If you go on Twitter for too long you’ll start to learn about a group of people you probably didn’t even know existed. People who you often imagined in your head as strawmen, but to your horror actually exist out in the open. The question is this: did they always exist, or did the internet make them?

Listen, I’m not going to lie to you. I’ve tried writing and rewriting this blog post about a dozen times, and at some point I’ve realized I have a deadline I need to hit and just need to stick with what I’ve got. This is going to be one of those hit or miss articles where you either know exactly what I’m talking about, or nothing at all. Some level of Internet experience is required to digest this work. You’ve been warned!

The Levels of the Internet

In order to understand the rest of this article, you have to understand the levels of the internet. This is one of those things that are better defined using examples, which is what I’ll do here:

Surface

You do not belong to any given echo chamber, and still regularly go outside. By the end of this article, you will be very glad you’re still here.

Community

You are apart of the broad internet community, and you might understand pieces of internet culture and slang, but you don’t yet have a specific belonging. For example, you know what “skibidi toilet” or “hawk tuah” is [1]. And lord have mercy on your soul for that.

Niche

You now fit into a specific group, and are beginning to align yourself to that group’s own internal culture and slang. For example, if you are an artist, you might know about Portfolio Day or the trends of redrawing an existing meme (recent examples include “Brazilian Miku” or “Why This 🥷 So Angry”)

Conflict Group

You’re now engrained enough in your niche that you know who your “enemies” are. For example, the number one enemy of artists are people in the tech industry, as they often have inventions such as NFTs or AI Art that attempt to ruin artistic expression. Therefore you have joined a “conflict” in which these groups must cease to exist. You will often see people in the conflict group stage of the artist niche have things like “No NFTs” or anti-AI comments in their profile descriptions, and be immediately defensive/offensive if any person with a technology background comes into their line of sight.

In addition, you might hear about other people in your niche who get exposed as wrongdoers, at this point for valid reasons such as sexual harassment or bullying. And you will spread that message as a form of vigilante justice, without really reading too deeply into whether it was all correct or not.

The toxicity is beginning to seep in here.

Religion

On this level your views begin to merge with a greater hivemind. Those with a deep connection to the artist conflict group will find themselves supporting seemingly different conflict groups as well — for example, artists are often very pro-Palestinian [2] and anti-capitalist. In addition, you begin to see “enemies” as anyone who goes against any of these beliefs — a businessman or an Israelite, regardless of how disinterested they are in art, will be seen to be as bad to you as an AI grifter.

Cult

This final level — the terminal level — is where everything comes together. Now a pro-AI, pro-capitalist, pro-Israel belief is just as bad as sexual harassment or bullying. And so you will do anything in your power to expose these people just as badly as you went after the people at an early stage. Now, for many people, this seems like a stretch — but not for you. Because you’ve gone in too deep, and you believe without a doubt that the enemy is everywhere, that they are after you, that they must be destroyed or else you will never live in peace.

At this point, it’s too late for you. The mental deterioration has set in. Your life is forfeit, and your insanity is all but inevitable.

…

What I’ve just described has been given in some places as the definition of an echo chamber — the explanation media outlets have for why seemingly normal people can fall into political extremism. It’s something that can happen to either side of the aisle — I use a left-wing example because I am left-leaning and know what the rabbit hole looks like a lot better on this side, but hopefully most of you can think of a right-wing example without me directly giving it to you.

Of course this is all political, as most things in life are. But I’d argue it’s not just politics. The people in our example did not start off political — they were grass-touchers, then internet enthusiasts, then artists. And even though the terminal level contains many politically charged notions, I think they are instead political because politics gives you something to be angry about. This is what these people are really after.

This is where the blog post starts to turn weird.

Capitalism and Schizophrenia

I don’t call the last level of the internet a cult for no reason. In fact, it seems to have many of the same features as a cult — it is a group where you must follow its laws to a fault, or else be ostracized and exiled from it, which is something many of its members equate to being the same as death. You’ll see many people give long, drawn out, tearful apologies for things the rest of us see as minor issues — showing up on the wrong podcast, making the wrong joke, following the wrong person — but in this part of the world, doing something like that might as well be the same as killing someone.

But there’s something weird about these cults. Perhaps the most defining aspect of a cult is that it must have a figurehead. Someone who the members of the group see as an all-powerful leader who can do no wrong, in a world full of evil and wickedness. Yet most of these groups have no leader! The evil and wickedness part is certainly there, but these groups are self-forming. There is no personality.

A self-forming cult has some pretty hefty implications. Sure, being part of one of these cults still give you access to the fellow cult members — people who you can see as friends, followers, etc. but will kick you off the second you deviate from the party line — but how do you follow the party line when there is no party line? There are no founding members, no managers, no gatekeepers. It is a group of people who have coincidentally believed that AI is the devil’s work, Netanyahu is Satan reincarnated, and misgendering should be punishable by death, without anyone ever having to tell them that at all.

What we have here is a bunch of mentally ill people who have found people on the internet to form a cult with, just because they feel the need to be in one. Because they’re lonely, and any normal group wouldn’t suffice.

Prozac Nation 2.0

Just like a cult, the one thing that connects all these people is that they have something in their life going bad. Drug addiction, depression, obsession — these are the things that tie them together. And while in tradition a cult leader would find these weak people to tie them to her own will, if there is no cult leader then all you have is a bunch of sad sacks with the same hobby who are able to inflict the same causes and conflicts upon one another, because as long as there is a majority then there is a rule.

These majorities tend to self filter. I’ll give you an example: there are groups of gamers who are in left-wing cults, and there are groups of gamers who are in right-wing cults. Some of them are upset that games don’t have enough black representation, others get upset where there’s one black character in the game. Some people boycott games that support Israel, some people boycott games that support feminism. Same pie, different slices.

But they still came out of the same niche, and sometimes even the same conflict group. But which group the person finds themselves trapped in is whatever one they were predisposed to. Some might even join one cult, find information that “frees them” from it, only to join the opposite cult! All that matters is if that person is in the same “bad place” that they were in before.

And as I’ve said before, while these things often look political, the politics isn’t the point. All that matters is that there is an “enemy”, a designated cause of their suffering, a person or idea or thing that they can get angry about as a way to better understand how their current lives are going.

And this leads me to the crux of the article. One thing I became obsessed with in regards to these self-forming internet cults is whether or not it only consumed people who already had mental issues, or if you could fall into them and have them create the mental issues in you. Many people have complained that prolonged social media use ends up having a bad impact on your wellbeing, usually due to having to constantly deal with these fringe cults and believing they have more power and popularity just due to the size and speed at which they can take over a timeline. But could it damage you so much that you end up joining them?

And The Abyss Stares Back

The first thing to understand is that these self-forming groups, although they feel uniquely Orwellian, have always existed in one form or another. Witch hunts, mass hysteria, and riots are all time-honored examples of the impacts of self-forming cults. People become obsessed with things, they make enemies with things that aren’t there, they become desperate for friends. So while things feel like a uniquely Internet-era problem, they probably aren’t.

And while I certainly believe that hearing content from these groups can certainly drive down your well being, I don’t think it will drive down your sanity. I think that, if you join these groups, something was already much wrong with you, something that wasn’t driven by the cult itself. Most people, when on the internet cult event horizon, are able to course correct when they snap out of it and realize things aren’t what they seem. Which, finally, brings me to the title of this article…

Has The Internet Made More People Mentally Ill?

Probably not. After I cut my internet use significantly — and began to block any “cult-triggering” keywords and users — I began to realize that the wide, great majority of people don’t really give a shit about what’s happening in Palestine, or the dangers of AI, or whether Disney making The Little Mermaid black is a sign of the end times. I think the only thing the Internet has done is made these people more easily able to find each other, and more loud in expressing their views.

There’s a fact that I originally opened this article with, but now I think its more suitable for the end. The rule of thumb that 90% of internet users are lurkers, 9% are creators, and 1% are obsessive commentators. These obsessive commentators are almost all members of these self forming cults, yet since they provide the majority of the content — usually due to their obsessions — they make themselves known more prominently. If you’re on the internet a lot, it therefore seems like a lot more people have mental illness then it looks, and that these numbers are growing by the day. In fact, it’s all just an illusion.

But it doesn’t make these people any less fascinating.

[1] – Since this isn’t going to age very well, just insert any sort of flavor of the month meme here. Anything will work.

[2] – Another historical anecdote. As of writing we’re currently at the peak of the Israel-Palestine war.

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