> It creates a simulacrum of the world which does not correspond to the tangible reality I see around me.
5–10 years ago I would have agreed: “The real world is so different from the terminally-online space.” But the terminally-online space has seeped into real life all over the world. For example, I have traveled the developing world a lot in the last two years, and it’s unbelievable how many young men want to talk to me about Andrew Tate and related things when they see I’m a man from the West. Even in countries with shaky English skills, certain online memes are big.
Or take when I bikepacked a remote route down Mexico that is popular with Americans: in spite of this route being largely a two-month break from being always online, the conversations when those American cyclists met up were often indistinguishable from the social or political outrage that engagement-maximizing platforms stoke. Even if you disconnect, you can’t repair the damage.
This is a really important comment, and I think people don't understand just how much the "call is coming from inside the house." We have really, really polluted our minds with all this trash outrage content. TV might have been stupid, but watching too much Cheers or Simpsons just never did this kind of damage.
A minor point might also be that TV was far less addictive (non-linear, personalized,...) and consumption was significantly harder (carrying a TV is difficult, even in watch format)
Back in the day, when you went onto the internet, you exited the Real World and went into the Internet World. I remember when like, there was one internet-connected device in the household, it was a computer with a keyboard that you sat down on. And it worked like you would "log on" to AOL instant messenger, and then when you "logged out" you'd have an "away message" that would indicate that you were offline, living your life, IRL. How quaint, right? You'd never have an "away message" nowadays -- you're never "away"!
These millenial terms of art have almost entirely disappeared. When's the last time you heard IRL?
Now, you (the general 'you', I mean, who spend 5-7 hours a day on social media) are always online. So when you log off, you're entering the Offline World, where you have to do some stupid BS that is totally boring and unstimulating. You wait to log on to figure out what happened in the Internet World, which actually has inserted itself and taken place of the Real World. Before, the important stuff, socially, culturally, politically, happened offline. Now, it's inverted; the important stuff socially, culturally, and politically, is happening online.
Unfortunately, this happened without any of us consenting or really knowing that it was happening. And like, parent comment put it perfectly: it's a simulacra of reality, with deeply bizarre/non-human scale rules, some explicitly built (algorithms, content policies, video filters etc.) and some totally implicit (viral behavior, memes, misinformation, AI).
The AI thing is also fucking crazy and it's happening in the Internet World. Y'all ain't seen nothing yet. It will get so much weirder. imho, it's horrific. The internet is like an alien facehugger for your mind, it will just totally fuck you up; the more you use it, the more mentally fucked up you will get. Most people have the alien facehugger totally strapped to their face and they don't even know it.
I feel like cyberspace was never meant to use your real name and identity. The entire point was that you were free from the constraints of the real world to be something else.
Cyberspace is still alive and well though at the individual level. The only social media I have is twitter with no followers and I have never posted anything. I don't cultivate any kind of online "brand" of my real world self. My twitter is basically an art machine that shows me wonderful works of art. Even the slightest mention of political nonsense, I block the sender no matter who it is.
Society is a lost cause in this regard but the individual can still enter cyberspace if they want to.
The real lost cause is even the word "simulation" is lost to a science fiction computer internet fantasy as opposed to the process of creating and sustaining simulacra like most people are spending their lives doing on social media.
This is a cool perspective. I never really considered that there were that many people for whom there's no difference between Internet Life and Real Life. We used to call these people "chronically online." To me, Internet is still something I sit down to deliberately do. I don't carry my phone around with me unless I plan to use it for something. Otherwise it sits in a drawer (and often has no battery left by the time I get around to needing it for something).
Nothing that happens on the Internet really affects my life. Someone could be flaming me on Twitter right now, and I don't know and don't care, and it will never reach into my real life. When I log off for the day and someone replies to this thread telling me I'm wrong, I won't know it until tomorrow morning when I log back in, and it won't have affected my sleep or anything. You can still keep Internet and IRL separate.
> But the terminally-online space has seeped into real life all over the world.
That's Baudrillard's point, who popularized one sense of the term "simulacrum." Not quite real, but not quite fiction either - something that straddles the boundary between the two as "hyperreality."
I know that HN culturally frowns on video links and unexplained references, so to be explicit:
The seeping of the internet into the real world is an important theme of the anime Serial Experiments Lain, which is excellent, and if you generally like anime and resonate with the kind of stuff that people are bringing up in this subthread, then I recommend giving it a watch.
I think the experience of jumping between destinations where people might be specifically interested in a sort of retail American culture is probably quite poluted unfortunately. I'm Canadian, but I don't feel the same sense of "lost cause" when I just talk to people I know in my community or at the gym where conversation goes marginally deeper than the most superficially relatable bits of sensational media.
I talk to my friends in their 30s about their relationships or lack of, the hobbies we enjoy, adventures we could go on, difficulties or success at work, family life, economic stuff, random ideas. Online stuff comes up almost only ironically at this point. Granted, I do specifically narrow the people I maintain ties with to only those I can engage with at that level and/or who are otherwise fun to be around. If even a noticeable minority of conversation was chronically online garbage or fake culture war crap, they just get muted/blocked like the rest of them and a friendship doesn't flourish, usually because in real life we can work through our real disagreements if they come up at all, but if it's derived from a presumption we should both be more mad or more aware of nonsense we don't need to think about, it's far more difficult.
I think this is true but the original point still stands. Online world now definitely plays a bigger role but I'd still suspect that for the majority online issues/drama are still a small % of what their real world looks like. Despite the media (social or news) bombarding the space with their 'model' of the world.
It has always felt to me like an amped up version of what the news is. As someone who has largely spent most of life as an immigrant, from a family of mostly immigrants all across the world, we always find it amusing how you get messages from people about the big x thing going on in whatever country you are, as per what is going on in the news/social media, and the person you're messaging is literally unaware that that is a big deal or is affected by it even indirectly enough for it to register. Anectodally, that happens far more frequently now than it did 5-10 years ago
We reshape reality to match the mental models we create. To the extent this has always been the case I have to accept it, but it feels like we're in a logarithmic curve of that pattern becoming faster and more powerful.
This resonates deeply with me. I don’t have any social media accounts, I’ve never been on tiktok or instagram, and the one social media I did have (facebook), I deleted 10 years ago. Yet I still can tell when there’s a new meme or trend. This is new though. Only in the last year or two have I felt like social media has really invaded offline spaces.
One of the things that I really enjoyed about bikepacking (GDMBR, various others) was that when you really get out in BFE, you meet people that live very different lives than you. They were also almost always quite nice, which was a pleasant surprise to this coastal city dweller.
Yup. Interacting with the Mexican rancheros was really nice. But so many of the American cyclists I shared the BD with were almost caricatures of highly-online, outraged people. Why do I need to hear from people I just met talk about “TERFs”, or other Tumblr- and Twitter-disseminated memes, or be asked to take sides in political races I had never even heard of (because I’m not even from their country and state and don’t follow their local politics)? It was something that we foreign cyclists noted and wanted to get away from.
5–10 years ago I would have agreed: “The real world is so different from the terminally-online space.” But the terminally-online space has seeped into real life all over the world. For example, I have traveled the developing world a lot in the last two years, and it’s unbelievable how many young men want to talk to me about Andrew Tate and related things when they see I’m a man from the West. Even in countries with shaky English skills, certain online memes are big.
Or take when I bikepacked a remote route down Mexico that is popular with Americans: in spite of this route being largely a two-month break from being always online, the conversations when those American cyclists met up were often indistinguishable from the social or political outrage that engagement-maximizing platforms stoke. Even if you disconnect, you can’t repair the damage.