The Lonely Invisible: How The Social Internet Has Failed Us (Part 1)
The logic behind digital invisiblity for the masses, or: how we turned connection into a winner-take-all bloodsport
8 billion people. Infinite ways to connect. And we're lonelier than ever.
Social media had one job: help us connect. Share photos, find old friends, message for free.
Simple shit.
Instead we got Cloud Empire: billion-dollar attention factories that turned connection into performance.
Now we're all competing for visibility in the same global arena… and most of us are losing.
The 1-9-90 Problem
Here's the math that's fucking us:
1% create content and get seen
9% comment
90% lurk invisibly
But algorithms made it worse. Through preferential attachment (visible accounts attract more visibility), platforms go beyond expressing inequality: they manufacture it. I lived this: going 1K→5K followers on Twitter took forever. But 5K→58K was automatic.
The game is rigged. You're either Ed Sheeran or you're nobody.
We Want to Be Fuckable More Than We Want to Fuck
Visakan Veerasamy dropped this truth bomb and it perfectly captures our broken internet.
We've replaced genuine connection with performative desirability. Everyone's optimizing to be wanted, not to actually connect. Your photo of your sandwich isn't competing with your friends for attention anymore; it's competing with food influencers who shoot 100 takes, and thirst trapping OnlyFans creators, and reels of Sam Altman talking about building startups.
The "fuckability" currency scales infinitely. We're all performing in the same attention casino, desperately pulling the slot machine handle for likes.
The Invisible Majority
When 99% of people become invisible online, something fundamental breaks in us. The basic selfish gene urge to share our ideas, express our values and find our people gets crushed.
What's left?
Lonely
Invisible
Falling birth rates
Not posting
Doomscrolling
Opting out
躺平 (Chinese movement: Lying Flat)
Truly, either you're everything or you're nothing. So why try? AGI is coming in 3-5 years. Global warming. The world is doomed. So by default, nihilism.
Even the "Technological Solutions" Are Broken
AI companions and therapists just extend the same broken logic. They position you as someone to be fixed, not someone to be learned from, looked up to, and admired. They do not empower you. You get used to complaining, expressing your pain in ever more eloquent ways, which they will always agree with.
AI as Therapist, AI as Girlfriend/Boyfriend, only extends your Jungian shadow, extend the gap between you and other people in this world. Another performance where you're the broken patient, never just human, and never able to connect deeply with other humans. Perpetually in victimhood, in a Peter Pan fantasy of blamelessness.
The Slot Machine Won
Social media is shockingly new. Stories? 6 years old. Reels? Even newer. We speedran our way to the most addictive format possible. The principles from Addiction By Design applied to human connection. I will barely begin my rant on Dating Apps and how it’s ruined how people connect.
Dating apps are preferential attachment on steroids. The same 1-9-90 rule, but worse: 90% of men compete for 10% of women, with average match rates at 0.6%. Not a typo. The apps profit from this by monetizing male desperation while reducing women to products in an infinite scroll.
We've trained ourselves to dismiss entire human beings in 0.3 seconds based on jaw angles. Swipe left, next.
The dehumanization is complete: we're not meeting people, we're reviewing products. The invisible majority gets even more invisible, accumulating psychic damage with every rejection, while the visible few get overwhelmed with low quality connection by the dating apps that optimize for you staying on them.
Nobody's connecting, because we're all just pulling different handles on the same rigged slot machine.
Seriously, all the ways we connect online, by default, are deeply messed up.
Every second you spend scrolling is a second stolen from:
Your sleep
Your agency
Real, human connections
The Core Failure
The social internet failed because it transformed human connection from a network phenomenon, where everyone could find their niche, into a broadcast phenomenon where only the loudest voices matter.
We turned the messy, beautiful web of human relationships into a winner-take-all brawl for attention, so Growth Hackers and warmed TikTok accounts can have the biggest chance at funneling your attention towards whatever they’re trying to push.
In a world of 8 billion people, we've never been lonelier. Us, The Lonely Invisible, cannot replicate their value structure. Can't find their tribe. Can’t partner up. Can't even express that they exist.
Until we build digital systems that value genuine peer-to-peer connection over performative broadcasting, loneliness and invisibility, will be our default state in this hyperconnected hellscape we've built.
So what now? Do we keep pulling the slot machine? Or do we build something that actually serves the 99%?
Trust that we at Sonzai have thought deeply about this.
Something that values connection and shared values over performance.
Something that makes you visible without making you a product.
Trust that we at Sonzai have thought deeply about this... and we will burn it down and build something human-shaped… something with Soul.