The chronically online will become a new underclass. Says (ya girl) DJ Magic. Funny, I remember when most people weren't online, everyone was rushing to get online, and there were worries everywhere of lower class people not being able to get online and getting left behind. Now, we may have reached a point where that goes into reverse. Her premise is simple: The online world has become a wasteland of digital pollution: echo chambers, anxiety (induced on purpose by algorithms), overconsumption, cultural extraction, addiction, and rage bait. People wealthy enough to do so will more and more seek healthy, fulfilling lives offline.

Yeah, I know I've been feeding you all a bunch of videos lately and a lot of you prefer text to read rather than videos. I'll be back to text stuff soon. Anyway, back to this video.

Her digital pollution theory: Social media is a place, distinct from the physical world, but still an environment we inhabit that impacts how we communicate and live. I remember back in the 90s when it felt like online was a "cyberspace" separate "real life", but over the years, the two seem to have blended together. Now, the internet seems as much a part of normal reality as the telephone or radio or TV. But maybe it's time to rethink this, and think of "online" as a distinct place again.

This place -- the online place, social media especially -- is currently being contaminated with pollutants that negatively impact our daily lives and exploit our human nature, including positive aspects like empathy.

The only real solution is abandonment. She's completely given up on the idea of reform.

Here we get to the political "p-word": privilege. The future of a contaminated digital environment is one where privilege determines who gets to log off.

She identifies 6 "pollutants": echo chambers, anxiety, overconsumption, cultural extraction, addiction, and rage bait -- and proposes different -- er, actually the same, more or less -- solutions to each one. For echo chambers, the solution is to participate in real life communities. For anxiety, the solution is to reduce your screen time and become grounded in real life lived experience. For overconsumption, get away from ads that make you want to consume too much, make rules for yourself like "1 in 2 out" (you can buy a pair of shoes if you get rid of 2 pairs), learn to fix what you already have. (This part seems to have less to do with the internet and is more just a general consumerism thing.) For cultural extraction, she says to participate in and contribute to real life communities (notice a pattern here?). For addiction, she says reduce screen time, make rules for yourself like phone free time during certain times of day (notice a pattern here). For rage bait, she just says, "Do not engage."

She mentions 3 books: Color Of Law (Richard Rothstein), Careless People (Sarah Wynn-Williams), and Caste: The Origins of our Discontents (Isabel Wilkerson). I've actually read 2 of these. 2 out of 3 ain't bad, eh? The 2 I've read are Color Of Law and Careless People.

Color Of Law is about racist zoning laws and other discrimination laws that existed from the time of the 13th Amendment in 1864 (ending slavery) to the early 1970s (when fair housing laws were enacted), as well as a myriad other discriminatory policies that were not part of the legal system but allowed by it. A friend suggested it to me, and it's a well-researched book and worth reading if you're interested in that history. Its revelance here is that she (the YouTuber, DJ Magic) draws an analogy between "digital pollution" and pollution in the physical world and how people who were part of the underclass, whether that was due to poverty or racial discrimination, were unable to escape it, and suffered the consequences, while more privileged people were able to escape and even profit from it.

Careless people is a book by a Facebook insider who became whistleblower, and, as its title suggests, reveals ways in which Facebook's leadership don't care about what harms they cause to people, only their own profits. It's based on this book that she is confidently able to assert that the harms of platforms like Facebook are not accidental, but intentional as the people who run the company know full well they are causing carm but don't care -- they care only about the profit to themselves. In this video, she notes that the book reveals Facebook executives prohibited their own children from using Facebook.

"The future of a contaminated digital environment is one where privilege determines who gets to log off. This will sound crazy, but I'm standing tall on my theory. I wanted to document it in 2025 so that when this happens, if it does in 10, 15 years, y'all be like, "oh my gosh, they predicted it."

"In this theory, we are saying that a digital space can be polluted. Is it possible for a digital space to be zoned, redlinined, colonized, gentrified? Hmm. Going back to what I said before about industrial capitalism, polluting industries, often situated themselves near black neighborhoods, both to access a cheap labor force and because racist zoning laws left black communities with little choice but to live near hazardous sites. These polluting industries were prohibited as zoning violations in neighborhoods where whites lived. And that was solely to keep their properties from deterioration. I cite the Color Of Law in this."

"I kept mentioning that my solutions from the last part are tricky to navigate for some people. It's tricky because these solutions are only available to those who have the time, the proximity, the privilege, and the money. So today, those who spend the most time in the polluted digital environment are often stuck there out of necessity. Exploited labor and unlivable wages leave little time for real life communities, pushing people towards addictive platforms. There, we're being fed sensationalistic content by creators incentivized by profit or fame, to fuel stress and outrage."

"These platforms need to be making money off of our human nature. They need to be making money off of the things that the pollutants exploit. Our relationships, our empathy, our attention, our insecurities, our emotional labor, our personal capital, our creativity, our cultures, etc."

"I'm starting to believe that there will be privilege in being able to be offline. The people who can afford to visit these dive bars, these libraries, these third spaces, the people who make enough money to have the time to engage with their communities or afford to live dense, walkable communities, will inevitably live healthier lives than those who have to be online. There will be a class of people who have to be online out of necessity due to geographical isolation, economic uncertainty, or lack of access. I believe that the online class could potentially become a lower class of people, maybe building out the idea of a digital cast system."

Perhaps the most amazing thing in all this is she never mentioned AI slop. Maybe that's because she's been pondering the ways in which tech platforms are harmful and exploitative for 5 years, and AI slop is too recent... and not the primary driver of making the online an "underclass"?

(See below for "AI slop will save the internet".)

#solidstatelife #ai #internet #socialmedia #privilege