It's interesting to me how the internet and the ability to effortlessly communicate with people anywhere who are not in your local physical community has completely upended how social interactions work to the point that tens of thousands of years of evolution as a social species now acts in often counterproductive ways
The fact that we can just block someone we don't like or otherwise just ignore them is, ironically, probably a massive detriment to our collective social health
And yet these functionalities are necessary because the lack of physical community with people and thus the lack of pressure to reach understandings when there is conflict for the good of the whole community means that toxic, unhealthy behaviors that were previously heavily socially discouraged can now be perfectly fine to do because online you are anonymous and there is typically no actual consequence to you or your physical community
So to protect ourselves and our communities from such behaviors, we can no longer rely on the need to collectively work together with those in our community for survival to encourage at least mutual understanding, and blocking becomes the only option, cutting off these mechanisms for establishing peace entirely.
Maybe the internet was a mistake actually? I'm not sure tbh. I think we just lack the tools to properly mediate conflict online, and the necessary evils of current safety tools exacerbate the issue.
