The Internet has changed people. By the Z-Man.
[The Internet] has changed people by changing the selection pressures within society. …
Life on-line exaggerates certain features by removing constraints or offering incentives. The solitary nature of on-line life removes the social signals that people rely upon to figure out what they can say and what they should not say. …
Of course, things that get the user attention are rewarded with likes, clicks and views, so this encourages more of that behavior. It does not take long before the weak minded are consumed with attention seeking. Twitter is full of hollow people who amplify the current thing as a way to get attention. …
Clout chasers:
Another novelty that the digital age has brought is the clout chaser. This is a person who spends his days scanning the internet looking for the next thing so he can seem like the first person to get on it. These people front-run trends in order to present themselves as trendsetters. They will often glom onto a person, positively or negatively, who has a big following on-line. This lets them free-ride off that person to gain attention and followers for themselves.
This is not something that could exist in the analog age. Famous people had flunkies, but the flunky was never going to use their association with the famous person to make himself famous independent of the famous person.
Mike Cernovich could never have become a thing in the analog age by stalking famous people. On Twitter he was able to build a huge following mostly by front running trends he had no role in creating and glomming onto big Twitter accounts.
Beware the manufactured influencers:
Another version of this is the manufactured influencer. If you watch YouTube, you will have noticed that Lex Fridman was always in your suggestions. You could only watch woodworking videos, but YouTube would suggest to you a Fridman video. The reason is the people backing him paid YouTube to do it.
A similar thing is now happening with Jordan Peterson, who signed up with the Ben Shapiro operation. They are now paying to have Peterson promoted on YouTube.
They did the same thing with Ben Shapiro. The people behind the Daily Wire made a Mortimer and Randolph Duke type of bet to see if they could make this obscure hobbit man into a star. How they did it was social media. They paid to have Ben Shapiro pushed heavy to middle-class whites on Facebook. He was what they hoped young people were really thinking. It worked. This helium voiced nobody is now a household name and a major influencer of old white conservatives. …
Generations raised online are different:
This deranging of the public culture to now has mostly been about rewarding qualities and people that existed but were suppressed in the analog age. What we see with the Zoomers is a whole generation of people raised in this culture. …
Those born around the turn of the century are the first generation raised on the internet. This is their normal, as they never knew a world without the internet.
One result of this cohort being raised on-line is they lack the normal social skills that have defined human life for ten thousand years. People have noted that in real life, this cohort is shy, awkward and quite weird. On the other hand, they are the exact opposite as their on-line persona. Meet Nick Fuentes and you are not all that impressed as his social skills are non-existent. Turn on a mic or pull out a camera and he goes from shrinking violet to boisterous and confident.
The sexual selection of fathers by females is going to further change people. The fear is that the genetic characteristics that favor wokeness will be selected for. The woke borg forever…
