I don't think I'm merely being a luddite or overly conservative when I say that the exponential rise of parasocial entertainment worries me greatly. There's a rising loneliness epidemic in much of the developed world, and entire industries that profit from selling a virtual simulacrum of the experience of hanging out with friends (Twitch) or intimacy (OnlyFans).

Much like Facebook and social media, these products cannot truly satisfy the interpersonal/social/sexual needs of their users, but they provide enough of an illusion that many people will spend their time, money, and social energy on those sites instead of getting so consciously lonely and bored that they'll undertake the much greater effort to meet real people and form true social/romantic bonds–which comes with many complications, compromises, conflict-resolution needs, and reciprocal dynamics.

I'm not so much outraged that there's sex involved, I'm actually equally concerned about parasocial Twitch streamers/influencers and OnlyFans. Learning what social relationships and hanging out with friends is like from performative ad-supported performers is like learning what sex is like from porn; both are bad influences on (especially but not only) young people that can significantly stunt them.

I can testify that I went through a lonely period a few years ago, and stumbled upon Twitch, and was immediately weirded out by how much of an effect it had on my emotions. It felt like I could point and click and immediately have the experience of hanging out with someone, belonging, having something that felt anchoring, without making any of the hard social effort that's always been a challenge for me.

I couldn't point to any one thing that was wrong about the arrangement... I just had this feeling that it wasn't something I should let myself get too comfy with.

One issue with streaming/youtubers in particular is that you can get all of that fun-social-fuzzy feeling without actually participating and forming a real connection, it's different to other online communities in that way. Unless you dive deep into their community you don't actually know the streamers and they don't know you. You come out the other-side of a binge with nothing.

If you've got a robust social network then it's not all that harmful, and if you don't then it's at least something, but you can trick yourself into thinking that something is enough when really it can be quite a shallow and ephemeral social experience.

>If you've got a robust social network then it's not all that harmful, and if you don't then it's at least something, but you can trick yourself into thinking that something is enough when really it can be quite a shallow and ephemeral social experience.

Doesn't that also apply to any kind of interactions though? Every single group I've ever participated with in my entire life has always been shallow and ephemeral. Especially the in person interactions.

People you meet in Discords is much closer to a social setting, almost a bar at times. Twitch is a one-to-many relationship and it depends a lot on the channel if you can make connections.

Yes the world is always changing but everything that happened in the history was once also a change and probably progress in the eyes of the people who supported it. Just because the world's changing doesn't mean it's a good thing on its own.

> how we were OK with things like interracial marriage, same sex relationships, drug prohibition, etc

Curious if you meant drug legalization here... or is this in reference to studies about younger generations using fewer recreational drugs than children of the 60s?

Thanks! Corrected

With this logic the following generations will also be perplexed at a changing world that has lost all barriers and controls.

Every generation will be forever perplexed as every year the world changes. continuously. The old ways will continuously be outdated. It's literally limitless as limits are removed.

What type of things do you think our kids will be puzzled about in the future? Where is the world headed?

For many people around the world they do not see the world headed in a positive direction as morality goes, and wisdom from past generations is dismissed. For many others they see it as a great thing, a libertarian paradise where anything is possible!

Things can reverse and move in cycles, society doesn't always move in a progressive direction.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generat...

The world is changing much faster than human psychology can cope with, which is why you're seeing so much of depression and mental health issues everywhere. We would do better to slow down a notch, but that flies against the face of the capitalistic imperative and the atavistic and ridiculous fear that "if we slow down, the bad guy will outrun us", and hence full-steam ahead on every front. If there is collateral damage, even planetary scale, so be it. We'll try to sweep it under the rug as long as we can, and when we can't, we'll let the activists and heroes and do-gooders and scientists work themselves to death solving it for us.

I think a good argument can be made for mental health issues being more related to a need to perform ever better, more successful, more efficient, more marketable, demonstrating ever more status rather than being exposed to the availability of sexual content.

I've had a talk with a friend who was about to propose the other day. The elaborate planning that went into a questionable display of extravagance (it involved - amongst other aspects - skydivers and a banner being flown behind them) probably put him into more stress than asking the actual question. And worse: this idea of the extravagant proposal has been hammered into this generation ("If he can't even do this for you, is he worthy?"). In the 1920s, when there was maybe a ring (and not a particularly expensive one, either), and a question, things were easier, and people were less stressed about this.

And it's not "only" attracting and "securing" a life mate, it's every aspect of our live that has been blown out of proportion. We have forgotten about the good things in life, like taking some time to watch a vineyard in early autumn as the colors change. Having time for oneself. Having meaningful communities.

You're not getting older, the world is changing, and that it changes doesn't remotely mean 'it's better'.

'Change' is not 'Progress' - I think that when we are young we tend to way over conflate those things. Usually there might be some reasonable impetus, I find 'change movements' usually lack nuance.

Marx was dead right in so many of his observations and yet nobody is seriously a Marxist today i.e. 'legit concerns' don't necessarily map to 'good change'.

Though change is inevitable ... the nature of the change is not inevitable.

There is some good to OnlyFans, at least in that 'creators' get paid instead of middle-men, but on the whole, I think it's a bad thing. I just don't think we're going to look back on this as a good idea.

I think impressionable young minds are not going to be able to grasp what it means to have that content 'out there forever' and when they get a little older they'll probably have a significant shift in their view.

This argument applies to any change. Trivially, not all the changes must be accepted, therefore the argument is flawed.

UPD: rafale is right, I misunderstood the parent. It's not about any change, it's about allowing more freedoms.

The way I read it is that each generation is pushing the limit of freedoms. Sounds good if we stop right there...

But is it? When does it become bad? Should a parent be accepting that their daughter opens an OF when she turns 18? Should society be accepting of it as a side "gig economy" kind of job? How about the boys who are usually on the consumers/payers end?

We are monetizing intimacy and sex at a level like nothing before. Sure, it's always consenting adults exercising their constitutional rights and freedoms. But it feels wrong. Like the parent said, maybe I am just getting old.

"We are monetizing intimacy and sex at a level like nothing before. Sure, it's always consenting adults exercising their constitutional rights and freedoms. But it feels wrong. Like the parent said, maybe I am just getting old."

Unpopular view in this day and age but maybe you're getting wise. Whatever the thing you're out of touch with, gig economy prostitution essentially, isn't worth being that in touch with. Maybe I'm just an old man too, but this sort of hyper-commodification of sex mixed with the nightmare that is social media just seems like a dystopic nightmare on so many levels. This sort of thing is not a good direction for society. The obvious emotional emptiness and moral bankruptcy that underlies this is stark.

For the sake of completeness: there isn't really a big necessity in pushing that limit, it's not that it earns us, the society, something, while its risks are unclear.

I remember someone being enthusiastic that "our young are exploring their sexuality". What will happen if they don't? Nothing. They will explore something else and be fine.

> The way I read it is that each generation is pushing the limit of freedoms. [..] But is it? When does it become bad?

Every generation since the history of time in this situation has asked this question themselves and has consistently answered wrong. Nothing good has ever come from a previous generation suppressing a later generation's right to self-determination.

> Like the parent said, maybe I am just getting old.

It really is just this. Our formative years are when we are young, and human nature is to simply reject what we're not used to.

> and has consistently answered wrong

"Consistently" is too strong a word. We have ended up where we are today, but let's not pretend societies didn't explore a lot of dead ends along the way. Sometimes very destructive dead ends, with many dead.

Nor can we state that today is the "best of all possible worlds", and that we wouldn't have ended up somewhere better had the advice of elders been heeded more often.

This is a case of survivorship bias.

But that’s really a gross view of human behavior. Commodification is what allows us to build functional societies, and I am glad we discovered it, but it is absolutely antithetical to the things which sit at the core of human experience.

Love, joy, excitement, mourning, creating art, singing and dancing… All of these are unconditional, intimate, and creative acts.

When they are turned into slot machines and side hustles they lose their humanity. There is nothing creative about the 50,000th “influencer” joining social media platforms to shill their low-grade reaction videos or porn or other entertainment cruft.

Most of the 60’s era liberation was a matter of being free to create in one’s chosen way, or with one’s desired people. Commodification, OTOH, is about extracting value from lonely people to enrich a vanishingly small minority of platform builders and “content creators”.

Commodification is an extremely alien form of “liberation” when compared with drug legalization or interracial marriage or what have you.

Yes, yes, the same old story. The exact same things has been said by the previous generations about books, comic strips, radio, television, computer games, etc...

Ok..? In the case of computer games, I don't think unfettered use is a good thing.

This isn't "juvenoia", I was born in and am living in this generation.

The vast universe of freely available junk and time wasters available now is a radical shift from even my early childhood, when there were distractions, but they were not purposely made addictive by teams of psychologists and programmers to increase the profits of huge corporate advertising behemoths (à la TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc.).

> The vast universe of freely available junk and time wasters available now is a radical shift from even my early childhood, when there were distractions, but they were not purposely made addictive by teams of psychologists and programmers to increase the profits of huge corporate advertising behemoths

If you were born in and living in this generation, for any living generation younger than maybe the Baby Boomers, that's only even potentially technically true because the teams optimizing stickiness of entertainment of all kinds including youth entertainment, didn't involve programmers (in the computing sense) until fairly recently. But they absolutely have for a long time included psychologists, and the have been serving the intereste of corporate behemoths including in the advertising field.

The point I'm making is that the scale of this is unprecedented. If you wanted to read comic books or watch TV or smoke cigarettes, there were effective physical limits. Yes, people ruined themselves with addictions then, too. But now, every person I know has a slot machine in their pocket they can pop out and get a dopamine hit by using. And it is never-ending.

You can binge watch or binge on social media or binge on anything, with unlimited supply. It's completely unprecedented.

I notice little compulsive ticks in myself now too — they're hard to escape. I have many friends I only contact through WhatsApp or Instagram. That pulls me into my phone and a nightmarish sea of influencer garbage every time I want to talk to someone. It sucks!

> Should society be accepting of it as a side "gig economy" kind of job?

No, because in a "good" society, people should be able to find work that they're happy/willing to do that pays well enough that they don't need a "side hustle" to survive.

> We are monetizing intimacy and sex at a level like nothing before.

No, we’re divorcing the monetization of feigned intimacy and sex from pretense into more honest exchange like nothing before, and (arguably) moving it more from a pre-capitalist patron-servant model to a capitalist market exchange model.