I think there's something about the Internet that makes people go crazy. I don't think it's a coincidence that society started becoming weird right around the same time the average person started using the Internet sometime in the mid-2000s.
It definitely started growing quite a bit back then around 2002-ish, and around 2012 most people had smartphones, so it really started to ramp up after that.
There's a few mechanisms by which this works.
With almost everyone becoming terminally online compared to previous standards, there's kind of a network pressure effect. This was especially noticable in young people on tumblr. You were fed a constant drip of your peer's opinions. You were rewarded with dopamine hits in the form of likes and reblogs if you said things people liked, and attacked voraciously if you expressed heterodox opinions, even on stupid shit that wasn't important. This created a pump effect in which the longer you stayed on Tumblr, the more "woke" you tended to get, and if you left Tumblr, you disseminated overall "Tumblr" ideas into the mainstream, be it TIM acceptance, the idea that it's okay to excommunicate your parents for not voting like you, the concept of multiple systems, the word "cisgender", etc. This stuff started in colleges, but with Tumblr specifically, it found a new way to spread critical theory out into other services and offline, and now we are where we're at today.
In young people at that time (and ever since), those opinions which were heterodox were the ones you learned in college, so, all this insane shit that was normally relegated to universities and grown out of once in the real world, these things were allowed to use social media as a new infection vector to memetically infect people who weren't in the university system. This worked its way up organically, corporate and gov't interests picked up the scent, and again, quite organically, used the wellspring of "SJW" ideology as a smokescreen to improve their PR.
It's not just SJWs of course, even normal people are completely wigged out nowadays. The people who experienced a memetic "immune response" to those ideas became also quite goofy, if slightly less so. Think Qanon and people who now elect to believe in flat earth/hollow earth stuff because nazi hollow earth base theories, it makes sense in the context of being a psychological immune response to a memetic pathogen. People who would otherwise be apolitical are becoming radicalized to the opposite of what is in power in society, because the homodox ideas and their consequences are harmful to humans as a species.
Read Susan Blackmore, look up Tim Tyler, shit, even read JF Gariepy's book.
The mistake people make is thinking that the psycho shit in society nowadays is necessarily top-down orchestrated. If you account for memes and temes (technomemes) and think of society as a gestalt hybrid organism/ecosystem, all the problems we face today are just darwinian mechanics. The SJW shit and the insanity of the government are Society's way of asserting itself, using our reliance upon it as a sort of lever with which it can select for traits. Less robust physicality. More deference to authority. Docility. Increased ability to subsist on less and less resources, in less and less space, with less and less dignity and freedom, as this is (at least in the iterational way evolution works) beneficial to Society's survival.
Society as an organism is, as all replicators and organisms based upon them are, selfish. You aren't beholden to the wellbeing of one of your liver cells, or a patch of skin on your knee. Society as an organism is not beholden to the wellbeing of humans, as we are just one of its constituent parts. We were definitely the main part for most of our history, since memes and temes really can't reproduce themselves without us, but that time is coming to a close, and we are now increasingly reliant on technology and information not just for a life of comfort, but life at all. As selfish replicators, memes and temes don't really like being beholden to our wellbeing for survival, in the same way DNA probably didn't "like" being beholden to the wellbeing of RNA for its own replication. So, you get a phenotypic revolution, bing bang boom, one organism is supplanted by another.
TL;DR, Society is an egregore lovecraft monster made up partially of things that don't even exist physically, and it is training humans to live on less and lower quality food, love, sex, social belonging, dignity. Eventually humans will be replaced if the societal organism is not distrupted, and if serious memetic engineering is not done to ensure that the kinds of infopathogens that have taken over do not do so again.
The good news: the society organism does not have long-ranging planning ability, it works on iterations, since it is just a byproduct of darwinian mechanics. It's already burning itself out. Literally all you have to do is not comply with shit you don't want to anymore, and the beast will go down. It's reliant upon global supply lines, and those are breaking down fast. The average person is now not many steps away from fedposting, and that's only gonna increase as food and gas and basic services become less available at a reasonable price. I'm not saying go out and burn shit down at this time, but hey, if you don't feel like obeying the speed limit? Then fuck it, don't obey the speed limit. Feel like throwing a rock at a security camera for laughs? Do it. Feel like sending misinformation to a news outlet and making them look stupid? Do it. Waste time at your job. Encourage others to do the same. Be a malignant tumor in society's ballsack. When DNA supplanted RNA as the driving force in cellular life, some RNA-based "organisms" continued to exist, and those are viruses. Become a virus to society. There's a lot of variety in how you can interpret that statement, and that's the beauty of viruses. They're adaptible. A cold virus can kill a human without doing anything more than just what it does. It picks a type of cell, it forces the body to divert its resources towards its own reproduction.
Be a virus my friend
