We are constantly reminded that internet is "not real" - to the extent that we are immersed in technology, we are not living in reality. According to this idea, the increasing interest in the metaverse, for instance, is a collective delusion. Conversations or interactions which happen online rather than face to face are seen as imaginary, while only face-to-face conversations are "real" or actually occurring. Online interactions are seen as a delusion of the person engaging in them, and thus in a sense, the very use of the internet and technology are seen as an addiction or mental illness. All of the distributed interactions of the internet are medicalized and diagnosed according to their effects upon individual mental health, which leads many to a reactionary and disinterested attitude to all technological development. Something such as the metaverse, or crypto-currency, is a collective delusion, a gimmick or bubble which is inevitably bound to pop at any moment. As these movements grow and their influence increases, this is only interpreted as a growth in the scale and severity of collective delusion. The genders, avatars and identities which people adopt online are seen as symptoms, as signs of mental illness simply by virtue of the fact that they exist online. Reduction, for example, in real life relationships is interpreted as a sign of a dark turn, since interactions which take place online are by definition viewed as an ethereal shadow, an imitation of what occurs in reality.
Another typical response in this case, is the turn to a conspiratorial mindset. Since digital culture is not seen to have any causative force in itself, any force it does exert must then be attributed to a group of radical college students, to the administrative state or to Klaus Schwab. However, by the sheer fact of connecting people, in increasingly manifold and fine-grained ways, to interact across distances beyond those of physical interaction, the internet exerts a force of its own, which those institutions can only respond to or attempt to articulate into policy. Because an interaction with someone anywhere else in the world can occur with equal likelihood, and with no more friction, compared to interacting with someone within the same nation, the norms of religious and ethnic affiliation which traditionally maintained the sovereignty and unity of the nation no longer maintain their grounding in the underlying processes of production and communication. For example, long distance relationships become more common, and people will be united more by ideas rather than by location, or by their physical appearance. As physical appearance can be easily manipulated, it becomes more an expression of one's preferences than their genetics, so that people are more associated with their avatar, which is a continually constructed artistic expression of their values. Sexual interaction becomes altogether less common. As an immediate effect, political polarization increases, as national identity is deconstructed, the nuclear family is marginalized, and so on. I believe that these are not symptoms of decline, but the first stages of a global shift in the organization of supply chains, as the nation-state no longer makes sense as the basic structural unit for the world economy.
