Rose-colored shit smells bad still: How onlinification of a conservative culture is a bad idea

In retrospect, it should have been obvious.

As a reminder, this is part 3, and the final part, of the series I was inspired to write after being on Clubhouse for 36 hours, for the second time. In the first post, we talked about the general ecosystem, the second was about the crass commercialization of Nepali social media. In this, we will look at the politics of online Nepali engagement, and how shit's gonna be fucked up, yoo.

I don't want to get in too deep with this because books and theses have been written about this probably, and this is a surface observation that'll play out way more clearly in the future.

Let me get to the point straight: when social and cultural mores around sex and sexuality haven't changed for thousands of years, but the availability of media and the pattern of consumption of sexual content has, there are many potential legal and ethical concerns around people being mistreated. More specifically, when a culture hasn't developed a clear concept of active consent, and the language and culture to discuss it in a cool, clearheaded manner, but has been made well-aware of all the nasty wild gross strange weird things people do to one another, and one to many another, and many another to one, a lot of people are going to be very sad, frustrated, confused, annoyed, and potentially violated by the mismatch. AKA, stupid conservative people who watch porn and have associated expectations with their partners, without the full understanding of sex not being perfomative, without understanding consent, and power dynamics in a sexual situation, will be creating a very unsafe environment, specially for their partners. The thousands of years of sexual violence will go on, with a slightly different mask, and it's possible things could get worse.

And that's just the start.

The American political discourse has been globalized in the strangest possible way. Cultures that have no concept of 'left' and the 'right' that parallel the political structure of the States have been using the discourse from the political conversations in the US. There are people in the right, in third-world countries complaining about 'wokeism' and 'cancel culture', and 'libtards', with very very limited understanding of the fact that these enemies are almost entirely fictional, in those specific societies. On the other hand, young women have started setting their expectations according to those of young American women, setting themselves up for certain disappointment, disillusionment, defeat, depression. And this all without bothering to understand the evolution and histories of their own societies. Because being told you deserve such and such, and it is your inalienable rights, is easy pill to swallow, being told oops those don't apply to you because you live among very different people with very different set of expectations and politics, is...not great.

The American political wars have been globalized. It's not great. Nobody will win this. But the biggest losers will be the ones who were going to lose anyway. This is most obvious in Nepali Social media, on apps like Clubhouse.

The root of this problem lies herein: barely-educated folks, who have little understanding of nuance in politics, rights for people besides themselves, economics, politics, etc, should not have been given these giant megaphones to shout at the world, to shout at each other and froth up anger and desperation, and angst. But that has happened, and the world going onward, if it keeps remaining this online, without proper interventions, is going to be angrier, more divided, less open, less progressive.

The internet would never have suddenly made the global social order liberal. Just like bringing the internet to Nazi Germany wouldn't have helped anybody. It was American overconfidence, and the liberal swagger to have believed otherwise, and the pandora's box of dangerous political polarization may have been opened.