The Social Dilemma on Netflix is very good, especially as a companion piece to Behind the Curve. Both demonstrate how effective the internet is at detaching people from reality. It's something I see on all sorts of topics, from MH17 Truthers to Covid-19 Truthers, and beyond.

It's really remarkable when you compare different online communities that have a focus on conspiracy theories or an obsession about certain topics how many similarities you begin to see between those different communites.

What's particularly dangerous is when those communities result in people becoming increasingly isolated from real world interactions, because then the individual participating in those communities base their entire self-worth on interactions inside those online communities.

So what you begin to see are growing communities that are completely detached from reality, and are totally unreachable by mainstream society because they exist in self-sustaining online ecosystems that automatically and instinctively reject mainstream perspectives.

The question is then what happens when these people meet undeniable reality? It's one thing to delude yourself that the Earth is flat, but what happens when Trump is your QAnon saviour and suddenly he's not president? Does your alternative reality collapse, or do you double down?

Our capacity for self-reflection is replaced by a reflection of ourselves, and we become a victim of our own delusions while convincing ourselves that we're the only people who really understand the truth.

There's dystopian visions of the future where societies are enthralled by immersive virtual realities, but we're already there, and we don't need fully immersive environments to get there, just a mobile phone to stare at all day and the tiny endorphin rushes of likes and replies.

Those visionaries gave humanity far too much credit.

Maybe the real challenge is for us to respond to those people with empathy, compassion and patience, rather than derision and disrespect, especially in an environment which is designed to fuel extremism.

And I'm saying that as someone who really enjoys the derision and disrespect aspect of it, so it's a reflection on my own behaviour to those sorts of people than anything else.