Evolution takes time, more time than humanity has. Our brains remain calibrated for a world that no longer exists, a world with small communities, limited information, limited conflicts, and desires shaped by the people you could see and touch. And then we built platforms optimised to exploit every evolutionary shortcut, every cognitive bias, and discovered – too late – that we had no defences prepared.
This mismatch between what we’re built for and what we’ve built explains the inescapability of the Internet. The French philosopher René Girard identified mimetic desire as fundamental to human psychology. “We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires,” he wrote in Generative Scapegoating. When those models of desire were limited to your immediate community, mimetic desire operated within natural constraints. But when the model became an algorithmic feed engineered to show you an infinite number of examples of what others want, desire itself became an object that could be scaled and monetised.
Indian Gen Z is the first generation to experience this at an unprecedented scale: socialised into digital life immediately, completely, with increasingly no memory of a world where desire wasn’t mediated by screens. Ria Chopra’s Never Logged Out: How the Internet Created India’s Gen Z documents this socialisation in eight essays,...
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