The obvious, known evil of social media is audience capture
= overwhelming incentive to please one’s audience and the ALGORITHM,
at the expense of one’s own beliefs and integrity and morality.
You become a mindless thoughtless zombie of feeding your audience and the algorithm what it wants
You also become insensitive and blind to anything that would contradict this project
But the less obvious one I discovered:
There’s a kind of BYSTANDER EFFECT taken to extreme among the digital bystanders .
Since everyone becomes this countless digital bystander…
…their humanity becomes diluted
People become just AVATARS, or maybe reduced to soulless targets for some gamified gain
And slowly everything becomes kind of UNREAL,
and then your natural HUMAN instincts atrophy
and there is no good or evil, as it’s all kind of not real
Of course ultimately none of this is a surprise = men are only as good their INCENTIVES
99% of men are only good when they are INCENTIVIZED to be good
some of them even fail at that =”evil” people
1% only maybe manages to ALWAYS be MINDFUL of what’s the RIGHT THING TO DO
Internet is of course a wild west of different incentives
Not yet tempered by centuries of culture or religion or politics
Incentives are wild therefore we are wild
Look no further than to a place like Twitter or Tik Tok, to see how ugly humans naturally are
Internet exposed us
Most of us are nothing without culture and system of good, collaborative incentives