As of the last few years or so, my online friend group is pretty spread out. Now that I have friends all over the place, it has me thinking about what I can only clumsily term internet friends internationalism.
note that the following contains thoughts on something race-relations-adjacent in an anti-nationalist way from an American white person (me), so please point it out if I'm being dumb as shit. but.
I think the zeitgeist is in a position where a lot of people can get de-brainwormed in kind of a cool way. A class solidarity way, maybe, even.
The way people in Western nations talk about people in poorer countries has a weird character of normalization to it, and of holy suffering, and of unbridgeable difference. Right? It's always "be glad for what you have, that you weren't born in one of those countries where everyone has to work every waking hour in a sweatshop." It's a tone that implies that people like that were born to suffer more than us, that they always will, and it's normal. It's also presented as if there can be no shared experience or relatability there.
This occupies a kind of "western" bias rather than a specifically anglosphere one - pretty much everyone in America picks up on the idea that people in Europe are kinda "just like you" but with a different culture, but this recognition is withheld from the rest of the world*.
(*EXCEPT JAPAN. This is downstream of the American occupation, and as much as generations before mine might still have seen the Japanese as being unfathomably foreign, pretty much every millennial can imagine growing up in a house with sliding paper-wall doors, and see it as comfy rather than "exotic." we're all weebs, folks.)
I already knew this weird euro-chauvinism was an inaccurate and racist picture of the world, even when it takes the form of "it is our duty to donate to help these poor, suffering souls." Now that I have friends in Brazil, Singapore, Taiwan, the Philippines, and other countries you often see on "Made in ___" stickers, however, I have a much better grasp on the shape of this.
Have you noticed how "sweatshop labor" is spoken of? Yes, it's worse conditions than the vast majority of people in America have experienced, but it's still on the spectrum of "shitty job" or "abusive job" and Americans can relate to that and should be able to know that they can relate to that. You talk to somebody about "sweatshop labor" and they'll act like, oh, that third-world thing that happens to the globe's designated omelas kids, ah how terrible so it goes. whales are going extinct too. alas, the world. But I think if you talk to them about how people in those countries have to work shitty jobs and there's no protection against getting assigned terrible long hours, like you would describe red-state labor to a lifetime blue-state resident, they'll remember the worst boss they ever had and go "ough, fuck, that sucks. it shouldn't be like that."
Similarly the recent heatwave in southeast Asia is the kind of thing that decades ago people would've disinterestedly said "alas, the world is a terrible place" to. However, it hits differently when the southeast asians you follow online are all posting vent art about "aagghh I would like the weather to stop trying to kill me. it's too fucking hot. *stands in front of the AC*". It hits different when you're messaging your southeast asian friends asking if they have AC and if they're ok. That's not an oh another natural disaster happened somewhere far away, how terrible is the world, kind of thing, you see that and you're like "oh fuck, I gotta check up on my friends"
Honestly this might be downstream of me growing as a person because I was dumb and bigoted in the default unexamined American way before (definitely an element of that), and this might also be downstream of American cultural imperialism making the world culturally homogenous enough that your gamer furry friends can be in very distant countries because those countries have game furries now (and there's definitely an element of that too), but the end result is "people in poorer countries" don't seem like a different kind of person anymore, and instead seem like just people in shittier situations.
Back in the 2000s, there were reasons I hoped the internet would make people less bigoted, because people could make friends in far away places, and that changes the way you see foreigners and borders. In the 2010s that seemed like a foolish pipe-dream - obviously the internet was a machine for turning normal people into nazis by nature. obviously. But I wonder if perhaps that was momentary blip by comparison, and in the long-term internet friends internationalism will win out.