It’s easy to scroll through social media and feel ugly, fat, poor, stupid and lonely – to screenshot a celebrity’s ribs or wonder how an old friend is taking once-in-a-lifetime trips every three months. The effects of the internet on our self-esteem are documented by scientists and debated in parliaments, and I’m not going to argue with my own opening sentence: the online world can make us feel very bad. And yet simultaneously, the opposite is also happening. I think an abundance of people are going online every single day and finding someone they feel superior to. They are making themselves feel great by making others feel worse.
How hard is it, do you think, to log on to the entirety of the world wide web and find someone who is ignorant and wrong? Not very hard at all, obviously – if it was your job, you could do it in minutes. And yet every day, without fail, the internet picks someone to pick on. As one 2019 tweet from a user named @maplecocaine put it, “Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it.”
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