Antisocial Conditioning and the Community Offscreen

Young men, and young people more widely, feel lonely because they spend so much time alone. Gaming might seem like a community, but it’s usually experienced in isolation, in a dark room, and in online spaces where antisocial behavior is just as common as friendship. Trolling is a feature of everyday life, and it breeds nihilism online as well as offline. Instead of doing anything to pursue a real life girlfriend, just quickly pop into a porn site, goon, and hurry back to shooting enemies.

Teenagers are experiencing high rates of mental illness because their minds are being constantly subjected to insanity, depravity, computer hallucinations, ragebait, consumerism, and bullying. The dizzying spectacle of online life is a whirlwind for those of us whose prefrontal cortex didn’t develop fully inside it. Imagine if your mental agility were conditioned to attend to 100 notifications per hour, between the ages of 7 and 17. Their brains are overwhelmed and they’re addicted to dopamine, willing to do anything to get the next rush, including the attention that comes from acting out in the real world. This includes politically dangerous behavior that is branded “rebellious” as it conveniently erodes many decades of social and political progress at the behest of the rich.

Wealth is concentrated in the hands of seven tech companies, and 40% of the US economic growth is teetering on investments in AI alone, because US social media users are now the primary commodity traded in our country. The data we provide these platforms about us helps them sell to us, and the content we upload serves as feed stock for their plagiarism machines. Our attention is their goal, and they’re using the most sophisticated technology ever produced to hold that attention as long as possible, distort our perceptions of its normalcy, and accept its encroachment into every area of our lives. Tiny sparkle buttons appear everywhere. “Did you want to imagine what you’d look like with a pretty face using our plastic surgery AI?”

Tech billionaires are using their immense wealth to prop up the Trump Administration, buying up media, and obeying totalitarian directives to bend opinion pages, social media platforms, newspapers, and late night comedy, to continue this indefinitely. The Zero Interest Rate Policy of the 2010s flooded the market with cash, most of which went directly to the super rich. With more wealth than any human beings in history, the big seven CEOs want another crash and another dip into the piggybank, without regard for inflation. The boom bust cycle is great for business, and we’re riding on the tail end of a boom, hoping to rush through the bust, and make a few more trillion dollars to reinvest in the next cycle.

[Insert social network] is obsessed with labubu matcha latte Benson Boone Dubai chocolate skibidi ozempic because we’re all getting served the same promoted content on the same platforms by an algorithm we were sure was just for us, but it turns out, is blanketing society with uniform slop. The engagement farm clogs our timelines with AI generated images of Bob Dylan crying about the death of Charlie Kirk, “you’ll never believe it happened” click bait articles, rage triggers like “Trump 2028,” and advertisements to sell us a respite from the madness and cure our collective loneliness, mental illness, depression, and body image issues.

There are more complicated reasons for all this – decades of gutting public education, culminating in the shutdown of the Department of Education by a pro-wrestling CEO. The manufacture of culture through right wing institution building between the 60s and the present, from the founding of Herittage and Cato and AEI, all the way to Turning Point USA and now the takeover of the newsrooms. Unaffordable and low-quality healthcare means people turn to the internet for information on health – from the early days of Web M.D., which was widely regarded as a joke, to teenagers using ChatGPT as a therapist because it doesn’t cost what actual therapy costs, and it’s in their pocket and not across town, with the embarrassment of being involed with a real healthcare professional who will know your secrets. People are ending their marriages because ChatGPT is a better friend than the person who gave them a ring and children.

But the simplest explanation for the state of our world this last 20 years is to look to the new omnipresent fun machine in everyone’s hands and pockets. These devices and technologies are programmed to take hours of our day, sell us things, steal our personal information, and convince us to take whatever action most validates our own ego, at the expense of human relationships. From the early days of Friending, Unfriending, Muting and Blocking, we’ve learned that people are commodities we use digital tools to manage and mediate, rather than full expressions of a soul and humanity outside ourselves. We insist that others in our lives are perfect, or we discard them. We shrink our circles to homogenous, uniformly-conditioned cliques. Occasionally someone pops up online to connect us to a broader grouping – a movement, an event, a spectacle in the real world that connects to the conditions online. It all flies under the banner “social,” even as it encourages navel gazing as we collect and discard friends, express likes, and proffer ego-driven commentary on others’ statuses and vacation photos. Most of us don’t know how to register political dissent outside their frameworks, which is why billionaires will allow us to share videos and posts as a form of protest– it threatens nothing and costs us everything. 

The internet was the promise of the whole world at our fingertips. But social media has made our fingertips and immediate field of vision the only world that matters. The tech companies aren’t worried about burning down the forests and fouling the air and boiling the drinking water, because so few of us engage with and observe those things as sacred, at least not in comparison to the holiest object in our society, the black mirror in our pockets that will show us anything we want to see, and where we can block out anything that doesn’t feel perfect. It even sells you solutions to the problems it causes. If your body bloats from sitting sedentary, and you express your desire to lose weight in a comment or within earshot of a microphone, you’ll quickly be served ads for a wonder drug which simply removes the desire to eat from your pesky corporeal form. If you lose your chin from constantly looking down, you can purchase FaceTune and apply a photorealistic filter to your photograph, until you can afford the trip to Indonesia to fix your jawline on the cheap. If you need a counselor, BetterHelp is here. If you feel out of touch, join a Discord of people just like you, until it inevitably collapses over internal differences.

The solution is obvious, if deeply unpopular, since popularity is now solely a measure of how much engagement on social media any one idea can produce. It’s time to abandon hope for these platforms to do anything except exploit our brains, bodies, wealth, social formations, and political systems. These are not family reunions, they’re funerals. These are not dating sites, they’re breakups. These are not communities, they’re cubicle farms. We’re swarmed in antisocial conditioning that masquerades as community, while eroding the communities that wait for us just offscreen. Friends, family, loved ones, neighbors, fellow constituents, comrades all pass by the windows of our cages as we slam the electric shock buttons and down the pellets that keep us living, but not thriving. We are addicted to customized marketing platforms where we sell our own rapid eye and finger movement, like human batteries in the Matrix, and are rewarded with pablum which inhibits our connection to other people through anything other than wires, tubes, and mail-order fast fashion. 

To people looking to organize, or sell online: jump ship. Start a website. Create your own app ecosystem outside the cacophony. Drive your audiences off of social media. Technology can connect people, but it is not a substitute for human connection. Build loyalty in meet ups and virtual spaces where phones and notifications are silent. Zero screen time for the children. Talk to your elders about why the iPad doesn’t work anymore. Lie to vulnerable people who are too addicted to make the right choice, even if they’re mad at you for it, if that’s what it takes to get them to pull the tube out of their throat and step outside for a real meal. 

The likelihood that I, or you, do this is slim. But that’s the mental environment. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is logging off. And that limitation on your imagination, and loss of all possible futures outside the cage, is our choice.