The Wrong Take

You have opinions. I have opinions. They have opinions. We all have a platform, so we express our opinions. All opinions matter; consequentially, no opinion matters. A curse of our age.
I kind of believe the Dead Internet Theory. I believe the internet has the potential to become an echo chamber, reverberating conversations between bots and replicating non-human content ad infinitum. I believe it could; I have this weird urge, however, to stay positive and believe it won’t.

My first experiences with the internet had that ‘early web’ flavor to them - connecting in the evening because it was cheaper, organically and manually visiting websites with purpose. It would take forever to load a single page, so it had to count. It was a time of simple and direct urls. You want a website about this, just type www.this.com and it will get you there. Or somewhere. Or you will find out there is no website about this, so you can make your own and pave the way for people who are really into this.
Or you could go into a search engine, and search for the thing you were looking for. Or visit a portal and browse their contents. The internet was just that: uncharted territory, with a few harbors to anchor your boat, choose a direction and go.

If you wanted to express yourself, to have a platform of your own, you would search for forums. Forums were where the internet really thrived, because you not only could find the thing you were interested about but the people who were also interested on that thing. Like any human connection, web users gathered through affinities, shared experiences, likes and dislikes. You could have a blog where you talked about these likes and dislikes. Someone could find it, agree, disagree and decide to stick around. Having a platform demanded finding a niche, putting effort into it, maintaining it. You would need to gain that thing called influence; you would need to be relevant or knowledgeable enough to be mapped by the harbors so they could point to you.

Social networks changed the landscape. You could share your likes and dislikes and opinions with friends, or with strangers you now befriended over the web. You could expand your influence by reaching like-minded people and having them reverberate your opinions. You could become a beacon in the more and more crowded waters of the interwebs.

And we fast forward to 2025, when it’s become brutally apparent that if everyone expresses their opinion it does not, surprisingly, create the magical fairy tale reality where dinosaurs and people coexist happily. It in fact makes things worse. Everyone has a platform, so no voice matters anymore. We can’t tell experts from amateurs because we all know something; all the knowledge in the world, factually correct or not, is a search away. The truth is not a shared concept, if it ever was. Anyone can live their individual truths, and not have them contested because they surround themselves with reverberating walls. Screaming into the void, day in, day out. Trying to be the loudest voice in a cacophony of indistinguishable sounds.

This is where I tell you that whatever social cause you hold closer to your heart, whenever you think that it is impossible for people to not understand this topic: it isn’t. It is quite possible, in fact, that once universal truths like fascism is bad are now dismissed by some because if they agree with fascism even a tiny bit, and everyone is entitled to their beliefs and live their lives as they wish, why do THEY need to have this belief denied to them? Why are THEY wrong, and not everyone else?
If feels exasperating. The more I think about it, the more I try to understand and hate that I understand. Even if I fiercely disagree with everything about it, I understand how it happens. And in these moments I would love to be clueless, to forget any knowledge I have and just not make these connections, because the truth isn’t setting anyone free lately. So, I’m sorry, but I want to show you how I’m seeing it.

What humans crave is connection, validation. To feel they belong, they’re not broken, they’re part of something bigger than themselves, they are doing it for a greater good, they matter. How odd that just now, when anyone can voice whatever they want and no one will care, it will not matter, is when people decided that being horrible is their validation. It makes them matter not to face punishment; it means they are valid, they belong. Saying that something is bad won’t cause much impact because, if they search in the right places, someone will be saying otherwise. And what is the truth, really?

I wish, reader, I could offer solutions. Way smarter and more knowledgeable people than me are looking for them, trying to change this broken world. But I won’t leave you without some hope; I believe some things can’t be fixed, but can be mended. That doing something will far overcome doing nothing at all, be that deleting a social profile in a dubious website, donating for aid relief in one of the many areas of the world at war, even just spreading some joy. Think of kintsugi, the art of repairing what is broken but using its cracks as a central feature. We are not anything as a species if not resilient.

We push through.

-Maíra