“You think people was meaner then than they are now? the deputy said.
The old man was looking out at the flooded town. No, he said. I don’t. I think people are the same from the day God first made one.”
-Cormac McCarthy, Child of God
The revolt of the bourgeois has beckoned the end of days because fame, fortune, and power begets not spiritual fulfillment but spiritual degeneracy. The Peter Thiels and the Sam Altmans and the Elon Musks of the world witnessed the warnings of science fiction and found inspiration; where others saw impending doom, they saw a reprieve from their crippling deprivations.
And the vehicle for their apocalypse is the Internet.
When you spend hours upon hours watching YouTube commentary about, well, other YouTubers, it’s easy to see how one could draw this conclusion; maybe the internet has exported this spiritual depravity onto the masses. One would have be devoid of their humanity to not feel heartbroken by witnessing others debase themselves for an audience’s amusement.
The legend of Chris Chan has permeated the internet for years, if not decades, now and perhaps it is the start of self-reflection for the legions online; Chris Chan’s followers encouraged their self destructive behavior and, after years later and the numerous real-world consequences that followed, the internet finally asked itself “did we go too far?”. For me, this legend is more than about Chris Chan; the audience, too, willed this upon the world.
Chris Chan ushered in the “lolcow” phenomenon which was my entry point into the world of long-form YouTube commentary. Spend any amount of time on the platform and you’ll find that there’s no shortage of video essays on this tale. But the authors of these essays not only cover the tragedy of Chris Chan, but they also explore the rise and fall of their peers. Here, I am specifically referencing Turkey Tom and Cruel World Happy Mind, two well-researched scholars of internet history.
But after months of mindlessly binging their videos, I have arrived at a concerning question: are all YouTubers, or indeed all content creators across all platforms, playing a dangerous game of thrones? Can one misstep lead to the summoning of wolves from their peers? I’m thinking of Turkey Tom specifically but this is true for all of us: we better make goddamn sure that we aren’t throwing stones from a glass house.
While the introduction of the internet has enriched our understanding of psychology, mental health, history, science, etc. it also has the unintended effect of dehumanization. To the creator, they are the main character to a scripted stage. And the viewer obeys, seeing the content through the prism of story and arc. In other words, the creator becomes another product among the plethora of objects to consume. And the platform itself, operated by the cold and hard calculations of value extraction, profits off our alienation.
But this is a tale as old as time. There is nothing new under the sun. The internet is only the latest tool of dehumanization used in the hands of the rarified elite. For millennia, kings and queens and billionaires have used religion, slavery, warfare, nationalism, and newspapers to other and dehumanize for their own gain. And we, the masses, have willfully adopted their cruel panorama of human affairs.
The skeptic might view the king and billionaire as a comrade to cynicism. But as it has been revealed, there is nothing cynical about the Thiels and the Altmans and the Musks. They see themselves as the arbiters of human value and the internet is a living avatar of this psyche.
Yet religion, slavery, warfare, and nationalism persist. There’s no putting the nuclear paste back in the tube. But we can restore our value and diminish our technological epoch’s stranglehold to fight against the violent bombardment from our nihilistic overlords. And we can save the day….
…until the next paradigm shift.
The Internet Ruined Everything 