Why is the internet so unbearably toxic?

Anonymous

One, because bad faith posters keep dangling bait in front of well-meaning users in order to generate a specific reaction, either because they are a personally broken individual or for political astroturfing reasons.

Two, it’s because the internet connects us all more closely than we’ve ever been connected before. In the 80’s and 90’s we had five neighbors we knew by name and a couple dozen friends.

Now a reasonably internet connected person is probably in at least five discord group chats, has two or three social media accounts, and makes a couple hundred publicly-facing posts per year, in replies to existing posts or as original content.

The scale of people we see and interact with daily is massive now. Culture shock used to only happen to people with travel budgets, and they were forced to adapt to wherever the plane landed. Now any ignorant peanut gallery weirdo can stay in their little bubble and be a bratty piece of shit about other cultures with no real consequences.

And there are groups that take advantage of that to stoke unrest. Political agitators are not a concept invented by the internet. International governments were planting moles in newspapers to control information as far back as the 1930’s and 40’s. Thanks to the internet, the scale of that kind of operation can be massive, as hundreds (even thousands) of paid users blanket sites like Reddit, 4chan, Twitter, and other sites to write fake posts that only exist to raise the temperature. The goal is to create a new normal where everyone is less tolerant of each other.

We are living in unprecedented times and I feel like either the internet is going to rip itself apart or we’re going to come away from this with some kind of regulation to make sure what’s happening right now never happens again.