The Internet is Dehumanizing

We all know the internet is dehumanizing, even if no one has quite expressed this sentiment out loud before. It’s time to stop pretending otherwise.

What does it mean for something to be dehumanizing? Almost by definition, something is dehumanizing if it refuses to acknowledge or seeks to suppress our humanity, whether it is our dignity, our free will, or the complex and beautiful inner world each of us possesses. These words are almost never associated with the internet, which is the first clue something has gone wrong.

First and foremost, we have surrendered control of the internet to outside entities, to the point that we are helpless subjects at the mercy of the tech overlords. The internet is engineered such that there is absolutely no way for the users to fight back “digitally”. There is a power imbalance here: the creators of software (increasingly dominated by the tech companies we have grown to hate) are not accountable to the users in cyberspace. With privileged access to all phenomenon of scale and the rules of cryptography fundamentally advantaging the developer over the hacker, we know we will never be able to fight back, unless we take the fight to the real world. We know Instagram’s algorithm is pushing teen girls to suicide, but how do we change that, unless we go the roundabout way of pressuring the government to enact regulation in the real world? This utter lack of power is dehumanizing.

Stripped of our agency and capacity to demand change or to enact it (or even the knowledge of how everything works under the hood), we are increasingly being treated as dumb consumers, useful for nothing more than the dollars that can be squeezed out of us. Like a parade of creepy salesmen in suits, nearly everyone on the internet is trying to sell us something, or to sell our attention to advertisers who will then try to sell us something. We know this too, and we sense the lifelessness of a for-profit digital environment. Unlike any other utility, public good, or service, the internet is unique in that the substance of the internet is dependent on intent. The water a for-profit water company provides is not fundamentally different from any other water, but a capitalistic internet will inevitably be filled by slop, clickbait, and manufactured outrage. The substance of the internet is intended to be dehumanizing, because users are not there for their humanity. Being human is almost a bug of the system, because an army of robotic wallets would greatly enhance the profitability of the internet, because unlike humans they don’t ask pesky questions about the nature of what they are being set up to do.

And lastly, the floundering of the great promise of communications technology, of its ability to bring people together. Perhaps this whole ordeal might be salvageable, if it produced human connection and dialogue. What went wrong? The compression of individuals into data points and the stripping away of real-world cues which remind us of our common humanity probably plays a role. In the digital environment we are poorly represented as profiles and avatars, in a way much more restrictive than our ability to express ourselves offline. The profiles we create are inevitably unlovable, uninformative, and fundamentally inhuman (anyone who has tried and struggled to create a dating app profile knows this). Recently, with the pollution of our digital environment with bots (after all if bots can create these same profiles what is really human about them?), trolls, and now AI, we aren’t even sure the peers we interact with are even human anymore. The humanity gap is a self-reinforcing feedback loop: the more we ignore others’ humanity, the less human we act in relation to them. A human can be empathized with, reasoned with, and understood, but when confronted with a potentially hostile nonhuman our instincts go to violence. We don’t feel like we are interacting with humans online. It certainly doesn’t help that the internet itself leaves almost no space for free will as a user, so how can we convince each other (besides by identifying traffic lights) that there is a human at the other side?

To everyone who feels deep down that the internet is stacked against them, that feeling means you’re human. We don’t belong here.