Real Life has finally become the internet, and there's nowhere else to go from here.

erratagnostic.substack.com/p/the-intern...

No institution was safe. Academics, politicians, businesses, journalists, all brought the irreverent norms of online space into the real world. Journalists became bloggers long before bloggers became journalists, as
Samo Burja once quipped on a podcast.

What you said and who you were online would follow you offline, and there was no escaping your digital past anymore. Anyone could trawl through a decade of your posts to find ammunition to use against you.

No longer was the internet its own world, nor was it merely importing social capital from offline. Instead, the flow reversed and online memes, culture, ways of speaking and writing, and norms infiltrated real life.

This, too, would eventually shift. Like many things, it was gradual then all at once. It came into stark contrast in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump.

The internet had become real life, downstream of the world of atoms. Celebrities, politicians, brands and relatives were present, and single sign on systems linked identities via apple, Google, and Facebook.

This shifted dramatically with Myspace, Facebook, and smartphones. Real identities were brought from offline to the internet, and social capital was exogenously imported to cyberspace.

Identities were temporary, with new names and personas generated with a new email address in a matter of minutes. There was no persistence across platforms, and no links between online and offline except those you chose.

The complexity tax on time and attention will continue until morale improves.