This is a message for the next generation.
The Internet isn't your friend.
At this moment in time there are some of the largest companies in the history of the world trying to convince you that they are your friend. They want to convince you that you should give them all of your personal information including your name, your address, your phone number, everything. Don't.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. At this moment in history there are very few organizations as powerful as those that control the internet. Facebook, amazon, Google, Twitter, these few companies have disproportionate power not just the internet, but the world at Large. They get to choose the winners and losers when it comes to news organizations, websites, individual content creators, they even get to choose which topics you talk about. If they don't like the topic you're talking about, they have the power to silence it.
This level of power hasn't gone unnoticed by governments. Hopefully by the time you read this the government hasn't stepped in and completely taken over the internet as it sure looks like they're trying to do right now. Government's all over the world are starting to use the technologies developed by social media companies to specifically target messaging that they don't like. It's entirely possible that in 10 years all that will be left of the free internet where people can exchange ideas without some omnipresent entity hovering over their shoulder will be a memory and stories passed down verbally because all the evidence will be erased.
That said, I'm still going to write about the internet because... Well, 40 years ago parts of the internet existed but were completely different from the way that they look today. 20 years ago, things had changed so dramatically that the internet looked like something out of a science fiction. Contrasting 20 years ago and today, although they weren't polished many of the things that the internet would be used for were already starting to take shape. The specific players might not have started their businesses yet, but the concept of social media was already relatively popular, high speed internet was already relatively common people could download video and audio and all kinds of neat things like that over the internet, and you could definitely argue that but we've seen in the past 20 years is more incremental improvements rather than Revolution.
Even in 1997 you couldn't really predict what was going to happen in 2007, but by 2007 things looked basically the way they were going to look in 2017, again notwithstanding incremental technology improvements.
For that reason, I think that at this moment in time writing about the internet can as long as you're careful not to get too specific be meaningful 10 years or 20 years down the line.
So the first thing I'm going to say is, and this was advice given to me by my parents when I was very young, don't give out your identity online. There's a lot of people who think that everybody should be forced to give out their identity online. They think that by forcing people to put their real name next to their opinions, that somehow that's going to make people nicer. Don't believe that for a second. The reality is that bad people exist. Bad people existed before the internet, bad people exist in some far off future after the internet has been eradicated or supplanted by a new technology. The only difference between those days and now, is that now whereas you didn't have to be in the same place as most bad people most of the time, you share a commons with them now.
At this moment they call it cancel culture, but this is only the latest name for something that has happened for centuries. Back in the '90s, certain political groups tried to silence their enemies using boycotts or whatever else. Usually their enemies were big media personalities because you could aim at them. Everybody knew who was on the television, so people on the television tended to be the targets of those people's ire. Those people never went away, they just changed. Previously they abused religion to justify why their enemies needed to be silenced. Today, religion has lost most of its power so those same people use social justice to justify harming others. They think that they're very self-righteous, but they're evil.
Trying to harm someone who's not hurting anybody else, not really harming anyone else, trying to not just sanction them or make them know that you're not happy with what they've done, but to go back in time and find every single thing that they've ever done that is against your arbitrarily chosen moral code of the moment, in literature there is a concept known as the anti-villain. The concept states that contrary to an anti-hero, who generally uses villainous tactics to achieve good ends, the anti-villain uses what might be recognized as heroic tactics to achieve evil ends. Walking in and expousing a moral code and using that moral code to absolutely destroy the people that you don't like, that certainly qualifies you as a villain in my eyes. Like many who fit the trope, there is no shade of gray, there is no context allowed, there is no repentance, once you are marked with sin you will always have sin. Once you are marked with sin, you must be fully destroyed. If they find that you have done anything of note they want to destroy it.
This cancel culture alone is such an important reason why you can't fall for the bait and try to give out your personal details online. You should be doing everything in your power constantly to stay anonymous. At least for me, growing up with the internet meant being able to say what was on my mind freely without having to worry about someone tracking me down. If you make a mistake I'm putting your details out there online, then there's a chance people can track you down and start really messing with your life in ways that are villainous. If you're going to school, they have contacted people's schools to get them kicked out and have their future destroyed for some imagined transgression. If you are volunteering, they'll reach out to the people you are volunteering with and they will try to get you excommunicated from Good works meant to help people. God help you if you're working, because those people will find out where you work, and silence you there. They will tell lies about you to your boss in order to shut you down. If you operate your own business, those people will reach out to your customers to try to get them to stop giving you money, and even if your customers are fully willing to work with you, they'll keep on going. They'll try to shut down your credit card processors, they'll try to shut down your web hosting, they'll try to get your domain name taken away, they will do anything that they can to destroy your life because they are evil.
Within recent history there have been a few evil empires, one of them was called Nazi Germany. Upon losing world war 1, the country of Germany was subjected to extremely strict controls over what they were allowed to do, and also absolutely crippling reparations. This meant that the nation of germany, and unfortunately as a result the people of Germany had to come up with massive sums of money to pass on to countries that were involved with world war 1. To an extent this made some sense, the war cost an unbelievable amount of money and led to the deaths of millions of people in what was considered at the time to be the worst war anyone had ever seen. In fact, it was thought at the time that there would never be another war because people had been so sickened by what they saw in the trenches. Unfortunately, the insistence on revenge has a cost, resentment built within the people of germany, and there was a politician who claimed there was some other group or groups to blame. That simple method of saying "all of this bad stuff wasn't done by you, it was done by someone else and it's unfair what's happening to you" was enough to create one of the great evil empires of history. The truth is, everybody thinks that they want fascism because they imagine that fascism will do exactly what they want and nothing more. They look at all the groups of people that they don't like and they imagine that the fascists will go and clamp down on those people and then just stop. Reality isn't so kind. Yes, the evil empire did go out and do reprehensible things to the group that they identified as causing the problem. Of course, you don't need to make any kind of choices to whether someone of that particular group caused any problems to realize that most people within any given group aren't responsible for the actions of the few. Within any given group there are lots of people who are just trying to sit back and live their lives without hurting anyone. Despite that, this great evil empire went out and exterminated a people. They didn't stop there though. To them, even amongst the people that they claimed to protect and and try to save there were two sorts of people: those who supported the regime and those who did not. For many of those who supported the regime, they were given the means to gain tremendous wealth and power in a very short period of time. For those who did not, they had their livelihood stripped away, they were shunned, in some cases they joined the groups who faced extermination. Eventually, because of the mismanagement of that evil empire, they collapsed, and half the nation was given to another evil empire.
The Soviet Union was born out of a repressive monarchy. Things were never particularly good in that country, but things were particularly bad during the early 20th century, and along the way there are many dissidents who were killed and a lot of political repression. A revolution grew out of a desire for something different, and in the name of absolute equality the revolution started. The idea was that everyone would work together and everyone would have a piece of the spoils. After all, why should the masses work their fingers to the Bone and not get a piece of the pie? So the new Revolution came about, but regardless of whatever pretty words were being spoken, nothing really changed. Prior to the revolution, if you spoke out about the regime you and maybe your family would be killed. After the revolution, if you spoke about the regime you and definitely your family would be killed. Prior to the revolution, most people lived in squalor while the elites lived in luxury. After the revolution, most people lived in squalor while the elites lived in luxury. In a lot of ways though, things didn't stay the same. The new regime, drunk on self-righteousness went out and used totalitarian power to try to morph the world in ways that the old regime couldn't have imagined. The whole concept of a church disappeared overnight because the state didn't want anyone worshiping anything but the state. Millions and millions died under mismanagement, and those who remained were expected to thank their overlords for their benevolence or face the death of themselves and everyone else around them.
In both cases, unimaginably evil regimes that murdered millions start with a nice idea. So too, the cancel culture mob starts off with a very nice idea of equality and justice, and they pervert it to their own ends. Very quickly, when you hand people that kind of power it gets abused. Soon you start looking under the sheets and you realize the people who are getting canceled aren't necessarily the ones who are committing crimes and doing that sort of thing, they're the people that the accusers have a personal vendetta against. This happened in both evil empires as well. People will always seek out whatever has the most power in the moment.
If religion has the most power, then they will try to figure out how to structure getting what they want as something religion supports. If you look at the official lineage of many kings, the royal family inevitably goes back to some hero or some God and the reason that they need to be in charge is that they are descendants of that mythical creature.
I once worked somewhere with a very strong union culture, and everything people wanted and ended up being phrased in such a way that the union would want it. I once work somewhere with a desperate for a manager, and anytime that anyone want anything, they would describe it in such a way that that manager wanted it. I once worked somewhere with an extremely powerful safety culture, and every ridiculous request was formed in the phrase of "it's a safety issue". People who seek power are going to seek power no matter what form it comes in.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that just because that thing that you like right now is good that it will always be so. On the internet, and in life, protect yourself.
Another point is look back at the evil empires I spoke of. Do you think that you could have predicted what arbitrary thing each of those empires would hate a few years down the line?
Growing up, the current power was the power that I supported. I believed and I still believe that people ought not to be judged based on characteristics they can't control, such as what reproductive organs they have, the color of their skin, who they love, or many other characteristics of that sort. Imagine my surprise a few years down the line when suddenly, those people have changed their tune. Suddenly, there actually were races, genders, and sexual orientations that you should judge a person by. As long as you hated the right people, you are fine.
Today, a literary theory by which you start with a conclusion that something is hateful and you work your way backwards from that conclusion is being used as a political theory. In the case of a literary theory, you can apply that to a work even if that works doesn't actually contain those things to derive meaning out of a work that was never intended to be there in the first place. There's no harm in this because all you're doing is trying to get extra meaning out of work. Using that literary theory on politics ends up becoming the definition of one of the logical fallacies. You start with the conclusion that something is evil, and you make it evil. In this way, you end up with arguments that sound absurd to anybody who isn't within your extremely specific in group, but it doesn't matter because you're always going to use this tool to get what you want.
The internet is littered with the result of this absurd idea. If you can think of something neutral you can probably find an article explaining why it's evil. There are people who have written articles about why milk is racist. There's articles out there about why nature is racist. There's articles out there about how ancient hand gestures are racist. They're not, but if you start with an arbitrary and ridiculous promise you're going to come up with arbitrary and ridiculous conclusions.
And so you end up with this situation where it doesn't really matter what set of rules you follow or what ideology you believe in. That ideology may be twisted into something absurd. Many of the same people like me who ended up growing up believing in that ideology are now excommunicated because despite never changing, the ideology did, in ways that nobody could have foreseen. Don't think that you're safe just because you happen to agree with the power of the moment. Just like the ethnic Germans who ended up on the bad side of the Nazi party in 1938, you can find yourself on the wrong side of an evil empire very quickly and there's nothing you can do about it.
I'm going to end with a different subject. My generation and likely many of the generations after me have made a critical mistake. We gave too much of our lives to the internet. I would like to propose a theorem: "people online tend to stay online, and people in real life tend to stay in real life". A lot of people my age have made the mistake of thinking that the internet is a replacement for real life. The friends you meet online may be fantastic, but they aren't your real life friends. You can have 1200 people on your Facebook, but no one to help you move a couch or to go camping with or to head to the bar. There is a distinct difference between the internet and the real world, and if you're not careful you will end up deeply depressed because in spite of all of this social interaction in the virtual realm, you are completely alone at home. Something similar goes for internet dating. There are definitely stories out there if people who have met their soulmate through internet dating. There's also people who are in the top 1% of attractiveness who can constantly go out and find people to go on dates with. Particularly if you're a man however, don't get sucked in by the hype. The juice isn't worth the squeeze. You can end up spending hours and hours and hours typing with people, and maybe that person who's made up of words and carefully constructed paragraphs is someone that you think that you'd really like, but then you meet and there's just no chemistry. You can't measure chemistry online, and frankly most people can't get across why they're amazing to be with in the real world using an online dating profile. There is a massive market out there, but the market isn't what it looks like. It's like walking into a luxury store and seeing all the goods and assuming that you can get them, but then you open up your wallet and it's empty, and in spite of all of the amazing things in front of you they're not really marketed to you and you can't walk out of that store with anything.
It is more difficult to meet people in real life than it is on the internet, but the real world is the one that you live in. If you try to live online you're just going to get super depressed. It's okay to spend some or even a lot of time online, but you have to remember and that in a lot of ways it just isn't real. Those Facebook friends can't come over and join you in a party. They can't help you move a couch. You can't hug someone you've never met who you will never meet. You can't sit next to a fire with someone that you've never met and it will never meet. You can't really stare into the eyes of someone that you've never met and will never meet, not in the meaningful way that makes you think that the two of you might have found someone that you want to spend a lot of time with. Without spending that time in the real world and cultivating your real world self you're going to be miserable. Take it from someone who made that mistake for many years and only realized way too late that his friends list was massive and totally meaningless.
The Internet isn't your friend.
At this moment in time there are some of the largest companies in the history of the world trying to convince you that they are your friend. They want to convince you that you should give them all of your personal information including your name, your address, your phone number, everything. Don't.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. At this moment in history there are very few organizations as powerful as those that control the internet. Facebook, amazon, Google, Twitter, these few companies have disproportionate power not just the internet, but the world at Large. They get to choose the winners and losers when it comes to news organizations, websites, individual content creators, they even get to choose which topics you talk about. If they don't like the topic you're talking about, they have the power to silence it.
This level of power hasn't gone unnoticed by governments. Hopefully by the time you read this the government hasn't stepped in and completely taken over the internet as it sure looks like they're trying to do right now. Government's all over the world are starting to use the technologies developed by social media companies to specifically target messaging that they don't like. It's entirely possible that in 10 years all that will be left of the free internet where people can exchange ideas without some omnipresent entity hovering over their shoulder will be a memory and stories passed down verbally because all the evidence will be erased.
That said, I'm still going to write about the internet because... Well, 40 years ago parts of the internet existed but were completely different from the way that they look today. 20 years ago, things had changed so dramatically that the internet looked like something out of a science fiction. Contrasting 20 years ago and today, although they weren't polished many of the things that the internet would be used for were already starting to take shape. The specific players might not have started their businesses yet, but the concept of social media was already relatively popular, high speed internet was already relatively common people could download video and audio and all kinds of neat things like that over the internet, and you could definitely argue that but we've seen in the past 20 years is more incremental improvements rather than Revolution.
Even in 1997 you couldn't really predict what was going to happen in 2007, but by 2007 things looked basically the way they were going to look in 2017, again notwithstanding incremental technology improvements.
For that reason, I think that at this moment in time writing about the internet can as long as you're careful not to get too specific be meaningful 10 years or 20 years down the line.
So the first thing I'm going to say is, and this was advice given to me by my parents when I was very young, don't give out your identity online. There's a lot of people who think that everybody should be forced to give out their identity online. They think that by forcing people to put their real name next to their opinions, that somehow that's going to make people nicer. Don't believe that for a second. The reality is that bad people exist. Bad people existed before the internet, bad people exist in some far off future after the internet has been eradicated or supplanted by a new technology. The only difference between those days and now, is that now whereas you didn't have to be in the same place as most bad people most of the time, you share a commons with them now.
At this moment they call it cancel culture, but this is only the latest name for something that has happened for centuries. Back in the '90s, certain political groups tried to silence their enemies using boycotts or whatever else. Usually their enemies were big media personalities because you could aim at them. Everybody knew who was on the television, so people on the television tended to be the targets of those people's ire. Those people never went away, they just changed. Previously they abused religion to justify why their enemies needed to be silenced. Today, religion has lost most of its power so those same people use social justice to justify harming others. They think that they're very self-righteous, but they're evil.
Trying to harm someone who's not hurting anybody else, not really harming anyone else, trying to not just sanction them or make them know that you're not happy with what they've done, but to go back in time and find every single thing that they've ever done that is against your arbitrarily chosen moral code of the moment, in literature there is a concept known as the anti-villain. The concept states that contrary to an anti-hero, who generally uses villainous tactics to achieve good ends, the anti-villain uses what might be recognized as heroic tactics to achieve evil ends. Walking in and expousing a moral code and using that moral code to absolutely destroy the people that you don't like, that certainly qualifies you as a villain in my eyes. Like many who fit the trope, there is no shade of gray, there is no context allowed, there is no repentance, once you are marked with sin you will always have sin. Once you are marked with sin, you must be fully destroyed. If they find that you have done anything of note they want to destroy it.
This cancel culture alone is such an important reason why you can't fall for the bait and try to give out your personal details online. You should be doing everything in your power constantly to stay anonymous. At least for me, growing up with the internet meant being able to say what was on my mind freely without having to worry about someone tracking me down. If you make a mistake I'm putting your details out there online, then there's a chance people can track you down and start really messing with your life in ways that are villainous. If you're going to school, they have contacted people's schools to get them kicked out and have their future destroyed for some imagined transgression. If you are volunteering, they'll reach out to the people you are volunteering with and they will try to get you excommunicated from Good works meant to help people. God help you if you're working, because those people will find out where you work, and silence you there. They will tell lies about you to your boss in order to shut you down. If you operate your own business, those people will reach out to your customers to try to get them to stop giving you money, and even if your customers are fully willing to work with you, they'll keep on going. They'll try to shut down your credit card processors, they'll try to shut down your web hosting, they'll try to get your domain name taken away, they will do anything that they can to destroy your life because they are evil.
Within recent history there have been a few evil empires, one of them was called Nazi Germany. Upon losing world war 1, the country of Germany was subjected to extremely strict controls over what they were allowed to do, and also absolutely crippling reparations. This meant that the nation of germany, and unfortunately as a result the people of Germany had to come up with massive sums of money to pass on to countries that were involved with world war 1. To an extent this made some sense, the war cost an unbelievable amount of money and led to the deaths of millions of people in what was considered at the time to be the worst war anyone had ever seen. In fact, it was thought at the time that there would never be another war because people had been so sickened by what they saw in the trenches. Unfortunately, the insistence on revenge has a cost, resentment built within the people of germany, and there was a politician who claimed there was some other group or groups to blame. That simple method of saying "all of this bad stuff wasn't done by you, it was done by someone else and it's unfair what's happening to you" was enough to create one of the great evil empires of history. The truth is, everybody thinks that they want fascism because they imagine that fascism will do exactly what they want and nothing more. They look at all the groups of people that they don't like and they imagine that the fascists will go and clamp down on those people and then just stop. Reality isn't so kind. Yes, the evil empire did go out and do reprehensible things to the group that they identified as causing the problem. Of course, you don't need to make any kind of choices to whether someone of that particular group caused any problems to realize that most people within any given group aren't responsible for the actions of the few. Within any given group there are lots of people who are just trying to sit back and live their lives without hurting anyone. Despite that, this great evil empire went out and exterminated a people. They didn't stop there though. To them, even amongst the people that they claimed to protect and and try to save there were two sorts of people: those who supported the regime and those who did not. For many of those who supported the regime, they were given the means to gain tremendous wealth and power in a very short period of time. For those who did not, they had their livelihood stripped away, they were shunned, in some cases they joined the groups who faced extermination. Eventually, because of the mismanagement of that evil empire, they collapsed, and half the nation was given to another evil empire.
The Soviet Union was born out of a repressive monarchy. Things were never particularly good in that country, but things were particularly bad during the early 20th century, and along the way there are many dissidents who were killed and a lot of political repression. A revolution grew out of a desire for something different, and in the name of absolute equality the revolution started. The idea was that everyone would work together and everyone would have a piece of the spoils. After all, why should the masses work their fingers to the Bone and not get a piece of the pie? So the new Revolution came about, but regardless of whatever pretty words were being spoken, nothing really changed. Prior to the revolution, if you spoke out about the regime you and maybe your family would be killed. After the revolution, if you spoke about the regime you and definitely your family would be killed. Prior to the revolution, most people lived in squalor while the elites lived in luxury. After the revolution, most people lived in squalor while the elites lived in luxury. In a lot of ways though, things didn't stay the same. The new regime, drunk on self-righteousness went out and used totalitarian power to try to morph the world in ways that the old regime couldn't have imagined. The whole concept of a church disappeared overnight because the state didn't want anyone worshiping anything but the state. Millions and millions died under mismanagement, and those who remained were expected to thank their overlords for their benevolence or face the death of themselves and everyone else around them.
In both cases, unimaginably evil regimes that murdered millions start with a nice idea. So too, the cancel culture mob starts off with a very nice idea of equality and justice, and they pervert it to their own ends. Very quickly, when you hand people that kind of power it gets abused. Soon you start looking under the sheets and you realize the people who are getting canceled aren't necessarily the ones who are committing crimes and doing that sort of thing, they're the people that the accusers have a personal vendetta against. This happened in both evil empires as well. People will always seek out whatever has the most power in the moment.
If religion has the most power, then they will try to figure out how to structure getting what they want as something religion supports. If you look at the official lineage of many kings, the royal family inevitably goes back to some hero or some God and the reason that they need to be in charge is that they are descendants of that mythical creature.
I once worked somewhere with a very strong union culture, and everything people wanted and ended up being phrased in such a way that the union would want it. I once work somewhere with a desperate for a manager, and anytime that anyone want anything, they would describe it in such a way that that manager wanted it. I once worked somewhere with an extremely powerful safety culture, and every ridiculous request was formed in the phrase of "it's a safety issue". People who seek power are going to seek power no matter what form it comes in.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that just because that thing that you like right now is good that it will always be so. On the internet, and in life, protect yourself.
Another point is look back at the evil empires I spoke of. Do you think that you could have predicted what arbitrary thing each of those empires would hate a few years down the line?
Growing up, the current power was the power that I supported. I believed and I still believe that people ought not to be judged based on characteristics they can't control, such as what reproductive organs they have, the color of their skin, who they love, or many other characteristics of that sort. Imagine my surprise a few years down the line when suddenly, those people have changed their tune. Suddenly, there actually were races, genders, and sexual orientations that you should judge a person by. As long as you hated the right people, you are fine.
Today, a literary theory by which you start with a conclusion that something is hateful and you work your way backwards from that conclusion is being used as a political theory. In the case of a literary theory, you can apply that to a work even if that works doesn't actually contain those things to derive meaning out of a work that was never intended to be there in the first place. There's no harm in this because all you're doing is trying to get extra meaning out of work. Using that literary theory on politics ends up becoming the definition of one of the logical fallacies. You start with the conclusion that something is evil, and you make it evil. In this way, you end up with arguments that sound absurd to anybody who isn't within your extremely specific in group, but it doesn't matter because you're always going to use this tool to get what you want.
The internet is littered with the result of this absurd idea. If you can think of something neutral you can probably find an article explaining why it's evil. There are people who have written articles about why milk is racist. There's articles out there about why nature is racist. There's articles out there about how ancient hand gestures are racist. They're not, but if you start with an arbitrary and ridiculous promise you're going to come up with arbitrary and ridiculous conclusions.
And so you end up with this situation where it doesn't really matter what set of rules you follow or what ideology you believe in. That ideology may be twisted into something absurd. Many of the same people like me who ended up growing up believing in that ideology are now excommunicated because despite never changing, the ideology did, in ways that nobody could have foreseen. Don't think that you're safe just because you happen to agree with the power of the moment. Just like the ethnic Germans who ended up on the bad side of the Nazi party in 1938, you can find yourself on the wrong side of an evil empire very quickly and there's nothing you can do about it.
I'm going to end with a different subject. My generation and likely many of the generations after me have made a critical mistake. We gave too much of our lives to the internet. I would like to propose a theorem: "people online tend to stay online, and people in real life tend to stay in real life". A lot of people my age have made the mistake of thinking that the internet is a replacement for real life. The friends you meet online may be fantastic, but they aren't your real life friends. You can have 1200 people on your Facebook, but no one to help you move a couch or to go camping with or to head to the bar. There is a distinct difference between the internet and the real world, and if you're not careful you will end up deeply depressed because in spite of all of this social interaction in the virtual realm, you are completely alone at home. Something similar goes for internet dating. There are definitely stories out there if people who have met their soulmate through internet dating. There's also people who are in the top 1% of attractiveness who can constantly go out and find people to go on dates with. Particularly if you're a man however, don't get sucked in by the hype. The juice isn't worth the squeeze. You can end up spending hours and hours and hours typing with people, and maybe that person who's made up of words and carefully constructed paragraphs is someone that you think that you'd really like, but then you meet and there's just no chemistry. You can't measure chemistry online, and frankly most people can't get across why they're amazing to be with in the real world using an online dating profile. There is a massive market out there, but the market isn't what it looks like. It's like walking into a luxury store and seeing all the goods and assuming that you can get them, but then you open up your wallet and it's empty, and in spite of all of the amazing things in front of you they're not really marketed to you and you can't walk out of that store with anything.
It is more difficult to meet people in real life than it is on the internet, but the real world is the one that you live in. If you try to live online you're just going to get super depressed. It's okay to spend some or even a lot of time online, but you have to remember and that in a lot of ways it just isn't real. Those Facebook friends can't come over and join you in a party. They can't help you move a couch. You can't hug someone you've never met who you will never meet. You can't sit next to a fire with someone that you've never met and it will never meet. You can't really stare into the eyes of someone that you've never met and will never meet, not in the meaningful way that makes you think that the two of you might have found someone that you want to spend a lot of time with. Without spending that time in the real world and cultivating your real world self you're going to be miserable. Take it from someone who made that mistake for many years and only realized way too late that his friends list was massive and totally meaningless.
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