tech and culture
What worries me most about tech is how much it trickles down into our respective cultures, inevitably. That’s why it’s at the core of what I criticize so often; you can stop using or dealing with a lot of other questionable things in life, but tech is here to stay. We’ll maybe not have the same social media or AI that we have now forever, but variations or something else with the same job will take its place. Might be a pessimistic view or "what they want me to think", but for now I feel that.
It starts pretty innocently. Depending on your circumstances, you might need a phone and/or a PC. You might need this website or that app for simple things such as childcare and school information, shopping at the supermarket, parking, participating in class, online banking, public transport, scanning QR codes and more. Of course we did perfectly fine without for ages, but now tech has to be crammed into anything. You might need WhatsApp for the local neighborhood group, Facebook to sell stuff locally and for your family, Instagram to see information about your favorite restaurant. As a business owner or freelancer, you might feel like you need LinkedIn or all kinds of other socials to advertise yourself and host your portfolio. It’s all very dependent on your responsibilities and location.
None of these apply to me, but I see the plight others have with this. They’re not the outlier, I am. The majority is trapped. I see the drawbacks and dangers of it all, but that doesn’t remove the FOMO, peer pressure, force and lack of convenience other people face when they try to resist that.
As humans are social beings, the biggest punishment is social ostracism, either directly (simply not being in the group where everyone is), or indirectly (you’re a bad mum for not having the school app, you’re the weird nerd for insisting on Signal, you’re the person stuck in the stone age for not being digital, you’re out of the loop in the discussion etc. and lose social status).
That sets up the need, the trap, the hook. But once you’re on there, it changes you, and that's where I see the cultural issues.
There’s the fact that usually, you’ll branch out on the platform and not just stay for what you came for. Even apps for your light now have their own social feed.
Inevitably, you’ll get more stuff suggested to you than you signed up for. You’re slowly sucked in to political or lifestyle content, for example; the latter causing homogenous cultural aspects across countries and continents because of the algorithm on Pinterest and Insta, ranging from clothes and art over plastic surgery and makeup ("Instagram face") to interior design. There are complaints about too many people looking the same now, complaints about everyone having the same room on TikTok, about the white and beige interior in houses and so on. Not a huge or persistent problem maybe, but to me, it is a puzzle piece of something bigger. It ties into how so many of us miss authenticity and see the US style dominance as a huge loss for our local, historically informed designs.
What follows is the proven radicalization by the algorithm, where it’ll start with harmless self-improvement and end in toxic alpha male alt-right content, just as an example. Now we’re even at a point where people get randomly traumatized with gore because of a fault in the algorithm, and people looking for a profit flooding the platforms with AI brainrot content. This stuff is addicting - we want to understand weird stuff, we seek a pattern, we are entertained but it also causes intense emotions, a high. We comment and send it to friends because it’s so shocking and they need to see it too, which drives up the engagement even more, so the algorithm will present it to even more people and the person posting it considers it a success and will continue. Isn't it weird how this type of content would have landed the tech giants into hot waters back then, risking their success? Now it's nothing and they've become too big to fail, a scandal is a mere blemish.
There are many people online detailing their experiences of seeing a gore image and subsequently getting hooked and chasing that feeling1, the shock and horror, and spending hours looking at gore. The same goes for porn2. So this content is sought out more and more, keeping people scrolling on the apps. Imagine how many addicts of this stuff are created by the “faults” in the algorithm, and how life ruining that is? How many children see that? Almost everyone has a story on how they saw their first porn or beheading online.
Speaking of children, teachers are increasingly sounding the alarm on “zombie kids” - a class full of kids who look at them, but aren’t present, don’t care about learning anything, about grades or about punishment, because their real life is online. No talking, just sitting quietly, staring or scrolling. Outside of school, they’re permanently hooked on content, so school and sitting down to focus is a time of withdrawal. It’s harder to get to them without flashing lights, jump cuts, yelling and short hyperbolic sentences. The withdrawal state makes them more sensitive, more aggressive and anxious. How are they supposed to learn to self-soothe if online content is always pulled out like some sort of Xanax or vape pen to distract yourself?
GenAI gives them more opportunities to bullshit assignments than ever and not having to learn how to write or reason and compare facts. I wonder if that makes them more naive than children and teens naturally are at that stage, because it doesn’t give them the tools to ask for more context, verify, and suss out fake from true. They’re emulating weird stuff they’ve seen online, the young boys already copying the likes of Andrew Tate. There’s a rise of eating disorders connected to social media and the ever intense beauty standards and filters it features.
On to another point, we’re already familiar with it changing language via meme slang or adopting the brand name (“googling” “photoshopping”; relatively normal, see “Kleenex”), and I already talked about how so many people sound the same to me online via text. If you spend hours a day on these apps, you sound seriously damaged and not like a real person to me, and it's obvious what app you're on.
The way the sentences are structured, the choice of words - they all scream “tweet”, for example. I had this experience again a few days ago. There are words in there no one uses outside of chronically online people on these platforms and they’re always ones to virtue signal which team you are on to the other weirdos equally invested into the culture war on that app. Then they link an X thread as proof of something or as a supportive opinion of what they said, because for hours a day, they just read text snippet after text snippet thinking “so true!” and just adopting that instead.
Why type out your own arguments and reasoning and actually reply to the person you’re talking to, if you can just link to this polemic tweet that “says it so much better” and was so cathartic for you to read. As an outsider, it’s very concerning. It’s like watching someone in the trap of a cult, like they lose their ability to form their own thoughts, write out why they think a certain way, not use some dogwhistles and think every interaction has to resolve in a winner and a loser. Every interaction feels like a performance for an invisible audience of millions, even in private.
These are your coworkers, your friends, your partners, your families, your healthcare personnel, your neighbors, the teachers, the parents of the next generations. It affects us all, whether we participate in it or not, because we still suffer the consequences from people who do. They interact with us, they shape trends, they make decisions, they vote, they give out our data by association.
Collectively, they’re pouring more influence and money into the big machine that’s taking more and more power from governments and people alike and hollowing everything out. The machine leaves governments infiltrated and powerless, policy too weak because it’s become too big to fail, it leaves people hollow inside, and leaves destruction behind where it has scraped all it could from the commons online and drown them out with its own slop. If things shut down because of increasing costs and DDoSing, that’s a feature, not a bug. People are supposed to come to the tech oligarch’s product for it, not any other website or service.
So actually, I guess it’s not just trickling down - this stuff is permeating our culture to the core. It may have replaced culture, or rather become culture, even. To many, culture is what is happening on these apps. It’s where the zeitgeist is, where the conversations happen, where the trends are set and the goods that define our time are sold. It’s the only marketplace of ideas and goods they know. It’s what society is to them, because there is nothing outside left - forums closed, independent websites almost impossible to discover, third places in real life stripped away, social skills eroded, prices too high to go anywhere, real or perceived risk of becoming a victim of violence, more illness and disability while accessibility stagnates3, shame about their outside appearance without filters and staged angles, clothes not meant to be worn.
The phenomenon with the biggest cultural impact right now is a website that is essentially a big slot machine - you put stuff in and crank the lever and hope for a win. It doesn’t spit out what you want? Pull the lever again. It has a mistake? Iterate and pull again. Finally, the correct version, and some euphoria and feelings of success. And then you start again with your next project or assignment, and pull the lever until you get the jackpot or you hit your daily limit or prompts. Maybe you’ll upgrade your subscription to pull the lever some more. Did you know that pulling levers (or pushing buttons) to get a treat in a random pattern makes it more addictive than getting a treat every time4? That's why gambling works.
I guess it’s not tech itself, by its own, that did all that. It’s a mix of who it is in the hands of, failures of governments, environmental reasons, systemic (capitalist) features and human weaknesses. But damn, are they hellbent on exploiting all of these circumstances and worsening it. It makes me afraid of the type of culture we’re building as we go on with this, or the type of culture outside of it that will be left.
Reply via email
Published 26 Mar, 2025
I can't and don't want to link them all here to not lead people to stuff, but one example is here.↩
You can find countless stories on Reddit, or under NoFap content; here is an article by the NY Post.↩
One example with issues that surely are a problem in a lot of places. I know they are where I live, too.↩
This is commonly known as operant conditioning or the Skinner box experiments. When the reward was given on a variable ratio schedule (different press counts), the rats tended to press the lever much more frequently than when they were on a fixed ratio schedule (getting a treat every x amount of presses). Now think about what kind of Skinner box you're in while using GenAI. This feels decisively different to me than just adjusting my search in a search engine.↩