At the dawn of the internet revolution, it was common for big-brained public intellectuals to talk about what it meant for the nature of society. As is always the case, they confused what they wanted to happen with what would happen. That usually meant some form of “as information is democratized, more people will have access to information and therefore come to agree with me on everything.” The internet would bring about the glorious egalitarian future.

Most of the predictions about the impact of the internet turned out to be wrong, but the internet has changed society. In fact, it has changed people by changing the selection pressures within society. For example, the phenomenon of the digital grifter is something that could not exist in the past. These people certainly existed in some form, but the digital age rewards their behavior, while the analog age did not, so they now flourish, while in the past they were suppressed.

That is how to think about it. Virtual reality is not reality. 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. When you are on-line, you are by yourself in the physical realm, even though you are interacting with others in the virtual realm. Those people, however, are mere avatars of people.

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. In the hours after every cable news actor was sporting a Ukraine pin and chanting “keev”, the internet personality was pulling down her Covid stuff and putting up Ukraine stuff.

Years ago, Dave Chappell did a skit where the internet was a real place. What made the skit amusing, in addition to Chappelle’s delivery, was the fact that the internet is such an absurd place compared to reality. Imagine walking through a store and everyone in the store is doing whatever they can to get your attention. Imagine the day after the war started, everything at the store is in Ukraine colors and all of the employees are chanting “keev” at the top of their lungs.

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.

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.

Tim Pool is another version of this phenomenon. Spend some time watching his YouTube channel and ask yourself why he has a huge audience. There are hundreds of people doing some version of the same act. The answer is he has the backing of an influencer production company. Richard Hanania is the most recent example of the manufactured influencer. The guy suddenly appears on-line and before long all the other influencers are mentioning him.

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. This post in the New York Times, of all places, is a good read on the subject. 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.

This is why this generation was not upset by the lockdowns. They did not complain about Zoom school because that was better than having to be around those talking meat sacks on campus. They prefer life on-line to life outside. They have grown up with the chat room as their playground. Instead of playing games with their friends in the physical realm, they played games on-line. Their peer group was the collection of avatars and personalities in the chat.

Everyone has their opinion on this stuff, but the important question that no one seems to be considering is if society is possible under these conditions. China’s heavy-handed censorship is viewed as a defense of the regime, but it could simply be a way to tamp down the negative selection pressures of the internet. American censorship is driven mostly by ethnic paranoia, which is another negative quality that is being amplified by the forces of the digital age.

It could very well be that the newly diverse Western societies cannot hold up under the selection pressure of the internet. The digital age amplifies the differences, which amplifies the natural reaction to those differences. This has the effect of bringing diverse civilizational outlooks into virtue contact. The result is hostility. The West may be forced to choose between the glories of diversity or the virtual public square. The answer may be a segregated internet in order to keep the peace.

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