Welcome to Sisyphus Highway: In Depth.

In recent episodes, cases involving Telegram, the Nth Room, deepfakes, doxxing, telecom fraud, and incels helped us discuss the internet’s influence on crime, individuals, and communities. Though apparently separate, these cases all point to a larger question: when the internet becomes a new environment for existence, what exactly does it change?

Over recent decades, the internet has developed far faster than rules, ethics, and social understanding could be updated. New technologies, platforms, and cultures continually appear, while our ways of understanding and responding remain in pursuit. People of different generations, on different platforms, and even within the same era consequently inhabit increasingly different experiences, languages, and worlds.

This episode uses concepts including “compressed modernity,” “coding a new world,” and “two-dimensional existentialism” to understand changes in the internet age:Why is mutual understanding between communities increasingly difficult? Why do more people rely on labels, settings, and databases to comprehend the world? And why do more people seek identity and construct meaning in online communities and subcultures?

 

- The development of internet media as compressed modernity

- The effects of compressed modernity: is the world becoming more divided and also more impregnable?

- Modernity and the Holocaust: violence is divided, guilt diluted, and evil spread on a larger scale

- Coding a New World: the database age and two-dimensional existentialism

- Mind uploading: hopes and fears for the future world

 

- Adolescence (television series)

- Chang Kyung-Sup, South Korea under Compressed Modernity: Familial Political Economy in Transition (book)

- Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (book)

- Wang Yuxi, Coding a New World: The Gamified Dimension of Chinese Internet Literature (book)