The modern internet is, in my opinion, a psychosocial hazard. Social media, with its millions of people and millions of horrible perspectives, its cliques, in-groups and out-groups, the literal millions of AI-Generated bots, billions of hours of AI-generated slop content, short-form algorithmically dictated content, and its inherent negativity and “sky-is-falling” bias, alongside Traditional media, whose role it is is to basically influence your thinking into worrying about stuff you have quite literally no control over, in order to facilitate the display of more and more advertising, has got me thinking… It’s about time to treat the internet as the psychological hazard that it is.
Once a gateway to the world, the information superhighway, the modern internet is a mess, filled with people who are all perpetual fools to the existence of the Eternal September. I know that’s real #iam14andthisisdeep energy, but the Eternal September effect is essentially the idea that a litany of inexperienced netizens, bombarding the space of the internet with their lack of critical thinking skills, has turned the internet into a cesspit of misinformation, AI generated slop and dramatic bickering in the comments.
As such, I believe it is time to start treating this modern iteration of the internet for the Psychosocial hazard that it is. It’s negatively affecting our health, it’s forcing us to focus on things that we as individuals have no locus of control over, and more importantly, it’s affecting our productivity, our inspiration, and our innovation.
What brought me to this conclusion: A Zizekian analysis of recent protests
I experienced this myself recently as a now 3-month long Tesla owner. As you know, we’ve been copping quite the rap online for the CEO of said car company going off the deep end. This has resulted in protests outside of Tesla dealerships, destruction of vital EV infrastructure, and the vandalisation of several Tesla vehicles throughout the world, including other EVs that aren’t even Teslas.
I am going to be the first person to tell you that the destruction of a person’s personal property is not a valid protest, and neither is the destruction of infrastructure that is necessary to keep transportation moving, regardless of who owns said infrastructure.
I am in agreement that the protests involving the picketing of Tesla dealerships are absolutely valid, as the actions of that CEO have gone against the ethos of the company and its goals of delivering sustainable automotive transportation and clean energy to the masses. By courting the Trump Administration for a chance at a tax break, Elon has done significant damage to the brand’s reputation, and even Tesla themselves know this.
I have tried my best to be the good guy on this topic. I really have. I have done my best to defend existing Tesla owners by re-iterating the beliefs that a solid 80% of our community has. Fuck Elon Musk.
I was recently told by a commenter on an Atrioc video recently, to either sell my car or commit suicide. Since I cannot sell my car due to the way Australian Lease agreements work, this is tantamount to a person telling me to kill myself for owning a Tesla.
It’s this reactionary behaviour that inspired this article. The age of nuance online is slowly but surely beginning to die. The online world, and its ever increasing encroachment into the real world is starting to have pretty significant impacts on our mental health. Any reader who’s ever read La Peste by Albert Camus knows that Fascism is a sickness of ideology, caused by a plague of greed in the Oligarchical class, and a lack of preparedness by the Political classes of society, or rather, a sort-of denialism by the political classes that be that oligarchs and billionaires at large are not a threat to society. It’s got nothing to do with whether or not someone chooses to buy a car or not, purchasing a vehicle is merely a numbers game. I went out and assessed the competition, and just so happened to have ended up in a vehicle whose company’s CEO is a complete and utter maniac.
It brings me to the Small Boy analogy by Slavoj Zizek. This is a story which explains the difference between explicit brutal authority, and subtle authority. Elon Musk has deviated from the loving yet forceful mother, to the blatant and instructive mother, telling you to see that grandmother who constantly bullies you and telling you that you must love her. As a result, with this explicit, blunt-force contradiction, you find it way easier to knee-jerk, push back and rebel against this brutal authority. This is why Tesla is now such a soft, squishy target, even though Elon only owns about 13% of Tesla as of the time of writing.
Now compare this to Rivian. Rivian is seen as the new “Friendly Alternative” to Tesla, even though Amazon owns 22% of Rivian, and by proxy, Bezos owns about 9.5% of Amazon’s stock. By proxy he owns a lot less of Rivian as a result, but his influence in Amazon is still pretty significant. Amazon directly donated to the Trump campaign’s inauguration fund. to the tune of $1m, and they previously gave about a quarter of that to Biden’s inauguration fund. It shows that Amazon, at large is also a horrible corporation, but it does its evil behind a veil of “no, we love our customers, we swear to god” behaviour. This is a soft authority, an authority which is hard to argue against, because it seems all warm and fuzzy, despite the fact that this multibillion dollar monolith is absolutely, just as inherently evil as Tesla is, it’s just tactically evil.
As such, this is why I actually still think it’s okay, despite all the BS that Elon’s spreading, and all the horrible things he’s doing, to buy a Tesla in 2025. Every company, corporation, business, whatever is inherently evil, and what drives people like Elon and Bezos to support people like Trump, is the ability to wield power under these more favourable conditions. Biden was at least putting the screws to corporations. Elon’s DOGE is actively attacking organisations like the SEC and IRS, all organisations that were investigating him and his billionaire mates. He’s just the pawn who’s being sacrificed for the much bigger game, the hard target which is distracting us all from the many, many soft targets who are playing the US government like a fiddle.
The protests in response, are absolutely justified. But there’s one thing about the internet. Nothing is ever good enough. It’s a constant game of attentionball.
That comment that I talked about earlier, about a commenter telling me to basically kill myself, despite me sharing the beliefs of pretty much a solid bulk of the Tesla community, says it all, really. The internet does not do subtlety and nuance, and hasn’t done so for several years. In a world where there is infinite possibilities of where one’s attention can go, you need to focus on the most visceral ways to make your point go across. I understand the anger behind such statements. I really, really do. It actually made me contemplate suicide for a brief moment. I’ve always wanted to own a viable Electric car for decades, and not five weeks before that Salute happened, I finally made my dream come true… Only to be told by someone to kill myself for that decision.
I’m starting to think that giving people unfettered and unlimited ability to react in a knee-jerky way was definitely not a good idea. The internet, and in particular social media, has done more to divide us into hard-lined communities than any other medium before it. And it’s not the first time in history that we’ve seen such massive political upheavals when a new medium is introduced.
This isn’t our first rodeo.
In the 1930s, it was the widespread adoption of radio communications that helped the NSDAP (aka the Nazi party) cement its chokehold on the German public. The program “Germany Calling” was basically if Rush Limbaugh had a hankering for some Jew Murder, wherein shock jocks would spread lies about Jewish people causing the economic woes that befell Germany post WWI, where in reality, it was the reparations they had to repay for causing WWI, Hyperinflation caused the German Government refusing to tax its wealthy oligarchs, and instead print money to pay said reparations, and of course, the global phenomenon that was the Great Depression, that caused all of their economic woes. The solution to this was an obvious push by German Socialists to tax the super-wealthy, but the NSDAP latched onto this “Socialist sentiment” by means of declaring that there was a so-called group of elites that were dominating German Banks. They were all Jews, and they all had to die.
Thankfully, the Austrian Painter painted his most inspirational masterpiece on the walls of an underground bunker below the Berlin Chancellery. The medium? Brain on concrete, powered by Walther.
But it was this widespread adoption of an alternate media that provided a new branch of oligarchical control. It was Oligarchs who allowed Hitler to exist. It was the proliferation of cheap radios which allowed the unwashed masses to access the airwaves, and when someone is on the radio, making all these big promises about how he’s gonna fix all your problems, and you’ve yet to receive an education on the fact that perhaps there’s motivation and purpose behind this new propaganda branch, you believe every thing you hear on the radio as gospel.
As such, we have the same situation with the Internet. In its early days, we were all taught media literacy, especially when it came to the internet. We were taught that this new medium should be treated with kid-gloves, as if this was the wild west, where anyone and anything can post information. You should treat this medium, like the medium of radio back in the 1930s, where it was much cheaper to set up a radio station than it was to set up a printing press. This accessibility of information made it easier for nefarious actors to spread lies, as there were less barriers to entry to spreading information.
As such, with a few million Deutschmarks, they could buy broadcast equipment, and spread The Jewish Question to millions of unsuspecting German Ears, who could all afford to buy cheap personal radios now, due to the proliferation of mass production of radio receivers and broadcast gear in the ’20s and ’30s.
Likewise, Facebook in its early days was an exclusive club. So was Something Awful. So was the Usenet. All of these mediums had barriers to entry. Facebook required you to have a college login. Something Awful required you to pay a $10 fee per year. The Usenet charged you for minutes of access. As such these places became fairly tame places for internet discussion and debate. Information spread through these networks relatively easily, and we in fact, got a few really interesting tidbits, including the phenomenon of Godwin’s Law (which i’ve already broken in this article, lol) and the Rules of the Internet, a set of loose guidelines on how the Internet kinda-sorta works.
But then the barriers to accessing these platforms dropped. The Cheap Radios of the Internet were first seen when AOL gave internet users access to the Usenet. They call this Phenomenon the Eternal September because of the fact that new Usenet users were likely to join Newsgroups in September, when the new American college season starts. Over time, the new users will learn the lingo, get beaten into shape by the other members of the group, and by the time the next September comes around, the newbies will be somewhat veteranised netizens. This all changed when AOL basically gave access to the usenet to the entire usenet, for free, for a limited period of time. Since AOL discs were a dime a dozen with pretty much every piece of software you bought in the ’90s, that meant that there was a consistent influx of new users who raided the groups, and destroyed all those conversations. Thus, an Eternal September.
Facebook encountered the same thing. Economic pressures drove its relaxation of college email requirements, despite the fact that Facebook was originally designed as a way for Mark Zuckerberg to try and get his freak on with college girls, it eventually evolved into sort of a new Usenet, a place where college students could talk, share pictures and information, and just generally have a great time. In the college email days? It was great. A little silly and fun, and yet still super useful for catching up with your buddies at uni. Hell, when MSN finally crapped the bed, it’s what I used to message my friends. Slowly but surely however, advertising was the main goal of Facebook, and ads slowly crept into the platform. The userbase widened, and now your parents were getting on the platform. They were tame at first, but they didn’t have the education that us millennials had when it came to how to navigate the ‘net. A lot of people started falling victim to misinformation and AI bots. The Cambridge Analytica scandal fed political advertising to people based upon one of those fun little personality quizzes that you used to take on the app. As a result, we got Trump in 2016.
Livestreamers and YouTubers helped win Biden the election in 2020. This soon gave way to Podcasters winning Trump his second term. New media, when left unchecked, when combined with significant economic crises, and the inability for Polticians to fight Oligarchy outside of media spaces, is what gave us Trump again in 2024. Podcasts were how we get our news now, not Twitch Streamers, or YouTubers, 38 million people tuned into Joe Rogan’s three hour interview with Donald Trump in three days. Kamala would’ve had to appear on CNN for a solid week straight, to get that same level of exposure. Gen Z is the most conservative new generation since the Boomers, and mostly because of Tiktok and podcasts.
The truth is, the internet has always been a hive of misnformation, and the rates in which new media are developing on this still relatively new medium is rapidly accelerating. It’s a medium wherein there are sub-mediums, just as there are Tabloid newspapers, mainstream newspapers, and editorial journals, this space has layers to it. It’s like an onion, and like with the Newspapers, most of ’em stink.
The media is a psychosocial hazard
Now I do a lot of work around the realm of workplace health and safety. I am starting to see that the media at large, in its quest for your attention, is becoming a psychosocial hazard.
So you’re probably thinking, “Okay Mr. OSHA, what’s a Psychosocial Hazard?!”
Well, firstly I’m Australian, so it’s “Mr. WorkSafe” to you, but regardless, in a workplace health and safety sense, a Psychosocial Hazard is a hazard which has the potential to cause harm to your psychological health and wellbeing. Like with all hazards, there are several risk factors in which you are exposed to. Misinformation, worrying about things that’re out of your control, the exposure to bots, AI and internet trolls, the risk of exposure to cyberbullying and harassment, it all seems to me like this modern state of the Media is very much a hazard to your health.
I quit social media a solid 5 years or so ago, around the time I met my current partner. I still do get exposed to it, especially Reddit and Youtube, the former I use to try and get help with my 3D printing projects, and the latter I either use to watch content related to my hobbies and interests, or get information on the goings-on of the world.
My recent spiral into the “Buying a Tesla” debate exposed me very much to these significant risks. Now, you’re probably reading this thinking “this dude’s just sticking his head into the sand on this issue, surely”, and i’m not. As I re-iterated earlier, Fuck Elon Musk.
But the levels of violence and vitriol spread to other users whenever something blatantly controversial happens, where you see people literally telling others to kill themselves for owning a car, is why I see the internet as a significant detriment to our society’s mental health.
Nobody is having honest discussions on the topic anymore. People think it’s fair game to burn Cybetrucks and plaster them with Swastikas, without knowing who’s behind the wheel of those cars. There is probably, nobody who hates Fascists more than me, as it was a Nazi Scientist who sent Autistic people to the Gas Chambers at Am Spiegelgrund, even if it was unintentional.
These people who are reacting to the news they read on the internet, are knee-jerking, damaging people’s personal property without any knowledge or understanding of who is behind the wheel of said vehicle. Hell, I bought my Model 3 knowing damn well how insane Elon was, do you think I deserve to have my car plastered with Nazi symbols because I made a choice to purchase the most efficient electric vehicle which suited my needs?
I bought a Tesla because it was the car that had the best range with the smallest battery. For perspective, my Model 3 has a 57kWh battery and gets 450km out of that battery. A BYD Seal Premium has an 87kWh battery and has a 500km range, due to its reduced overall efficiency. When you are like me and you live out of a low-powered L1 charging socket, you need the smallest battery and the longest range you can get if you want to go electric. This is why I bought a Standard Range Model 3 over a BYD Seal or a Polestar 2.
Wanting to care about energy efficiency in makes me a Nazi, apparently, according to some people.
I would also argue, that due to Tesla’s restrictive access to OEM parts, all you’re doing by vandalising a Tesla is giving Tesla more money in terms of repair costs from Insurance companies. Vehicles are insured against damage, after all, and it’s Tesla who will be making money on those repairs.
This video from CarterPCs explains this better than I could say it in this long, ranty article.
As such, I consider the reactionary nature of the large bulk of media these days, to be a significant psychosocial hazard to your health. As there’s a risk of harm to health, you should obviously, go through a risk assessment. There’s a defined process to this, and there’s a structure you can place this hazard on. If you want to mitigate your exposure to psychosocial hazards on the internet, you can use a risk matrix to assess the risk and then determine your course of action.
Risk assessing my internet use
So. In the hierarchy of controls, there’s five layers, going from most effective, to least effective.
- Elimination – Eliminating the work all together
- Substitution – Substituting something dangerous with something safer
- Engineering controls – Using physical systems to reduce risk
- Administrative controls – Using policies and procedures to reduce risk
- PPE – Encouraging people to wear protective equipment or undertake personal action to protect themselves from the risk
It’s important to note that this is being used as an analogy, not as a physical framework for how you should actually go about undergoing your path to a much better internet experience. I am simply using this framework as a way to teach you some of the possible ways to control or mitigate your chances of exposing yourself to psychological harm online. Do not take this as a gospel-guide, and always, always perform your own introspection. In fact, this might actually be a good thing, you might find a system of analysis that works better for you. As always, like everything you read on the internet? Your mileage may vary. I’m just a dude who’s writing about his own method of dealing with the craziness of it all.
Elimination
In 2025, eliminating your internet connection would essentially require you to basically eliminate yourself from modern society. The internet is ubiquitous, it’s required for pretty much every line of work and in some aspects of your day-to-day life these days, from working as a cashier in a retail store to being a neurosurgeon. Every line of work requires internet access to either perform your work, gather information in relation to your work, manage finances in relation to your work, so on and so forth. Therefore, just like in the world of WHS, Elimination controls may not work in this instance, however if the risk of harm to health is significant enough, say for example in the case of severe internet addiction, it might be advisable to eliminate access to the internet all together.
Examples of internet elimination controls include:
- Removing your home’s internet connection
- Removing your SIM card from your mobile phone
- Removing the modem and WiFi chips from any portable devices
- Removing your PC’s network card.
Substitution
Substitution is a very powerful control, as it will allow you to have greater control over the types of content and information you watch or consume, or over who you choose to expose to your inner thoughts and feelings. Essentially, this would involve you doing a little bit of legwork to set up some alternatives to internet services and social media platforms. If you enjoy watching video content, perhaps consider the use of a localised video server, if you prefer to talk to your friends over a chat app? Use one which doesn’t require the use of a social media platform. Examples of internet substitution controls include:
- Building a Plex Server to substitute YouTube or Netflix
- Replace WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger with iMessage or RCS Chat
- Replace your Smartphone with a feature phone
- Replace reading articles on news sites with reading books on topics you are interested in.
- Replace your social media presence with a website (mine’s a great example!)
- Communicate with people outside of the internet more often. Less Cyberspace and more Meatspace.
Substitution gives you the power to essentially control how you consume, distribute and maintain exposure to media, on top of this, you can actually have greater control over your internet presence. This blog’s basically my only exposure to the internet now, so if you’ve bookmarked this in your browser? You get to read the long-winded rantings of a thirty-something Autistic dude trying his darnedest to cope with being a video producer and product designer in an ever crazier world.
If you’re into that, feel free to stick around.
Engineering controls
Engineering controls are essentially using pre-existing systems, or inventing new systems to allow people to perform the work in their present way, but in a safer manner. In the workplace this’d be stuff like say, engineering a ventilation system that allows people who work in a fume-filled environment to work safer, or designing guards for a piece of plant that didn’t come with guards in the first place. In the case of engineering our way around media exposure, we’re talking things like:
- Installing a modified router which uses something like OpenWRT, PFSense or OPNSense as a way to block access to social media services (the upside of this too is that you can also block malware, spam, porn sites and ads using this method too if you’re keen)
- Using tools like BlockSite, Screen Time or Parental Controls on your phone to block access to social media, news and other platforms which have the potential to harm your health
- Using the NoNews extension on Google Chrome or Safari to block the news
- Using a tool like Gas Mask, Hostsman or AutoHosts to apply blocks to your computer’s Hosts file (essentially redirecting requests to certain websites to your computer’s network card test port or to a Null IP address)
- Use the “Shut up!” plugin for Safari or Firefox to hide the Internet comments sections of most websites
- Turn off comments on any videos you post, or any websites you own (it’s why you can’t comment on my site.)
Administrative controls
Administrative controls are controls which rely on internal policies and procedures, as well as training and mentorship to essentially educate and encourage individuals to work safely. In a workplace, this could be things like training people in the use of a particular machine, or educating people about risks in the workplace. In the case of the internet you can:
- Set up a set of “personal rules” to determine if a person is trolling you or not (or hell just use the original rules of the internet as your guide to browsing)
- Learn a little bit of media literacy, especially when it comes to the internet.
- In fact, just read a lot more, if you’ve got the capacity to do so, that is.
- Seeking the assistance of a therapist or coach who can teach you how to better navigate the internet.
PPE
PPE is oftentimes, the weakest form of control you can implement in a workplace, but is oftentimes the easiest one to implement as it relies on the agency of the individual to act in the role of keeping themselves safe. Telling someone to go to therapy in response to bullying for example, is considered a form of Psychological PPE, as the agency is left to the worker, not the workplace, to take their health into their own hands. Likewise, a worker wearing goggles to protect their eyes from shards coming off of a grinding wheel, is a form of PPE, as the control isn’t effective unless the worker goes out of their way to wear the goggles.
In the case of social media PPE, here’s a few i’ve got in mind.
- Blocking problematic individuals on social media
- Confiding in your peers whenever you encounter online abuse or controversial news
- Engaging in mindfulness, and other forms of self-care practices
- Logging off of social media, or closing social media accounts
- Refusing to engage with the news
- Removing videos from your recommendations pages on YouTube to prune your algorithm to suit your needs.
So… What am I doing?
Well, you’re already seeing part of what I am doing on this website. I use this as my only digital presence now. Since I kinda need the internet to do my online banking, use my car, perform my work, etc. Eliminating an internet connection out of my life is practically impossible.
I’ve basically substituted my presence on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Youtube comments and so on with this particular website. I am in the process of also removing myself from Discord and other platforms. I’ve built a Plex server and engineered a site-wide block on my phone, laptop and home network for all social media platforms that I cannot control my access to due to my own habits. I am seeking therapy in the form of a Occupational Therapist, and I am doing my best to not engage in debate or comments online.
I am implementing controls from four out of the five layers of controls here, and with this control set, i think I might do pretty well. I left Facebook all those years ago and i felt a marked improvement in my mental wellbeing by doing so. I think by implementing some more controls, blocks on websites, comments, and pruning my algorithm on Youtube, i think i could do a pretty decent job of coping with today’s crazy internet.
Besides, a lot of it stuff that I have absolutely zero control over. I cannot influence or control the opinions of the insane, Especially those who are willing to commit crimes of property to exercise their ideological beliefs.
To those people, i’d like to present you with a few words of Zizek, since bloody everything I feel these days can be attibuted or assisted by a quote from our favourite Slovenian Trash Panda… “Don’t act, Just think.” Maybe before you burn down a Tesla because you don’t like its CEO, imagine how the person on the other end of that transaction of fire and vehicle would react to or feel about your actions.
Is that a person who’s a mother of three kids, who bought that car because they just wanted a safe, efficient vehicle to get their kids to school? Is it a finance bro who bought it off the back of his Dogecoin winnings? What about the somewhat successful engineer who just likes the technology behind the car’s batteries? Or the older man who wants to buy a car he can power with his solar panel array on his off-grid home? What about the government worker who’s getting stiffed by the very man who owns that car’s production company, and who simply owns it due to a favourable lease deal?
If you want my perspective, i’m a combination of all of those things. I wanted something safe, and power efficient, i’m relatively safe with my work and finances, and got a decent lease deal on it, I can power it with my solar panels, I like battery and renewable energy tech, I had very specific charging circumstances.
None of the things that I care about when it comes to the car have anything to do with the guy who owns the company, and if you burnt my car down because you hate the company? Whilst I do not blame you for your actions, I like the car so much that I would probably just go out and buy another one, both to spite you, and to re-iterate my stance. I do not care about Elon. I do not care about his shitty behaviour. By acting without nuance towards those who own these vehicles with nuanced reasons? You give people less nuanced reasons to continue their ownership. The Streisand Effect works in both directions.
And once again, I re-iterate. Fuck Elon Musk. If you’re that mad, log off. Sell your Tesla stock, delete your Twitter account, unsubscribe from Starlink, and if you really feel your morals will affect a vehicle purchase? Go buy another EV. I’ll support you in this cause. Just stop burning stuff for Pete’s sake.
Beano out.