Comment by eric4smith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eric4smith | Hacker News Reader

Digital divide is not even so much of a problem as social media overuse.

Let’s say, and why not, that you’re a pretty girl living in a small village on a farm.

You start to dabble on Instagram and at first post photos or horses, veggies growing, campfires - you know, normal farm stuff.

A couple young farmers from the community has they eyes on you. They tout the size of their farms and how you can have beautiful children together.

But one day, accidentally, you post a photo on Instagram of yourself that’s slightly revealing, you felt a bit daring that day.

Now you got 15,000 likes. Normally you’d get maybe 2 likes for anything else.

You get a little more daring. Now you’ve posted more like the “daring” photo and in the space of a couple of months, without even noticing, you’ve gained 120,000 followers.

You fear looking at your DM. You have to turn off Instagram notifications.

You start posting on tiktok. Even more followers because, video.

In total you’re over 220,000 followers. Men contacting you every day.

Now those farm boys with the promise of marriage look pretty lame.

People start sending you money. Cash app. PayPal. Venmo.

Secretly, you’re making more money than your parents.

Another girl online mentioned lonely-fans. You’re considering it...

Current social media has destroyed normal relationships. Destroyed remote communities.

It’s 10,000x worse than any “digital divide”.

There’s good or bad in everything - but this is one of the indisputably bad things that has happened to the world in the last 10 years.

How is it undisputably bad? This woman now has access to higher quality men around the world instead of a random farmer without much to offer (no offense to the random farmers in the audience).

She now has the option to leave a dead end rural lifestyle is she chooses. And if she's into the dead end rural life (insert whatever dumb american tropes we have that idealize wasteful rural modes of living), she won't find rich, high flying city guys very appealing and it's all a wash. Or maybe she wants to move to a different dead end rural community with a better match than the random farmer she happened to be born next to. Now she can do that on farmers only.

You could say some good and some bad (and of course very bad for the random farmer whose main reproductive strategy was apparently counting on his mate not realizing he's not a catch and there are much better options), but you can't say it's only bad.

Ideally, none of these people reproduce at all since we already have plenty of humans. Hopefully the shift to digital relationships can greatly reduce our headcount in the long run. This trend seems well underway already thankfully.

> dead end rural lifestyle

Sorry, but who's growing your food?

Machines, immigrant laborers and huge agribusinesses, mostly. I don't engage in the trendy family farm fad if that's what you're asking.

More to the point, are you implying that it wouldn't be possible for a dead end community to grow food? If so, why? Seems like a bizarre argument but I'll bite.

>This trend seems well underway already thankfully

On average, for now, yes. Not across the entire national population, though. We're just selecting for the sorts of people who thrive (reproductively/evolutionarily speaking) in the modern high competition/low scarcity environment. Because this environment is very different from the environment, say, 200 years ago, people that are more fit to the current environment are relatively rare now- which is why you see trends pointing towards overall population decline- but those small subgroups are there, quietly reproducing at >2.1 children per woman. As such, over time, they'll come to make up the majority of the population, as the relatively non-competitive phenotypes numerically stagnate or dwindle.

Ironically, the prediliction to be convinced of viewpoints like your own (given things like personality and political tendency have a significant hereditary component) is one of the things likely to be selected against!

The future is a dwindling relative population of midwit liberals, lots of live-fast die-young r-selection chads, and one 150 IQ guy who made a billion clones of himself.

So... this “dead end rural lifestyle” that feeds the world now will be populated by young men only running the machines abd tending the crops and animals by themselves.

Hmmmm...

Now let’s extrapolate that to every country. Because that’s what social media did.

That example was taken from outside the United States. It’s only worse inside North America now.

Well unless you force women back into coverture rural girls are going do like a couple of my friends, leave and never look back.

Putting aside your ridiculous stereotypes; it's a bad thing becaauuuuse... What?

Are you one of those people who get super scared when women are too independent or make more money than you?

It is maybe not such a bad thing that now and again a woman secures the financial independence she needs to look beyond the life she was born into in her tiny rural community.

The new mental slavery comes in guise of emancipation.

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