I don't know if this belongs here but can't think of where else to post. I've been using the internet heavily over my entire adulthood and it's occurred to me that I have been swallowing complete horseshit. If I'm going to get a handle on things, it making a commitment to reality instead of reading the internet.
Yes of course everyone knows the internet has no shortage of crazy bullshit. There were always plenty of lunatic forums and conspiracy theory places. The problem is now nowhere is safe. Everywhere you go people are aggressively distributing memetic material, often politics but other kinds of bullshit too.
The lie that I fell for was that it was possible to become self-made on the internet. You don't need family, friends or connections, you can teach yourself everything online and build your own career! Oh wait. You actually do need those things. Shit. Well I didn't have much of a chance anyway.
However, people online are pushing harder than ever that individuals can build their own company with no investment or experience, develop lucrative side hustles from scratch, get rich with bitcoin or coding and so on. Usually that would fool no one except the most desperate, but now it's being pushed hard at any opportunity by ordinary people who receive no benefit or advantage from sharing this information.
Then there is all the political activism and correctness, the rampant neo-conservatism, radical feminism, talk show-ism that dominates every popular outlet. The homemade stuff is pretty bad too, e.g. blackpills, whitepills, incels, and so on. None of it is based in objective reality and seems completely designed to appeal to desperation.
The medical psuedoscience is out of control and any mental health forum is filled with suggestions to do your own research on personality disorders and cptsd which you should absolutely never do. Probably the worst thing is the transgender thing where an individual is pressured into cutting out their support system and get a sex change, then isolated to the online forums which lied to them in the first place.
There's plenty more I could talk about, the point is that the internet is helpful for some things but the amount of sheer bullshit out there is so bad that it probably ruins more lives than it helps at this point. The only cure is to stop taking what people say online seriously unless they have a verifiable real-life reputation relevant to your culture, not simply an online one that exists in a virtual world which never existed.
Yes of course everyone knows the internet has no shortage of crazy bullshit. There were always plenty of lunatic forums and conspiracy theory places. The problem is now nowhere is safe. Everywhere you go people are aggressively distributing memetic material, often politics but other kinds of bullshit too.
The lie that I fell for was that it was possible to become self-made on the internet. You don't need family, friends or connections, you can teach yourself everything online and build your own career! Oh wait. You actually do need those things. Shit. Well I didn't have much of a chance anyway.
However, people online are pushing harder than ever that individuals can build their own company with no investment or experience, develop lucrative side hustles from scratch, get rich with bitcoin or coding and so on. Usually that would fool no one except the most desperate, but now it's being pushed hard at any opportunity by ordinary people who receive no benefit or advantage from sharing this information.
Then there is all the political activism and correctness, the rampant neo-conservatism, radical feminism, talk show-ism that dominates every popular outlet. The homemade stuff is pretty bad too, e.g. blackpills, whitepills, incels, and so on. None of it is based in objective reality and seems completely designed to appeal to desperation.
The medical psuedoscience is out of control and any mental health forum is filled with suggestions to do your own research on personality disorders and cptsd which you should absolutely never do. Probably the worst thing is the transgender thing where an individual is pressured into cutting out their support system and get a sex change, then isolated to the online forums which lied to them in the first place.
There's plenty more I could talk about, the point is that the internet is helpful for some things but the amount of sheer bullshit out there is so bad that it probably ruins more lives than it helps at this point. The only cure is to stop taking what people say online seriously unless they have a verifiable real-life reputation relevant to your culture, not simply an online one that exists in a virtual world which never existed.
