrifice of the self. The problem with calling all selfish behaviour bad is that we miss the part were the root of ‘selfish’ is ‘self’. We are individuals with individual needs and goals, and we often need to be selfish. And that is the continuous tension between the self and society. The area where that tension exists, where we need to be selfish or selfless is grey and opaque as hell.

And yet… how do we rebuild those physical connections with people that are not friends and family without the historical obligations of work, church and school? How do we heal the divisions of our society?

Do we require a massive Carrington Event to force us offline for a long time? Do we need to un-plug the internet entirely because we cannot use it responsibly?

Or do we just ride this out over the next ten thousand years (if we have that long) and let evolution sort it out?

All I am certain of is that we cannot rely on technology to solve a human problem. We keep trying, and it never works. And the rise and the dominance of the online world is tearing us apart.

P.S. And now even the online world is distancing us even further as technology seeks to replace even that interaction with AI. Will we even talk to each other in the future? Or will we only interact with the AI representations of each other that comes as part of our subscription to MetaXAmazon.TwitchDiscourse.com?