Are we ACTUALLY connected at all?

CW: depression, paranoia, isolation, addiction

To whom it may concern,

I have been struggling with adult existence for a long time. The reasons for this are manifold, and while I strive to identify the external factors for this, I will make no attempt to offload responsibility onto someone or something else. My failures in living within this time period, whatever extent they may encompass, are my own. Before you become too worried, however, do not judge these first sentences as an introduction to a cry for help or some sort of suicide note. I feel disgusted to even supply such a disclaimer, but since the tone of this letter is of a certain nature, I simply saw it as necessary, in order to avoid any misunderstandings or excessive reactions. 

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The internet has been with almost everyone I know for their entire lives. I remember watching skateboard videos and the Harry Potter Puppet Pals on my Dad's laptop within the first couple years of the existence of YouTube, back when the main mode of syndication for such things was direct peer-to-peer sharing via email, and peak resolution couldn't exceed 480p. At the time, the internet was still chiefly dominated by single-purpose websites, emails were highly susceptible to electronically transmitted infections, and the general sentiment was optimism; the idea that we could somehow connect each and everyone together, transgressing national borders and cultural differences, was intoxicating. This intoxication inevitably birthed a clear ethos of expansion, investment, and innovation, and by the mid 2000s an in-group -- composed of people demographically similar to myself -- developed this into their own manifest destiny. 

As internet services have travelled upwards through the various stills of their development, becoming more refined and weapons-grade, this ethos has experienced a crisis. Now that we have seen what individuals are prone to use this technology for, at least within the current meta, the picture is bleak: the vast majority of websites follow an identical, idiotic format. We all use smartphones whose screen sizes and colour parameters have been tuned to an optimal configuration with respect to the anatomy of the human retina. Content occupies as large of a box as physically possible on the screen, and the drip-feeding dynamic of scrollable content has been pushed to its technological limit as video codecs and buffering methods have improved. Further, every video uploaded to platforms such as tiktok and instagram reels have a bespoke audio-enhancement algorithm applied before publishing, developed through the trial-by-fire the recording industry experienced during the 'loudness wars'. For example, I attempted to use tiktok to upload some music I made, only to find that it automatically applied audio compression which contorted the sound significantly, having tried to make for something more attention grabbing. Everyone who uses these platforms knows this; that the only currency is attention, and that the platforms can widen even the slightest smidge of it into something surprisingly magnetic. You feel cheated each and every time you partake, especially after many years. Beyond being merely base, many people adopt an entirely different personality in communicating online, since relative anonymity (and the inherent fungibility of a text message vs openly made statements) allow vile and hateful rhetoric to be more easily dismissed or altogether forgotten. I am guilty of exploiting this too. Said hatefulness eventually bleeds into your internal belief system, if left unchecked. 

Is such a technology inherently harmful? I won't touch on any of the neurological implications because I am not equipped to anticipate or understand them. But economically, I would say no. The real trouble arises when attempting to dissect what bargain one enters, when one plays this game designed by big tech. From a Marxist perspective, the idea that the platform rightly reaps all the rewards generated by content not created by them and data generated by user behaviour is ludicrous. Collating the annual revenues of tiktok, meta, and alphabet yields a staggering figure of 178 billion, which is enough to supply each of the 5.24 billion social media users globally with around 34 USD a year. This figure, whilst small, is the price of your mere attention: it is conjured out of thin air, a sort of credit paid forward by industry to social media platforms on the promise of your possible future engagement. There already exists a class of professional consumers, the influencers, who shave a handsome portion of those earnings not allocated to the profit of the platform, so it is not unthinkable that, when adjusted for the total use time of these social media platforms, allowing oneself to be profiled for capital could imply a significant income stream. Of course, none of this income is seen by the end user. The total value added to the economy through many internet technologies is widely estimated to lie in the trillions, so this could be extended another magnitude at least, assuming a maximally aggressive implementation. The existence of three-stakeholder systems (provider, user, advertiser) is demerit if and only if the profits are distributed as they currently are; with an emphasis that the user has no rights to the profit they are most instrumental in generating. But to propose policy to enact such a redistribution would more or less always be DOA because of the implication for the prevailing hierarchy. 

From the iterations that social media platforms have progressed through, it is clear that their model cannot evolve, since all the platforms are doing the same thing now. Their formula is complete, and now the only thing it cannot account for is the possibility that each user may just decide not to play any more. It is precisely this that I urge everyone to do. Just to stop playing. Commit platform suicide. With the arrival of technologies like VEO 3, it will become decreasingly realistic to expect any factual information out of short form content, or of really any rapidly syndicated content online, an already dismal expectation. Citizens are increasingly propagandised; we all have a fair helping of family members who have succumbed to this, whose eyes and ears are well shut to the world around them, who have been passively transformed to only receive and believe that which is maximally inflammatory. With this, I think the present day is a good moment to depart from this system, don't you? 

To see what I mean, ask yourself the question of how connected you actually are to your friends through the internet. Many of our connections nowadays are vapid and deflated, especially compared to the culture of the letter and the telephone common in the 20th century. We send each other mind-numbing flashing lights, often without physically laughing in response, the mere echo of a laugh inside the mind being entirely sufficient. We congratulate each other superficially, but we have no idea what actually transpires in the lives of the other, where social media was meant to bridge the gap of geographical distance. We have allowed ourselves to use these technologies to track the birthdays of our friends so that we don't have to bother with keeping our own calendars or carry any physical remnants of any sort of rapport. Our entire social existence has been commodified. 

A reasonably well-adjusted reader might start at some of what I am saying. Many of you, I'm sure, take pride in your careful cultivation of social connections. Every independently remembered birthday is important to you. You keep journals of your dreams, both those of the night and of your futures, you regularly call friends and family. I do urge you to consider the possibility that at least a third of the people our age, especially the men, are totally inept in these seemingly rudimentary tasks, and that social media offers them the dangerous path of least resistance. 

Finally, and without prescribing what I believe everyone should do instead, I will simply put forward what I have chosen to do now, in order to remove these malefactions from my life. Mere removal is the only remedy, since the individual is clearly not equipped to meaningfully fight back. I have set up an email alias and will continue to use my Whatsapp account, which will now be my only communication vectors with personal friends whom I don't have in front of me. I have chosen to do this because I am deeply unwell. I am struggling with multiple addictions, have isolated myself from nearly everyone, have almost totally stagnated in my personal development, while receiving treatment for depression. I am not sure if this change will be permanent, but I should hope that it will be, and will positively impact my journey back to community and health. 

Leon