How The Internet Ruined Society 

New editor for this video. Let me know what you think.

The total narrative shift from “online dating is for socially inept weirdos” to “basically the only way to date” says it all to me

Web search is broken: it either shows you SEO-boosted garbage or large websites that pay for ads. With search being broken, nobody can find your personal webpage anymore, if you're not on some big platform like Twitter or RU-vid, it might as well not exist. And the worst of all is that the normies are okay with this.

I think the real reason 4chan is still standing and so easily accessible is because it's a paradise for media shilling and honeypotting

You’re right on the money when it comes to sponsor-safe baby talk. How can people seriously talk about real, life changing events with terms like “essayed” or “unalived”?

I was born in 1994. I started using the internet in like 2002 or 2003 probably. It was really fun. Ebaumsworld, Gaia Online, GameFAQs, RU-vid, 4chan, uStream, etc. Around 2016 the internet basically died. Even Vine had this grassroots feel. Once literally EVERYONE started using the internet it died. I remember when knowing what a meme was made you a total outcast.

The tolerance of normies using the internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race...

Back in the 90s when my home phone rang, I was curious and happy to see who was on the other end, but nowadays, when my ringtone goes off, I jump and hesitantly check the number assuming it's either a scam call or some other terrible shit that'll ruin my day. RIP sanity.

That part of not having any privacy really spoke to me on a personal level. I've always hated the concept of a permanent record, as I don't like having to stress about everything to make sure I don't slip up.

We once burnt the library of Alexandria, and now it burns us...

You WILL watch the 1 hour long video of souls bosses beating pve enemies and comparing their powerful stats in a video and you WILL be happy(its game of the year)

Burning: slow Spine: tingled

4:45 "Couldn't manage it in real life, so they need a screen for protection." This is so true. There are people who are so shy in real life, or are scared of a social interaction, yet are willing to happily discuss everything and anything when in front of a screen, talking or texting.

Ah, I see you are in your video essays about the internet phase of your channel.

People often ignore the mental illness feedback loop / greenhouse effect that results from the entire world being terminally online. Before the advent of mass communication the "feebleminded," antisocial elements of a nation were often institutionalized or kept out of "polite society," rather than given a flood of endless affirmation & overstimulation.

The Internet is saved, billions must post

Alright boys say it with me now......The industrial revolution and its consequences.....

Also worth noting that the internet is dead, and most activity is composed of bots, not humans.

The internet ultimately forgets compassion and nuance. It's completely neurotic how one mistake will get you hated by everyone for life.

The fact that it's basically 50/50 if a piece of text you read online was posted by a human or a bot should tell you enough about the state of these bigger platforms everything is completely astro-turfed and there is almost no organic discussion. Stick to the forums bros

out of priciple to not let myself be completely consumed by brainrot, I actively resist youtube shorts or any other social media trying to emulate tiktok slop. I hope my fellow nerds here do the same.

I quit social media two years ago, totally deleted my accounts. I'm so much happier today.

One thing I despise is how people talk in real life using exclusively meme references or this weird “therapy” talk. Constantly talking about “red flags” “gaslighting” “Not me doing X” “Me when I Y”. The thought of people going about real life about ten years ago speaking in 4chan references would be unthinkable, and now real life is just Twitter and Instagram talk. People's vocabularies are atrocious now, and they literally don't know how to write properly when needing to. In about a century, books from 1900 will be completely unreadable for most average people because everything is getting condensed, sanitised and streamlined. On top of that, being sociable and outgoing is becoming more and more frowned upon and rare. People take pride in being anti-social, being unable to go outside due to anxiety, staying in every night etc. It's depressing thinking about what the next fifty years will bring, and how retarded we'll make ourselves because attention spans and social ability has been reduced to nothing. The worst thing is that even if you want to unplug yourself, delete social media and whatnot you end up isolating yourself because fucking nobody else just uses their phone as a phone any more. You might only be able to talk to people on social media, and you will never randomly meet your friends or even make new ones by going out by yourself because approaching anybody is creepy and rapey (if a woman).

What really sucks is most people who don’t acknowledge this subject won’t have the attention span to watch this video

If you dont care about politics. Then someone else will and will be able to influence society.

"Don't be fooled by the internet. It's cool to get on the computer. Don't let the computer get on you. It's fun to use the computer. Don't let the computer use you. You all saw the Matrix. There's a war going on. The battlefield's in the mind and the prize is the soul, so just be careful. Be careful." -Prince 1999

I was literally just thinking about how I wanted to watch a new shredded nerd video

Best video you've ever made. I could see schools using it for educational purposes. It explains the basic and established consensus on the internet's effects and its foreseeable consequences in an entertaining and eloquent way. Good work.

This video goes very hard love from Kazakhstan I hate normies and corporations so much it's unreal

I am a Faustian Wigger

before this video i didnt know that MOST people actually use dating apps to find a partner. I've always considered that to be for losers and thought that generally still was the consensus lol.

We have a friend of the family, who is a nuclear physicist. He can literally tell you how to build a nuclear reactor down to the details, but he is not capable of calling himself a taxi to go home. Now this guy was autistic afaik, but that kinda reminds me on a lot of younger people in my family today. They´re Specialized to the teeth in one or two certain areas they learned in school and university, to a point where they could start a business around this particular topic. But they still lack a fundamental understanding of the basic topics even adjacent to their area of expertise. It´s a hyper specialization issue and I don´t see this going away with the way how schools today work. Or better how they don´t. Throw a degrading social society and melting of real vs fake information and you got the perfect storm for a completely inapt society in the near future.

oh my science! an hour long video essay by a fellow vryvn sistah! you won the internet today!

"And yet you use The Internet! Curious!"

have you ever gone to a restaurant that had a huge menu? you open it and there's like 100 different things to choose from. It's so overwhelming that you just look for a dish that you're familiar with and order that, to save you the hassle of reading 4 pages of different entrées. That's basically what the internet has done to us, and makes it very hard for the average, unaware person to actually use it to educate themselves.

One thing I’d like to add in is that it feels like the internet forces you to have an opinion on everything. Otherwise you are deemed as a “centrist fence sitter”. I hate it because if you do talk about something you have little to no knowledge on then you are called an idiot who doesn’t know what they are talking about. You can’t win.

I live under the mindset that every single person on the internet is factually wrong, socially inept, and emotionally stunted. If you take any kind of interaction online as a personally defining attribute of your identity, then you're probably putting too much weight into what these complete strangers think of a situation you're far too uninformed on.

I miss forums, bros…

Very high quality video that respects our intelligence while being able to call a spade a spade

The part at 33:50 where the guy denies porn addiction as dismiss it as a Christian invention is disgusting. These people want everyone else to sink to the lowest of the lows, but what did I expected from a profile with a fursona as a profile pic

The internet has fallen; billions must log off.... Also, smart phones are scrying mirrors so it's not surprising people become terminally online

One of the worst parts of internet culture is the inability to take anything seriously. Everything has to be caked in a sort of apathetic irony.

Everyone agrees with this. Everyone will remain the same. I think now only crises will change us.

About 20 years ago in high school I had a friend obsessed with Japan. He would talk about it all the time and studies so much about their culture. He’s the one who first told me about hikikomori. He posited that they had gotten too technologically advanced for their own good and it was causing a schism in their culture and the growth of the hikkomori. I think about that guy all the time these days.

Planescape torment has been called the most "Philosophical game of all time" the writer Chris Avellone has confirmed he was just writing a story he thought was interesting, and fans are reading to deep into it". Death of the Author or what I call the Jacob Geller affect, yes affect, that has been my pet peeve of the internet for the past 5yrs

To be honest im really glad for the fact that I got to experience pre 2010 internet. It was glorious. And it will never come back.

"The algorithm brain: you know lets listen to molchat doma and plastic love while talking about biblical accurate angels, walkable cities and anolog horror". All this video is worth the time just to listen to this quote

I do think Facebook will fall in my lifetime. It’s used religiously by people 40 and over. But younger generations are checking out of that site entirely.

I find ironic how in a age where we have nearly all human knowledge at the tips of our fingers, there's still people who don't even know the culture that surround them. I mean young people who don't even know who were the Beatles, never even heard of Kubrick, or Einstein, Walt Disney, etc, important people of history who shaped our modern culture.

Charlie Brooker's series "How TV Ruined Your Life " is completely here on RU-vid, as old as it is it is still entertaining and still holds a lot of truth

>Global monopoly silences voices "Look at this tragedy" >Trans person silences voices "I don't condone everything this website did, and I most certainly wouldn't have allowed it to happen on my website... just look at the publically editable wikipedia which was raided years ago and never fixed!"

The internet is over, billions must live like 99% of human existence pre internet

I'm glad you pointed out how people are starting to use watered down euphemisms for "bad" words in order to avoid getting demonitized. Equally worse is seeing how commenters are emulating that same behavior for no real reason or obfuscating those words by changing letters to symbols (ex. d1e instead of die). I never thought 13375p3ak would make a comeback these days, but it seems corporate censorship made that a reality.

You will watch 3 hours long video essay about a manga that nobody heard about and how it changed the presone reviewing it for better ( reinforces ther left-wing views) , the deep psychological and realistic panic attack's with struggel that lesbian relationship face. *You will praise it in the comments*

15:10 that chair screech

The browning of the internet is one of the worst things to happen to the human race.

I've been slowly walking away from an Online Presence or Social Media usage past Watching Movies or Videos. I'm sure I'm being left behind in many things but my Mind and my heart feel better so Fair Trade I guess. I just wish people could try and walk away rather than cling to it for dear life.

China has a closed ecosystem not to simply exclude American tech companies - that is of course part of it - but mainly to not have their citizens get exposed to ideas and content the Party deems unacceptable. So I'd be really wary of making statements like that since it sounds like you are advocating for such bubbles of net, when that would be an even worse dystopia than what we have as of now. At least you can find unconventional ideas and sites, in China, no chance.

Just wait until SN finds out about Spandrell's concept of IQ shredders...

"perhaps everyone now is a loser" yep, just look at the rise of the Chad and Sigma memes. this video opens (and from the thumbnail/title) as a seemingly generic technology is bad return to monkey style, but develops in to a more nuanced discussion, that I ultimately agree with. what I am trying to say is, the first part of this video is framed kind of weird, but the rest is really good and well thought out, good Job man.

The reason for centralization is simple: convenience. Running a forum, paying for server hosting, having to make webpages etc is a hassle. Reddit, Discord etc. do something similar to their old internet counterparts for free (read: for your data and stripping you of actual control).

Good ass video

I miss internet 1.0 in lot of ways. Every website had Avery distinct personality and algorithm trying to plug into your brain didn't exist. Finding the good stuff one internet took talking to people either virtually or irl.

We just simply weren’t ready for it and honestly, I don’t think we ever would be.

Sincerely, extremely nuanced and highly thought provoking video! Rarely do I ever comment on anything here on youtube, however, I really felt like I had to this time. I have been following you for a while now, Shredded Nerd, generally because I like the way you present your ideas and *mostly* agree with your gaming takes, but this one took it a step further, by giving a detail-rich and fresh take on serious issues societies around the world are facing. I shall actually be sharing this video with those who might listen, perhaps it can lead others into useful time reflecting as well, like it did with me. Seriously, bravo!

Instantly destroyed subscription icon. This has to be the most in depth and accurate video fitting into beliefs I’ve had in my own echo chamber for years…but couldn’t ever put to words. Fantastic and fascinating. Thank you.

It is insane, how these algorithms can get to you when you are depressed or in any other way down mentally. I remember how my previous relationship started to go down the downward spiral. Suddenly I started to see Hbomberguy, Ben Shapiro, Contrapoints, PragerU and all that shit in my recommended videos. It was like RU-vid scented my vulnerabilities and started testing which rabbit hole I was more likely to go. When my (at the time) girlfriend broke up with me in 2019 I became full on insufferable woke grifter. And let me tell you, it is so much easier to consume another video about how capitalism is bad and totally a heckin root of my problems, instead of dealing with what problems actually are. So anyway, in 2021 I started therapy, and then in 2022 I took shrooms and combination on these two (and gym) "healed" me. Weirdly enough, my social media algorithms stopped recommending me these depressing videos soon after. They say that sects and extremist organisations recruit their members from people who are in some way mentally down - depressed, griefing after loss and that stuff. Funny how social media algorithms took that strategy as well.

This video was incredibly insightful. Do you recommend any further reading on any of these subjects? I am particularly interested in the "fast-politics" culture, and the over-emphasis on rhetoric. Genuinely, thank you for making this video.

You articulated everything I have wrong with the internet in this one video, congrats.

In a sea of goyslop this channel is a beacon.

My mom is very tech savoy but she still asks me how to do certain things. Never even crossed my mind that my future kid would ask me similar questions.

11:32 LOL I still remember when "youtubers" were always told to "get a real job" by their own subscribers when they asked for money on Patreon or something. This wasn't even that long ago but between 2010-2013. These days, it's weirder if they didn't put their Patreon link in the description openly told you to "become a member".

20:26 Over the past couple years, I' ve witnessed alot more stuff first get popular on "deep ifunny" or niche twitter circles then filter to the rest of the internet than from 4chan. 4chan didn't really have any notable cultural impact since wojaks and even jaks were made better on other sites like the sharty and the ru. I think 4chan, particlarly when it comes to its more popular boards, was irreversibly damaged by its widespread reputation as being "underground and edgy" among normies. That's not unique either, I've seen most of the spaces i used to enjoy online, including those cited prior, decline, either by becoming too popular or depopulating. Which is really depressing, but being in my 20s now, I'm probably becoming too old for that kind of entertainment. I feel like, outside of my studies and work as an engineer, I'm using the internet for less and less else than to listen to music, audiobooks and podcasts and keep in touch with acquaintances. None of which, at their essence, are uniquely made possible with the internet. The "wild west" aspect that i used to love has become more and more dead in my eyes. Maybe it hasn't declined and i'm just no longer an edgy teenager. I don't know, but the place the internet occupies in my life has greatly declined and has never been this low since I first started using it more than a dozen years ago. The worst part is that, this definitely has been a change for the better in my life.

Amazing video, very well informed and argued. Particularly loved the calling out of ideological echo-chambers on all sides, this is a phenomena that consumes many people today sadly and eliminates their ability to actually question narratives and should be talked about more. Would love to see you do a in depth video on that topic.

Internet became such a weak place, where everyone tries to cancel everyone else for any reason. Used to be more freedom there.

I couldn’t’ve said it better myself. Genuinely dystopian shit, which is why I’ve largely removed myself many social spaces. I find it hard not becoming misanthropic about it all because I do believe our species is capable of truly amazing things, but more often than not humanity just seems hopeless asf at times. Ultimately I do blame tech giants and conglomerates prioritizing money over morals, allowing unsuspecting people to fall victim to this shit. Knowledge is power at the end of the day, and while you think with the internet being a damn near infinite resource for that, no one’s using it for that. Hell, even if they did they would have to sort fact from fiction at every turn, so why not just consume what’s on the surface. It’s easier that way right? It’s all about control, and unfortunately even if we acknowledge these things, we’re still just as susceptible to it as someone who knows no better, simply because of how overarching this system has become. The industrial revolution and it’s consequences man

Just caught up with the latest skibidi toilet lore video *sigh* i guess I'll just watch this

55:02 Nobody talks about this but it's so true. I can't help but roll my eyes whenever some internet lefty says they "grew out of" alt-right political beliefs.

"4chan is like the shadow" yeah you're right that was really cringe but it's the truth.

Extremely underrated video and channel.

This video made me pretty sad. I yearn greatly for the internet of 15, 10 and even 5 years ago. LiveLeak going down is particularly sad because they documented the harsh reality of the world in a way no other site did. They did a great job of straddling the line between raw journalism and gratuitous shock content. The fate of the internet seems to be an endless spiral towards the worst possible outcomes. The period between 1996 and 2016 will likely be seen as the last era of truly free speech in Western society. The mass censorship brought on in the wake of the Trump and Brexit campaigns has created a "chilling effect" where people avoid discussing anything remotely controversial. Non mainstream voices have been marginalized. The algorithms are designed to push you increasingly low quality content and favor large, corporate creators over small, independent ones.

>the SHITernet [HEADCANON] I TANKED it.

Don't even get me started on content creators mindlessly streaming their "reactions" to other content and not giving the original creators credit

This is by far your best video dude.

Excellent video. I can very much relate. Having been there from the beginning remembering the wild west era of internet.

Phenomenal video that goes into a lot of things I have had in mind but didn't exactly know how to express

I stumbled across your content and found this video. While I disagreed with a small portion of it, some of what I disagreed with offered a new perspective I hadn’t considered. Very good stuff.

Bro how'd you resist placing that "dangerous to our democracy" news anchor montage/collage about halfway through

I remember when this video was titled something like "How We Ruined the Internet (and how the internet ruined us)" That title was telling us the truth because we forced some unneeded things and allowed suckups to become bigger suckups.

This is one of the best videos on this topic I have ever seen. Your analysis of 4chan was extreamly interesting. Well done.

This is a spectacular video. I hope you channel keeps going in this direction

Her voice is so beautiful

Thanks algorithm for feeding me this essay which has now radically changed my mind from being a thoughtless consumer to a rational ascetic anti-algorithmic! I'm going to watch exclusively videos now about Uncle Ted and living off-grid! Jk but good vid.

Love the original D1 soundtrack halfway through the vid. Thank you for this video essay... it's always a treat to listen to thought-provoking things while slogging through work

Beautiful video, wow, haven't seen something this good in a while.

It really is insane considering we have found a way to pretty much automate culture but we threw out the manual.

The "Skeptic" Community, was not skeptical about anything other than organized religion. They accepted marching orders and talking points without question as long as the speaker had bashed on religion enough.

This gives a good glimpse into The Information War. Top notch work

I love that in the scary hacker stock footage at 5:02 you can see the youtube video player on the "terminal"

Dating on the internet is still for losers... some things never change....