The Internet’s Appetite for Humanity

Lately, scrolling through Bluesky, I've noticed a peculiar reflex I'm making: diving into conversations I couldn't care less about. It's not really engagement; it's more like eavesdropping on a Facetime call at a bus stop. It's initially harmless, even mildly entertaining, until you realize how much time you've surrendered to the digital undertow. The pull is subtle, sure, but relentless. These "urgent," "world-ending" debates often resemble a kindergarten play where everyone's acting as a tree in The Current Events of the World. Over here, someone's screaming about the latest micro-scandal; over there, Trump is building his latest walls of lies and delusions. It's unscalable if it keeps growing.

The worst part? Most of it never resolves. What's true hasn't been realized yet. What's false hasn't made itself obviously false. Reality isn't a fixed point; instead of one disconnected person here and there, it seems like all of us clawing around, trying to grasp something, pretending we understand the rules when none of us do. It's existential quicksand. How do we act ethically when the truth is still a draft? How do you stay intellectually honest—questioning, doubting, withholding judgment—when the hive demands you pick a side now?

Pick. Team Grey or Team It's Complicated.

So, I'm settling into a mindset I despise, 'cross that bridge when you get to it.' And I am bad at this, bad at floating around without wind for my sails. I crave structure, plans, or at least the illusion of meaningful discussion. But right now, we're spinning tires and getting nowhere fast. The best I can do is try, not even particularly hard, to avoid the gravity well. To skirt the event horizon, these platforms are designed to drag us toward. And, naturally, I fail most of the time. Social media knows its prey. It's a kitty cat playing with a half-dead mouse.

The manipulation sucks, but what really grates is the inefficiency. Not the loud, hack-your-life kind of inefficiency, but the quiet, gnawing kind. It's the kind that drains time, focus, and mental energy in ways that don't even leave you with an experience. Social media is inefficiently perfected. For all its supposed potential to connect, inform, and inspire, it's mostly a factory of distractions. Trivial arguments and shallow debates pile on top of empirical threats like climate change or class inequality until everything feels like background noise. Meanwhile, the architects of our social chaos toast champagne from their yauchts, watching the rest of us claw at each other in comments sections. The world's shittiest game of Jenga: crises stacked on crises, the real threats on the bottom while the top blocks shift around. At some point, a bottom block will give way and collapse the whole structure into a pointless pile.

Pull another block. Write another word.

We add to the racket, hoping this time it'll mean something. Even now, I'm asking myself if this blog post is just another top block. I hope it's worth talking about. That's the trap, though, isn't it? Maybe that's the whole point. Maybe the connection isn't the goal anymore. Maybe the real purpose is sedation. Keep us typing, scrolling, shouting—anything but organizing or acting on anything.

Even those of us who think we know better find ourselves lured into absurd arguments, our priorities scrambled by the relentless now-ness of it all. If resisting is this hard for the aware, what hope do the vulnerable have? Reduced to moral luck. The harm, the complicity, isn't just ours; it's the product of an ecosystem none of us designed, but all of us live in. Are we free agents at all, or just puppets twitching on strings of code?

For some, it's more than a distraction—it's a hell. The thirst for connection, for recognition, can spiral into something darker. Pain becomes content. Humanity becomes performance. People throw themselves into the emptiness, hoping it will fill them. But the void doesn't fill; it devours. Sometimes, that desperate need for validation leads directly to cruelty's doorstep, and the void just keeps watching.

Picture this: A man, 25 years old, alone in a foreign country, battling the kind of mental health struggles that already feel like too much without isolation amplifying the weight. He reaches out online, looking for some scrap of kindness, hoping for someone to see him. Instead, he falls into a cesspool where suffering is sport and vulnerability is blood in the water.

Now imagine: A teenage girl. She's part of an online community that thrives on malice, where cruelty isn't just tolerated—it's currency. She pushes him closer and closer to the edge to gain status and prove herself. When he dies, there's no horror, no regret—just applause. His life becomes a twisted punchline, another tragedy recycled into content.

This isn't fiction. His name was Samuel Hervey. He was from Minnesota, stuck in Kyrgyzstan, and he died on a livestream after being persuaded to self-immolate by the Discord group called 764. This wasn't an isolated event. The group has been linked to multiple victims, and at least one other confirmed suicide. Discord's infrastructure, private servers, and minimal oversight created the perfect environment for this group to operate. Reports were ignored or processed too late. By the time action was taken, investigative journalists had already exposed the horror.

It was far too late for Hervey.

The teenage girl who pushed Hervey wasn't acting alone. She was part of a machine, groomed by older predators who turned her into a tool of despair. Malice like hers isn't innate; it's taught. Spaces like this sculpt vulnerable people into weapons, where kindness is mocked as weakness, and cruelty becomes the measure of value. These environments don't just corrode empathy—they make it a liability. They train people in the opposite of virtue, rewarding apathy and sadism. What starts as a community mutates into something grotesque, where decency is the first casualty.

Hervey's death is a tragedy of failures: a mental health system that left him stranded, the isolation of living in a foreign land, and the platforms that enabled his tormentors. What he needed was help. What he got was agony. This inhumanity is a symptom of something deeply wrong in the systems we've built. When we accept these digital spaces as they are, we're complicit. If we don't push for structural changes, better moderation, actual accountability, and mental health resources, then we're endorsing this cruelty by default.

Why does this keep happening? Because online spaces reflect the values, they're designed to amplify. Some communities cultivate creativity and solidarity. Others reward malice and nihilism. The girl who became Hervey's executioner didn't get there alone, and she was shaped by an ecosystem that celebrates torment.

This doesn't erase her responsibility, but it is important to note that she was only 15 at this time. She had yet to experience holding a job, paying her own bills, driving, or genuine, long-lasting love. While many would focus on the teenager, I'm choosing to focus on us, to confront the moral ecology of these platforms. If we don't address how these spaces shape people, we miss the bigger truth: that we have the power to build something better, at least in theory. To design platforms that nurture accountability and empathy instead of gutting them of humanity.

It's about seeing the whole system, the interplay of person and platform, environment and behavior. Morality doesn't exist within nothingness. Accountability has to go beyond the individual; it needs to reach the designers of these platforms, the communities they spawn, and the societal systems that allow all this to fester. Progress means asking if restorative justice, community oversight, or basic ethical scaffolding. Imagine digital spaces where cries for help are met with care instead of cruelty, where people who stumble find support instead of a shove.

The internet promised connection, but the connection isn't enough. Without stewardship, it becomes a Petri dish for the worst bacterium. Hervey's death isn't a rarity; it's a pattern, one we have to break. If we want to stop this, we need a moral framework that values dignity, strives for ethical truth, and punishes harm. Progress isn't inevitable. If we don't actively build something better, cruelty takes over by default.

And if we settle for that, what does it say about humankind? If we look away and shrug and let this continue, we're telling a story about who we are—a story of weariness, indifference, and surrender. If we want a future where digital life doesn't strip away our humanity, we have to make it ourselves, Jenga block by painstaking block. Otherwise, we're just pretending we're not part of the scene while the world burns right behind us.

Discretion Advised: For more on Hervey's story and a blight within our society - The Washington Post

Thanks for reading. Stay Human.