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Amr Nosir's avatar

A major side of this trend is the decades long slow and steady death of accessible third places or any other public space where young people can form offline connections.

This gap was filled by social media for a while, but in their quest to maximize engagement and profitability they morphed into the algorithmic dopamine dispensers of today. The isolationary, degenerative impact of which you highlighted in the article.

Breaking the isolation feedback loop propelling this system forward is going to be the existential problem that this generation needs to address.

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Rob Secundus's avatar

I think this is an excellent piece, and I agree the trends here are extremely concerning, but I want to push against one small thing with some slight optimism from my extremely limited perspective:

"It is the job of Meta, X, TikTok, Apple and Google to keep you scrolling, and the simplest way to accomplish that is by trapping you in this perfect mental corner of anger, loneliness and cheap stimuli. They’ve made it so you don’t even want sex or connection: you want a stream of thousands of gifs of women making the ahegao face."

Now, I'm not a gooner, and I've never identified with any kind of "incel" community, but I am an old perpetually single guy, and I've spent a lot of time talking to incels on deradicalization forums, real internet-poisoned types through and through. And I think that ultimately the sole limit that exists to these apps' control is desire. In my experience, and in my experience talking to the kinds of people who are very much far along the pipeline outlined above, the desire for sex and connection *always* remains. The endless scrolling is even predicated on it; the thousand ahegao gifs *fail* to fulfill any desire, and so the scroller keeps scrolling in the *hopes* that something, anything, will eventually satiate.

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