Does anyone wonder...

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When the world became so unfeeling and cold?

I think it was always this way.

The Big Bang? :>

No, it wasn't always this way. It started in the early 90s and has gotten progressively worse ever since.

The advent of the Internet has allowed people to feel anonymous and freed them up to vent their nastiness, hate and sarcasm, and it has begun to infect the populace at large. That kind of ugliness and venom used to be relegated to a few bitter curmudgeons who generally kept to themselves or hung out in small groups, where they could sit around and hate the world together. But they've spread their vitriol out into cyberspace, where it seems to be infecting the entire human population of the planet.

It's like the Internet has become the global social bloodstream and hate is the infection that's spreading wildly throughout humanity's collective brain.


I mean, there have always been bullies and jerks, but it's waAaAAaAay worse now than it ever was before.

So are there more misanthropes, racists, sociopaths, misogynists and gay bashers among us or is it they're making their presence known through the internet?

Perhaps the dawn of civilization, the existence of which requires the exploitation of large numbers of people.

cause its winter.

My guess is that it is due to biology shaped by evolution. We only care about close family members or sexual partners (and sometimes we don't even care about these people). We form temporary alliances with non-relatives based on mutual benefits. We hate and fear people who are different because they compete with us and our relatives for scarce resources. Altruism is a good concept because it kind of holds society together, but realistically it is very limited. We can't help it. We are programmed this way, and it is the way it is supposed to be enable our species to survive. I try to let go of all of that ideological stuff, expecting love and caring because it just isn't reality, at least not in civilized societies.

.........

It started long before the internet, but I don't think it's something inherent in humanity.
It seems that the modern world (last 150 years) technological advances have progressively separated us more and more from each other. It could be a side effect of modern technology, or it could be deliberate. Populations are much easier to control when they are more divided & separate. Post WWII, families became more broken up, and automobiles came in to wide scale use. Televisions entered the home and had everyone staring zombie like at a box, instead of interacting with one another. The "programming" (interesting that they use that word), on television depicts an ever increasing distorted view on life. We may consciously know it isn't real, but the subtle messages can be somewhat destructive to a child growing up with that electronic babysitter. Over the past century as telecommunications came into wide scale use, it wasn't necessary to actually go visit with people. Letter writing is a dead art, back in the day, one had to spend time thoughtfully composing correspondence to send through the postal service. Now we can just fire off an email with whatever thought came to our heads, texting further waters down communications by restricting message to very few characters.
And then this fast paced, economy of lack we live in have us constantly living in survival mode. Scraping to make ends meet, or to preserve the collection of meaningless material items (for the more financially wealthy). Either way it's still living in survival mode. Living like that has people only utilizing the lower function parts of our brains, like reptiles. Never really experiencing compassion.
They don't have time for compassion, they have bills to pay, debts to service.

I'd have to agree with the view that the Internet seems to be contributing to a general decrease in empathy and compassion among human beings.