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I was on the left before I started reading / watching anything online. My positions didn’t change but it feels like all of politics shifted right. So I guess im further left now by comparison than I used to be.
I think the main difference for me is that the internet wrecked my trust in the mainstream media and people in power. I question things more now than I used to. Then again that could have happened naturally just by growing up too.
Yes. My worldview, morals, and ethics were pretty much fully formed before I even started using the internet.
Maybe I would’ve been slightly less cynical and nihilist and depressed, but the world outside the internet has let me down a lot more than the internet, even accounting for enshittification, so probably not.
I would definitely have less interesting fetishes, though.
I think I’d need to be born before 1755 to have a significant change to my religious or some political beliefs.
Definitely. I only got easy internet in my pocket after school. Before that, I was raised by Sonic the Hedgehog and Captain Planet in my childhood years, and punk rock in my teenage years. And it was never a phase, mom.
No, I think I probably would have the same. All the internet did was make it easier to be exposed to more ideas, but I had been doing that in libraries from the time I was a teenager anyway.
Simply because I wouldn’t have met my wife, I suppose I wouldn’t have. Also, being on the more “conversational” parts of the chans as a late teen made me (perhaps surprisingly) very empathetic and more merciful with my judgement and actions, and helped create a bigger “barrier” of human understanding between the words I hear/read and my reaction to them (very helpful as a hyperactive, sensitive guy!). But most of my ideology’s “building blocks” come from very old and popular books, so maybe I would’ve developed into it/found my way to it, just a bit later. How could I know? 😅
I think my beliefs would be similar but far less mainstream
Assuming that the only thing that changes is that the Internet doesn’t exist; yeah. I would still have the same ideals. I didn’t learn history from the internet, I learned it from books. I didn’t learn empathy from the internet; it’s inherent to being human. I didn’t learn how to share or be kind from the internet; I learned that by being around people, having empathy, and from wholesome media like Sesame Street.
If the internet didn’t exist I very likely wouldn’t be alive today, so I guess not
You mean like you wouldn’t have the job you have and thus can’t survive, or do you mean like… mental health peer support groups on the internet?
Online friends helped me get through puberty tbh. Irl my classmates were mostly bullies.
I’m still trying to figure where these mythical online friends are.
The secret ingredient is spending too much time online as an escape from reality
They were conceived on an adult film shoot.
I don’t think so. It’s provided me with a lot of different perspectives and information that doesn’t show up in centralized media.
Probably not. I build my philosophy bit by bit, by being exposed to a lot of different often contradictory ideas though the internet.
I would have never had patience for reading all the classic philosophers (they wrote a lot). Even less with modern ones (they are very niche these days). But having a summary of anything at my fingertips made me able to cross connect ideas and form something coherent on my own.
I’d say i’d have the same political/philosophical beliefs, cuz they make sense with who i was before i had access to the internet, and the social context i grew up in. I rejected religion since i can remember interacting with it. On the other hand, i might not have the same cultural knowledge (especially in music, which i discovered on youtube and forums).
I can state pretty definitively mostly yes because a lot of my formative years were before the internet really existed as such. Www came about when I was about 15. I was already dialing into BBSes and Gopher and IRC before that, but DSL didn’t come about until I was in my twenties and I must’ve been nearly thirty when broadband came about in my neck of the woods.
My swing from right to left was well under way by that point. The internet certainly didn’t hurt that, and I might’ve hung onto some deep-seated bigotry longer without it, but my die was cast probably before 9/11 and certainly after it.
if internet didn’t exist, I’d probably be a religious person, who wouldn’t read any religious books but would have followed the customs. But with internet, and by interacting with different people, I became atheist.
