Our social connections have been replaced with commercial ones. Where at one point we socialized to relieve boredom and need, now we have never ending entertainment and those that would capitalize on selling it to us over everything else.
Someone older than me, of the hippie generation, once said to me "There were like three TV channels and they went off the air at 10pm. If you were still awake after that, there was nothing to do but sex and drugs."
I strongly suspect the 24/7 availability of free entertainment, live online discussion, etc is a large contributing factor to the trend towards celibacy. I don't think this is a bad thing. And it's being achieved without some preacher putting the fear of God in you and telling you impure thoughts will get you an eternity in hell.
I'm very much okay with this.
I'd be very happy if this was also the case for other networks. Feels like a competent moderation team (not necessarily paid; forums in the good old days had people competing to be voluntary moderators) would make mainstream social media a lot more enjoyable.
Moderation seems to generally be better when it is paid. I've done plenty of moderating in my time. I currently am the moderator or a number of things. I'm generally a good moderator.
I'm also dirt poor and I resent the fact that I do so many things for free for people without it coming back to me and my extreme poverty actively interferes at times with my ability to tend to unpaid obligations while I try to eke out a living doing something else for a bit, etc.
I generally have a pretty good track record of doing things for free that I'm willing to do for free and not dumping on other people about how they aren't paying me to do this, but I have seen plenty of moderators over the years have a snit fit about how the membership is ungrateful and they do this out of the goodness of their heart and You People need to behave better, appreciate us more, and quit being so much drama since it's all free, dagnabbit.
I think if you really, truly value something, you should be okay with people being able to do that work and actually somehow pay their own bills because of it.
Reddit is sort of a weird grey zone where Reddit actually makes money and has paid staff, but most moderation on Reddit is unpaid. And I run a few Reddits and I'm still trying to figure out what I think of that weird beast.
But, generally speaking, as someone who has done tons of volunteer work in my life and has also spent a lot of years very poor where all that "goodness of my heart" crapola didn't do a fucking thing for me when I needed some "goodness" from someone else, I think if you resent the service you use for free somehow making money and actually paying its staff, (trying to think of a more PC way to end this sentence and failing -- suffice it to say, I don't have a high opinion of such people).
There are a lot of people out there who would be happy to work for free to help their community out; forums used to work like that before being made mostly irrelevant by the social media garbage. If you consider that a problem then it's not for you and that's okay. (I wouldn't do it full time either now that I have a job, but back in my teenage years I had lots of free time that I was happy to donate for free, and indeed my Stack Exchange account's reputation - useless internet points - is a testimony to that.)
Paying people means the company needs to put in a significant amount of resources (technical, legal and staff) to manage that, something companies might not want to invest in (at least not right now). Random internet points is at least a stop-gap solution to let the community manage moderation without much investment nor management from the company, and would definitely be a good upgrade from the status-quo.
As a counterpoint, for people having their community's best interests at heard, being paid might actually be a downgrade. I contributed to Stack Exchange years ago for free because I liked to help people and help the community I was part of. I did so on my own time and terms. Being paid would've meant I now had a duty to do it and I couldn't for example decide that I wasn't in the mood to contribute one evening because it was now a job. The other issue is that being paid means you have the company's best interests at heart instead of the community, and those might not align. It's easy to break rules or "look the other way" for the sake of the community when you're a volunteer, less so when your paycheck depends on it.
It fills the same emotional needs just enough to make it hard to get up off your ass and put the effort into going out and finding people with common interests and making friends with some of them, but it does not provide anywhere near a full emotional diet.
'Typing to people' is different to talking to them, but it has its own very real and rich reward, that I feel is different to but overlaps with talking.
That overlap means that yes, sometimes my need for connection with other people can be sustained entirely by typing, but not forever.
Along the same lines, I do not get exactly the same reward from talking to people as I do typing, and I find that after several days without spending some time thinking and typing to other people, I itch to get back and just have a back and forth about something online.
Usually, I prefer this to be something that I and the person I'm talking to agree on, and we're plumbing the depths of shared experience, but sometimes to much chagrin it definitely is 'beef'.
Sometimes I wonder if this is because the sort of people I type to online are very different to most of the people I talk to offline, but I don't honestly think that explains the whole thing.
Typing is great, theres a certain density of information and shorthand inherent in how we write and use punctuation (much like how a lot can be said with gestures and facial features) as well as a sort of shared purpose (we all came to this website to have a particular kind of experience, everyone present is in a particular sort of mood)
If everybody had sex today tomorrow would be awesome. I welcome a world where women are not slut shamed and it is normal for a 20 year old girl to brag at the office that she had an amazing fuck Yesterday from a random hit-and-run.
Say what now
No, you don't. I work with a (trans) woman who has absolutely no sense of "slut shame" and listening to her recount tales of her sexual exploits every day makes me dread a job I used to find fun and rewarding.
Today, outside of your family and maybe some friends nobody really cares about your drug use or sex life. There are some prohibitions by law, but I doubt these are too relevant.
I often ask myself from which cult people have escaped or how old they are if they indict current society of being restrictive or even suppressing in some way. Frankly, I don't see that at all. Maybe it is a wish, since that would mean that society cares at least somehow.
Maybe I am lucky, but I don't really see restrictive norms anywhere. You see a lot of people not caring though. The internet is no reference here. You can save a puppy from its inevitable demise and certainly someone will be deeply offended by your actions.
> If everybody had sex today tomorrow would be awesome [...]
Always a better tomorrow... but I highly doubt that. Some might crave sex and some might crave intimacy. Anyone bragging in the office about hook ups would be suspected to seeking confirmation. The same is true for males since quite some time. Cultural suppression? I don't think so. Because if you would do that, I think the repercussions would be almost negligible. Some will judge you, but that will happen if you wear the same pants twice. Maybe not a bad choice of fetish, but certainly no fight for more freedom.
I can stay in my bubble now. Thanks Internet!
You sound like you're making an excuse for a lack of friends by implying there is no one worth being friends with? Perhaps I've inferred too much, I sure hope so...
Plenty of hikikomori in the safe, walkable Tokyo. What's keeping them inside?
I would guess they've shut themselves in and away from the shame and rejection by society and have found the tiny inkling of happiness possible in that hole. And as society continues to rejects them further for being in a hole, the hole only gets deeper.
Understandable, since the minute they go outside, everything is stacked against them and even with help, they probably won't be able to compete on the same level as the normal people who didn't fall into the hole. I can't win outside, but I can be happy in my hole. Hole good, outside bad.
You see what's unique about the overall style over and over, and you don't yet see what's unique about each work, so the art form seems simplistic and repetitive even if it is no more so than others you already enjoy.
This one phrase combines Marx's notion of alienation and commodity fetishism into one - it's odd how relevant Marx's sociological analysis is today.