Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

by Christian Rudder

The webcomic Penny Arcade puts it a little better: Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory normal person + anonymity + audience = total fuckwad

From empathy and sexuality to science inclination and extroversion, statistical analysis of 122 different characteristics involving 13,301 individuals shows that men and women, by and large, do not fall into different groups.

In the United States, of all Google searches that begin “Is my husband …,” the most common word to follow is “gay.” “Gay” is 10 percent more common in such searches than the second-place word, “cheating.” It is 8 times more common than “an alcoholic” and 10 times more common than “depressed.”

Reddit is the fulfillment of that earliest ambition of the Internet—to bring far-flung people together to talk, debate, share, spread news, and laugh. To collapse space and create personal closeness. It’s one of the most popular sites on the web,3 and it rightly calls itself “The Front Page of the Internet”—a lot of the ridiculous viral stuff you see on the big aggregator sites originates there.

The odd thing is, for all its influence, Reddit doesn’t really do anything; there are no apps, no games, no profiles to speak of. Their New York office is in a co-working space and smaller than my bedroom. The site itself is just a raw list of links submitted by the users, who vote, and comment, and comment on the comments, and modify, and repost all day long, in what feels like the world’s biggest group of friends sitting on the world’s longest couch. Few Redditors know each other’s names, let alone ever meet in person, yet their bond is no less close for being anonymous: a forty-year-old woman in the Bay Area was alone the day before Thanksgiving 2011 and posted as much. Her thread received over 500 comments in just a few hours (including, of course, many invitations to the next day’s dinner) and the post quickly broadened, completely ad hoc, to connect Redditors in many other cities.

it’s not numbers that will deny us our humanity; it’s the calculated decision to stop being human.

If you have an iPhone, Apple could have your address book, your calendar, your photos, your texts, all the music you listen to, all the places you go—and even how many steps it took to get there, since phones have a little gyroscope in them. Don’t have an iPhone? Then replace “Apple” with Google or Samsung or Verizon. Wear a FuelBand? Nike knows how well you sleep. An Xbox One? Microsoft knows your heart rate.1 A credit card? Buy something at a retailer, and your PII (personally identifiable information) attaches the UPC to your Guest ID in the CRM (customer relations management) software, which then starts working on what you’ll want next.