Transport yourself thirty years back in time.

It is 1995, Wonderwall by Oasis is number one on the charts, OJ Simpson was on trial for the murder of his wife, the Oklahoma bombing took place, Ebay was launched, Windows 1995 was released. And of course, every woman was wearing Jennifer Aniston hair.

Are you there? Now let's think about a few scenarios.

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1. You are sitting with a guy friend and he tells you about one of his common hobbies. What he does is take explicit photos of himself, prints them out, and then distributes them to strangers on the street.

2. You are sitting in a café having a snack. You take a photo of your food. You take several photos of yourself at different angles. You then get them printed, invite friends around to your place, and then show them the photos you have taken. Your friends comment "cute" and make heart signs with their hands at each one, but say nothing else.

3. You are at home eating dinner and a friend walks in the front door and then walks around your house, looking at the things you have recently bought, looks at the dinner you are having and then walks out without saying anything.

4. You are talking with a female friend and she says that for work, she stands naked in a window facing the street with a tip jar, touching herself and using a dildo for strangers to watch and pay her some coins. She is in one of many similar windows of women in the same street. She considers it female empowerment.

Do these scenarios sound odd?

I believe that if we are being honest with ourselves and not rewriting our own history, we would consider these scenarios not only strange, but absolutely absurd at the time. Yet, less than three decades later, they have become the norm. Not only the norm, but the incentivised approach to life. Behaviours that we would have judged harshly not too long ago are now accepted as healthy.

The internet has warped us.

And these are just a small sample of scenarios off the top of my head to highlight, because there are a whole host of them where we have normalised all kinds of behaviours that would be considered far from normal a little while ago. Not only that, the internet has enabled extremist thoughts, where there has been an explosion in not only violent thoughts and actions, but the facilitation of highly inappropriate and illegal behaviour, like paedophilia. There have always been paedos, but not like there is today on the internet - DYOR - there are some great articles on it.

While we might have all the information we have collectively gathered at our fingertips, rather than use it to make the most of humanity, we have devolved. We have degraded. We have torn society apart and become more disconnected, less compassionate, more voyeuristic, less active, more dysfunctional physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially.

With all that information, we have got worse.

It is quite incredible how much societal degradation has taken place over the last decades since the internet was mainstreamed, and how quickly it turned from the promise of better, to another wealth generation mechanism that supercharged the concentration of value into fewer and fewer hands. You can disagree with me on many things, but that much is clear.

The internet connected us all, but in so doing, it also meant that we could be influenced at scale, homogenising approach and thought and pushing us all into confluent streams that are easier to reach, easier to push - easier because we become increasingly accepting of the same kinds of behaviours. We have been influenced to accept a "to each their own" approach without any regard to what is best for the group at all. And while people believe they are acting as an individual, what they are actually doing is behaving exactly as they have been conditioned to behave - like everyone else.

As individualistic as an ant in a nest.

It is not that the past was all sunshine and rainbows, nor is it possible to go back there now. Rather, what I wish people would realise is that we are degrading, not advancing as a society. We are continually choosing to use all the information we have available, to get worse as individuals and by extension, as communities, and as a species as a whole. Every new invention, even if it has the potential for good, ends up being used to profit on the degradation of us as humans.

It is all degrading.

We are not empowered, we are being used to satisfy the pleasures of the few. And what we trade is for a little attention, a little money, a little entertainment, a little convenience. But what we pay is everything we could be. It saddens me as a person. But it seems that most people are unwilling to see or do anything other than they are conditioned to do, because it is hard to change, and definitely not fun. It is far more convenient to just accept being degraded and keep on bending over for the masters.

It is going to end badly for us all.

I could be wrong. But unless something drastic changes, I don't think I am.

We'll see what the next thirty years brings.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]

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