Guest post: Psychological pressures in action
Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Glam.
It occurs to me that the way these people talk about, celebrate, and encourage this shit online is similar to what I’ve seen of two other horrid online groups. Specifically those formed around murder and suicide. Looking into either one gets really dark, really quickly. You can see the same sorts of psychological pressures in action, all of which are also present in other high demand groups (i.e., cults). It’s also the same sort of assault on identity, one’s conception of oneself as a continuous entity of worth, that Lifton documented in Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. (Side note: I highly recommend the book. It’s one of those things that, having read it, I see its echoes everywhere, just like with Nineteen Eighty-Four.)
The Internet is a more powerful thing than we really understand. In hindsight, it was almost certainly unwise to popularize it when and how we did. We aren’t ready for it.
I thought I’d go for the obvious gag and ask if it’s available on audio.
But it turns out it is!
Does not the Thirty Years War show that Europe was not ready for mass literacy; the Rwandan genocide, that Africa was not ready for radio; the cholera epidemics which decimated our ancestors, that none of us were ready for agriculture?
Perhaps in retrospect we can choose a moment for the invention of the Internet when its introduction would have been marginally less harmful, but it’s not obvious to me that the actual moment was worse than any other randomly chosen moment after it became techologically viable.