Imagine if you will a box. Now imagine, like Schrodinger’s sometimes unlike cat, that you are in this box. And this box’s height and width are the expectations of the individuals inside the box of what the proportions of a box should be manifest. Now, if we can go further, imagine that your community- be it colleagues, classmates, or neights, are now in this box. How it shifts, the constraints of your world changing to match the median expectations of the entire community.
I would argue that if you could look at every community’s box, from Taipei to Tacoma, you would see that as time has gone on the constraints of our unique societies have come to be more similar than not. The once varied shapes have drifted to become one, maybe it is an Amazon box.
The law for instance is the manifest expectations of the constraints we expect to maintain our social contract. Over time, the global expectations for punishment surrounding something such as adultery, or a breach of the age of consent, or perhaps hate speech have shifted to a global norm. It goes beyond just the law, you can look at immigration, or expected retirement, expectations of social safety nets and unemployment insurance. Cultural values that have become global and affected the constraints of our social contract. It goes beyond just the constraints, and can be seen in the same recurring trends in diverse dating markets, or the rise of involuntarily celibate communities that entirely multinational yet take umbrage with the omnipresent features of nearly every developed society in the world.
Why? Why the diminishing variation?
The monoculture is a direct result of the increasing ubiquity of the monopolized internet.
The internet has taken on a greater meaning in the world as every major metropolitan area throughout the globe has seen increasing antisocial populations- think the spread of out of desert Arabs, or off the boat Africans that stalk the streets of white civilization from Paris to New York City, to the extent of course either can be considered white civilization. Increasing anti-social populations have pushed the baseline normal human, which is inherently social, into a more digital and closed off online life. Whether it is in a cardboard shoebox apartment, or if you are an American the freedom to commute thirty minutes to a large cardboard house to waste the remainder of your day on Twitter or Discord.
A life online is no longer the realm of outcastes or losers; it is the new normal for every citizen of a developed country. Whether TikTok, Instagram, Discord, or 4chan, the majority of time any one person spends is on the internet.
The early internet was a Wild West (TM) in many ways, from the litany of sites that offered similar or competing services, to the lack of bought and sold SEO to become popular, there was an ample amount of freedom. In the same sense, there was a diverse set of ideas and stories that were promulgated throughout the internet. In that way, a person who used one corner of the internet everyday could not be confused with another who lurked on another, in the same way people from different countries on the same continent are unalike. I could make a long story about what comes next, but to make it short, as we have all seen, the internet has become increasingly monopolized. A few individuals whom control a few sites get to filter and decide the stories, jokes, memes, that are spread.
As there is increasing reliance on the digital life, and the reality spread throughout the internet, these few companies have an immense amount of control. Many people are sub-median IQ savages, and they rule on our juries, or in our legislative bodies. As can be seen in particular South East Asian or South American nations (Brazil comes to mind), the increased reliance on digital stories, memes, etc., to form societal norms and values has created a single set of laws and values that are at times incongruent with previous beliefs, or overly harsh reflecting the views of different societies.
What we are seeing now, as a collective species, at least to the respect that those in the developed world quite literally live in an entirely different world than our own, is the spread of a single set of values and beliefs, as promulgated through the monopolized internet. It goes beyond the constraints of the social contract, to the portrait of life itself. In many ways, individuals are more likely to belief the picture of reality painted on the internet than that which they are confronted with daily. This dissonance is responsible for much of the mental health issues we see today.
This is a framework of looking at things that I am developing, and will be subject to much refinement. It is my belief that the sustained increase of antisocial populations in global major metropolitan areas, and even rural areas as Vermont has seen, is a large driver for the increasing trend of a digital life leading the real. Combined with the increased monopolization of the internet leading to a single set of stories, values, memes, being shown globally which is leading to one global value chain, and in many ways a broken and unescapable social contract the world is engaging in.