Let me start with a bit of an explanation. I read this post and didn't know how to respond, I honestly found it shocking. Shocking that someone can look at the same society I see and come to these conclusions. Given how this society has impacted my friends and family, it's very difficult to not take your comments personally, I really needed to remind myself that they are not intended that way. With a week's time to digest everything, I think (hope?) I'm ready to respond in a more constructive manner than if I had just banged something out when I read it. Here goes.
I try to never take anything personal unless it specifically insults me as a person. We disagree, but I think we both are being honest in our disagreement, and can discuss this rationally. I even think that we are not as far apart in our agreement as it first looks. I think really it is just that I view a lot of this in a much large timespan than you do. I'll explain.
I was probably a little bit sloppy in my original point here. While I still think that we are becoming more socially isolated, I should have been more clear that, even decades ago, we were already quite socially isolated.
My anecdote was from more then 40 years ago. I'm a old geezer. We didn't even have TV because there was no cable TV, and the nearest broadcast didn't reach to us very well. (and beyond that my Aunt would never have allowed children to be inside if the sun was shining! We were all but kicked out of the door by sunrise.)
You mention that you loved heavy metal music and punk which is fascinating to me because much of that music is about frustration and anger at the capitalist/corporate world.
I think you are mistaking me. I'm not all about capitalism or the corporate world. I just view technology from a large historical standpoint. I think that most of our technology has made our world a much better place. It is the general technology I'm talking about, not the specific platforms or companies that run it.
I will concede that, on a superficial level, technology does provide more ways to connect with each other, but it simply cannot come close to satisfying the social needs we have.
No, but in many, many cases it is all we have, and go back 30ish years and we would not have had even that, and the problems that separate us were still there. It is not a perfect solution, but like most of our technology it is better then what we had before.
To illustrate with a personal example, I live 800 miles from my niece. Do I like doing FaceTime with her? Of course I do. But I simply cannot have the kind of relationship with her that I could have if I lived half a block away. So the real question is, why do I live 800 miles from my niece? And the answer is capitalism.
Capitalism is not the only reason, it might be a reason, and it might even be your reason, but people have been separated throughout the history of mankind. Your plight is no different from a 15th century peasant that was pressed into a lords military, or a 19th century farmer that had to move to the city when the crops failed. If you didn't have that technology you would probably have never seen your niece at all. You would know nothing about her but what you got from your sibling in a few letters a year, if you were both lucky enough to be literate.
To me this is where this post gets really frustrating. Compare society now, in terms of revolutionary movements, to what it was before the internet. From the 19th century abolitionists to the labor movement in the early 20th century and the civil rights movement in the middle of the century, this country has a rich history of revolutions producing real, meaningful change. And those are just the broad strokes, there are tons of other examples like the Women's rights movement, gay rights, anti-war movements, the environmental movement, the list goes on.
All those movements took the better part of a century from the start of the movement to it's fruition, mainly because it took that long for the idea to spread and people to organize into a critical mass. The abolitionist movement was argued about in the drafting of the US Constitution. Women's Suffrage took 80 years to get a foothold in the US. Today a movement can start, sweep the nation, and get a law changed in a year. All because we can spread ideas, locate the people that agree, and organize them into an effective political caucus in a single afternoon.
Now, I'm not blaming the internet for stifling these kinds of movements (although the ease of surveillance facilitated by the internet certainly can't help), but if you want to argue that the internet makes it easier for activists to connect with each other and produce social change, you'll have to explain why social change has ground to a halt or even moved backward in the last decade.
It hasn't. That 'going backwards' might be distasteful to you and I, but they are a movement that is creating change. Progressive movements are not the only movement.
The other answer is that one problem all movements have is that there are simply too many of them, they can organize to easily and spread so fast that they often end up with multiple ones competing against each other. Do we want more nuclear power plants, or are they a danger to the environment, or do we need so solve the storage problem first (and where to we build them when every proposal ends up with an organization to oppose that location)? Do we want wind power, or are they an eye blight (an actual campaign in the West Texas area)? I could go on and on. The problem with the internet enabling such reform is that it works for both sides fairly evenly. You no longer need to be absolutely passionate about it to get heard. Sometimes too much ease is actually detrimental.
It is astonishing that so many people have come to accept depression and loneliness as inevitable.
That is because at a very biological level it is. There has always been, and probably always will be, depression and loneliness because it is a part of our physiological makeup.
"Deaths of despair" in this country are at an all time high, the average age of marriage is skyrocketing, birth rates are down, more people are living alone. I would challenge you find a single metric that suggests that we are a happier, less anxious, less stressed society than we used to be.
I don't know what you call 'deaths of despair'. I don't know of any such metric. If you are talking about suicide then you are flat out wrong.
Marriage age is up, but for the most part that is just different life choices. People are not getting married, but they are not really being single either (at least in the US). They are just choosing to not get married. People do not put the same stock in marriage as they used to.
Having children later in life is actually linked to a metric of being happier. People tend to have more children when they are depressed then when they are not (there are various reasons for this, but the important thing to know is that having children is actually detrimental to most people's happiness in at least for the short term).
As for the metric, I would say it matter a whole lot on what time frame you are looking at and who you are looking at. If you are a gay male, person of color, or pretty much any minority, then the metrics are outstanding. You are more likely to be happy today than any time in the history of the world, and while we call them minorities, they make up the vast majority of the worlds population. Overall for humanity the world is a hell of a lot better then it used to be. Now if we can just keep from destroying it.
This is a thinly veiled "people aren't as tough as they used to be".
This is not 'people aren't as tough as they used to be' this is 'they are exactly the same as they always were'. We have always complained about our current problems and forgot that those problems are the same ones we have always had, only we used to have even others. We have a very short memory.
There are plenty of medical horror stories in our society today, including people dying because they ration their insulin, the obesity epidemic, asthma caused by our polluted environment, etc.
Insulin was not widely available until 1978. Obesity has replaced starvation, nearly 18 million people died of starvation in the 1940's worldwide. Pollution based asthma has replaced dysentery. None of this is new. We have always lived with our ills, and if anything we are much better at treating them in a way that allows for a relatively normal life.
Whether it's the fault of technology or not, there's no denying that we live in an increasingly unequal society, and I don't think most people grasp the implications of that. Here's a rather unsettling article about a familiar theme: the continuing struggles of the millennial generation.
Overall humans are more equal today then they have been in almost all of history. It takes a very, very narrow view to believe that we are more unequal today than in the past. Do you really believe that the different between a middle class man, or hell even a lower class black woman, compared to that of a billionaire is greater than that of a surf from a king in say 17th century France?
There was more to your post, but really it all comes to that last sentence. You believe that social inequity is too high, and because of that you think that all of societies ills are caused by it. I agree that more equality would help, I just think it is only high compared to what we had hoped for, because historically we are all astoundingly equal. What you are really talking about is being disappointed that we are not living up to our expectations, and with that I can agree. I had hoped more for all of us too. But lets not lose sight of all we have accomplished. For most of us we live in a near utopia compared to just about any time period in the past.