It does but it needs to be carefully and consciously curated. You also have to know what’s healthy and good for mental health and bad for mental health. Material planted by marketing, domestic propaganda and foreign propaganda or influence doesn’t start off in your feed seeming like anything nefarious. We all are constantly targeted for influence for whatever reason benefits the entity doing it. Sometimes you don’t understand or know your mental outlook or opinion is being manipulated until a long time after or ever.

This is the reality of living in a consumer society and America has manipulated its people long before the internet. What’s negative? What’s positive? Sometimes you don’t know until your behaviors and choices in your life begins to be effected.

The younger generation is online more but as I said, history and human nature have proven time and time again that a portion of us will be effected by the artificial creep very differently. And those of that grew up with the birth of the internet have experience with how tech changes and grows, it’s complete indifference to what effect it has on users and the pitfalls we’ve experienced and why. Good things will come too and amazing innovations and progress and discoveries but it’s about whatever is also going on while you’re playing that you don’t know about. Like using Facebook for instance when they offered it and the running list of damaging and life altering things that was done on purpose like the fact that we lost our anonymity and privacy and everything anyone would want to know was collected and sold to the highest bidder for who knows what purpose. I could go on and on like giving child exploitation a platform to conduct business and a bloody civil war that was started using Facebook by a government that resulted in a massively bloody hand to hand war.

We have peeked into the visions presented to us and also what has leaked out from the tech companies for the next iteration of the web and many many of us don’t have any interest in it; apart from casual use. I have a pretty good idea of what sorts of things they want from us and it’s unfortunately never a better quality of life, unless of course it happens to benefit the corporate or political overlords.

If you’re aware of American history and it’s endless hunger to make profits using the citizens and the endless human rights tragedies that corporate entities were aware they were committing and offer no remorse only denial, you’d know that anything new especially on a large scale better be approached with awareness and caution and sometimes you have to know when to resist.

Because a large number of us will grow tired of the increasingly negative outlooks attitudes and algorithms we’re faced with online and also the inability to make personal connections. I’m taking to you but when we’re done we’ll almost certainly never interact again and if we did we wouldn’t even know it.

We’ll turn to human connections and the biggest impact we can have on creating a peaceful and comfort world to live in is our own communities. AI might be a tool we use and integrate into that world but many will crave working with our hands and creating things. Also an online experience where everything and anything you interact with is possibly or probably ai or ai created rather than humans and marketed to you won’t be desirable. I already take 2 week break after a couple days online and I’m not alone.

Many will immerse themselves into the virtual world and that’s fine but human nature and history says many will reject that entirely.

That’s what a life under capitalism does to us, until we take a long hard look at society and the way things are done and compare it to other societies and question the narrative enough that you can see through the capitalist veil, the idea that humans could live without constant labor if resources are obtainable and do things that fulfill us for our lives instead, the concept seems the antithesis to what we are conditioned to. Capitalism told us anything but a 9-5, 5 day a week labor is lazy and makes us worthless to society.

I think society would go back to spending more time in the real world and within the community so we could share our interests and work on community projects. Imagine how creative and innovative we could be when creating our world around us, together, without the pressures of modern capitalist society. We would go from consumers to creators.