This was a difficult piece to finish. It started as a lighthearted, snarky piece about how Reddit can teach you what kind of person you don't want to be. The more I read and wrote, the more the material seemed too dark for that kind of treatment. theamericanconservative.com/articles/reddi…
There’s an irreducible weirdness to the Internet. You see it on all relatively uncontrolled platforms. Like YouTube, where pop culture, click farming, and the telephone game of transmitting pop culture across culture and language produces this stuff: medium.com/@jamesbridle/s…
Or even Amazon, where the product search pages, the combination of algorithms, fast, custom production, global shipping, and sellers chasing and mimicking algorithms, produce results like this. Page after page of increasingly spammy, word-salad titles and brandless, generic junk. 
There’s a blurring of the line between human and machine, sort of like an uncanny valley effect. I say all this because Reddit, while very different in that most of the content is normal human discussion, is also suffused with this essential *weirdness.* It is very “internetty.”
So, Reddit. One thing I’ve noticed is the ease of anonymous discussion makes it very easy to disclose personal stuff. You can be reading a thread about cats or cooking or something, and suddenly there will be a diversion about suicide or addiction or some such. It's disturbing.
Of course, much of the content is substantially about these things. I’m not a determinist, but everything that happens, happens in a physical and social context. That’s why I think these vignettes of human misery tell us something political.
Surprisingly I didn’t mention suburbia at all in this piece! Even though it probably has something to do with America’s pervasive sense of alienation and despair; not everything, or even most, to do with it. (Read this piece that pushes back on that view): theamericanconservative.com/urbs/the-subur…
Social science doesn’t prove that suburbia substantially caused America’s social problems (aside from exacerbating the racial gap.) Still, these things aren’t always “A causes B.” I always think of this bit from James Howard Kunstler, on mass shootings:
These don’t feel like things that can be measured and isolated. Feelings are not revelations, and yes, the availability of guns is surely a major factor. But this feels like it captures something essential about the underbelly of American culture and life.
A word on feelings. I grew up fairly affluent and probably sheltered. The kind of misery that’s just daily life for a lot of people is shocking to me. I try not to gawk at it, like I’ve discovered something new: “Wow, look at all these poor people! Aren't they interesting?”
But it’s not just the individual stories. It’s the feeling that many of these individual stories are downstream of common and deleterious social conditions.
My favorite line: “We increasingly understand that many people are latently ill. A society that goes out of its way to trigger these tendencies is not kind or just. A society that pretends they are merely bad choices, and that whatever follows is deserved, is positively cruel.”
As I say later, America probably needs more social policy. But that’s not just welfare. The aim of this policy should be to *reduce the triggers to latent illness.* Call it social engineering, if you want, but unbridled consumer capitalism is itself a massive social experiment.
A lot of things in American culture and politics enable this: The transmutation of freedom into consumer choice; the attitude of denial towards mental illness; a history of freewheeling entrepreneurialism that no longer accurately reflects the modern economy. Probably much more.
On that point, as an aside, a couple of pieces that touch on those changes in the economy and the actual ability of people to “bootstrap” it. Here: theamericanconservative.com/articles/when-…
So. I read a lot of depressing anecdotes on the internet, and I came away thinking America is broken. I could be wrong. But it's a big country. Many things are broken, and there are aspects of our politics and culture that make us blind or callous in the face of them. Fin.
