I remember a time when people treated each other decently on the Internet. If you message someone they would reply, they wouldn't ignore you or delete you, or cancel you or whatever nonsense we have today. People just treated each other with respect and dignity and that was just normal.
But apparently today all of that no longer exists. The idea of even "friendship" on the internet is a complete mirage. You can message someone, be talking for months, be kind to them, HELP THEM even, and they would seem like a friend, until you say something that makes their soul hurt and boom, suddenly you're just blocked or whatever. You seem to forget the other person on the other end is a human being.
People are so fucking awfully unkind nowadays it's unbelievable. And the amazing thing is this has become normalised. You can't have a discussion about literally anything because it may bruise their fragile strawberry feelings. Heaven forbid they even get into a relationship for a single day because they might break up the next day because their partner said something that hurts their poor fragile soul. Heaven forbid you give them advice that might make them a better person but they take your advice like it's an insult towards their fragile egos, when it was just advice to actually make them be better but in that moment they couldn't help but succumb to their mental fragility.
Talking to someone on the Internet has become commoditised and cheap. People are easily discarded and abandoned, for the most trivial reasons, just because someone could not handle a few words that someone else said. The process goes like this, "Yeah they said this and that, so you know what, fuck you, I'll just block you and find another person to agree with, until they say something else and then fuck them too and I'll find someone else", and this goes on and on, ad infinitum.
The biggest irony is that these people want others to be kind and treat them nicely, and set all these lofty expectations upon others. Yet the way they behave and present themselves is the complete opposite. They have never the ability to self reflect upon what they perpetuate to others. Truly I am amazed at what's happening. And by that I mean shock and horrified.
I met lots of people in the 90s, all online and most of them were decent people. I met them in real life as well, often far flung distances. We never "blocked" anyone. Of course there were disagreements, but all of us just agreed to disagree. Or we would simply have discussions. Look, it's fine to have disagreements, but why treat each other like an enemy just because you disagree? We're all human beings. At the very worst case, just agree to disagree, but have civilised discourse. I would say the teens of that era behave even better than the young adults of today's generation. We talked on the phone, there was no messaging, no blocking or whatever. Yes, we did yell on the phone at times, but in the end we all remained friends. I talked to people in Australia, in the US, and I met them in real life. It was a very cool time to be alive.
I just wonder where the hell did it all go so wrong?
The internet has made people become more machine like and less inhuman. It actually makes sense because keyboards are used to communicate with the computer. That's the original design. It's not used to communicate with human beings, until the advent of the network age.
Today communication with humans over the computer is just asynchronous. You send a message, and hope for a reply. Maybe you'll get blocked. The only time I've ever blocked anyone by the way, was because they were literally stalking me. Otherwise I'm always open to normal conversation. This level of asynchronous communication is not how humans are designed to work with.
In real life, human communication is not asynchronous. It's looking at each other face to face, verbal communications, body language, so on and so forth. All of that is lost when you simply text someone. Imagine all of your days doing that, simply messaging. All of humanness is just lost. And if you do that over and over again guess what happens? You're becoming more of a machine than being an actual human. Imagine you're living a hundred years ago, when people communicated with each other on a daily basis with zero smartphones or computers daily and compared to today, what a big difference that is. Who is more human then? I would have to say people back then were definitely more human.
I weep for humanity and I can only pray for humanity at this point, because the point of return has disappeared a long time ago. There's no doubt in my mind more and more men and women will simply turn to "seemingly intelligent" chat bots like ChatGPT to sooth their fragile minds and souls because they can no longer communicate with the rest of human existence. The idea of being a "human" will be reduced to one which behaves like a computer talking to another computer. Meanwhile their minds will be completely oblivious to what is happening.
I was lucky due to the fact that computers really only came to me in my late teens, I got the best of both worlds.
I got into the tech industry because to me computers were a cool thing, you could do a lot with a computer. It never dawned on me that today people would be more computer like and less human like. I imagined a future where people would be more human. There would be more kindness, more tolerance. Instead today there's only people who look like people but completely behave like walking machines.
Perhaps I'm getting too old for this shit.
My name is Chooi Guan (given first name) and I'm a human being like you are.
Never forget your humanness, even though you may be absorbed by your screen 24/7.
