>>2075
In general it feels as though every web community nowadays has its most self-destructive traits amplified in ways that (((coincidentially))) keep people from actually making anything and either drive them off the internet altogether or force them onto a couple select megaplatforms like Discord and Twitter. I've often wondered how to make sense of it, and lately an odd comparison has stuck out in my mind: to the soul in Hell (or more accurately, Hades).
There's this idea in Christian tradition that the souls of the dead in Hades and demons are unable to repent not because of some arbitrary restriction, but because true repentence or changing one's ways requires the mortal body's physical capacity to act and change. Under most circumstances (which don't quite apply to departed saints for a couple reasons), the disembodied soul cannot actually change its mind for the better in any meaningful way, but it can get worse through this feedback loop of drives and desires that it fundamentally cannot meet, sort of like an having an eternal itch that cannot be scratched and gets worse the more it's noticed and thought about. The non-demonized dead cannot really affect the world most of the time, but the demonized and demons themselves...that's a complicated subject, but the gist of it is that a lot of the time their capacity to act boils down to their ability to influence the more-embodied world and people to act for them.
When I look around online and even within myself, I cannot help but see something similar. People online seem fundamentally less capable of acting or making things than they used to be. We talk endlessly, we grow more and more pent-up the more we talk and think and do nothing, and then we sperg at others in hopes of influencing them to do things and scratch our itches for us, as we seemingly lack the "body" needed to do things outselves. Those who can create find themselves puppets of social media algorithms, undead 20th century ideologies, sexual identities, and dogshit memes. All of these promise to increase the artist's identity/body/capacity to act, but instead deform that body into their own image and make it a spreader of their influence.
It wasn't always like this, and it doesn't need to stay like this (we aren't actually dead or demons, for one), but I won't mince words: the internet is hellish nowadays.