De-Digitalization Movement

The De-Digitalization movement was an anti-social media and anti-digital backlash especially concentrated among Generation Alpha as they entered their formative years. But also supported by portions of Generation Z, and parts of the older generations, especially the aging Gen X'ers and Baby Boomers.

## History

Following the Silicon Valley crash of 2022, as well as the extreme atomization of society in the former years, the younger generations revolted against what they perceived as an over-indulgence in digital media. The movement was largely driven by a desire to reconnect with local community, as well as increasing awareness of the negative downsides of the internet. This also coincided with a slow degradation of the quality of the internet ever since the breakthroughs in artificial intelligence in the late 2010’s and early 2020’s.

One of the first shots fired by a now highly contested culture, one of the first widely successful cultural movements to emerge out of the new right was the De-Digitalization movement. First spearheaded by neo-traditionalist thinkers who urged society to "reject the sinful ways of modernity", one of the first actions from the right was to distance themselves from social media, and later ween off the over-digitalization of their culture. This coincided with the maturing of Generation Z, and their desire to distance their children from online social media. This led to the further weakening of the Silicon Valley tech giants, though it also led to the mass creation of decentralized forums, which were generally smaller and therefore less targeted targets for rampant bot farms. Individual verification and "whitelist" forums became popular, vetting members one at a time to contain the influx of new people. This put a natural cap on the upper ceiling of the size of social media forums. As constant moderation was now needed, and there was no force large enough to moderate a site of millions.

These whitelist forums became one of the largest disseminators of alternative media, which was rising rapidly in response to the decline and destruction of trust in traditional news media. The internet, in many ways regressed to the Web 1.0 days, when websites were simply places to withdraw information from, and large-scale social networks were rendered impossible by the influx of bot traffic. A shortage of microchips caused by the breakdown in global trade further accelerated this trend, leading to the death of many "smart devices", and a return to a smaller amount of devices per household. Microchip manufacturing slowly moved back to the United States in order to keep up with consumer demand, though this was falling as the De-Digitalization movement continued.

The internet had become overrun by spam bots, and there had already been multiple scandals involving politically funded bot-networks employed by major political parties in an attempt to sway public opinion. Social media platforms had already seen substantial declines in popularity as tests such as captchas were unable to keep up with the ever-more sophisticated progress of bot networks, and the internet had largely retreated back into closely knit private communities, often only involving people who were already friends in real life.

Various media sites and reputable journalists became figures of authority in a world where any sort of social media trend could be easily fabricated by malicious actors and bot networks, and trust in social media in general declined. Similar to the Temperance movement, it would advocate for less digitalization in people’s lives, and would push to revert to simpler and more antiquated technology in their homes. Which included embracing non-smart appliances, removing computer chips from many things, and overall returning to a simpler life. By 2035, it is estimated 90% of the remaining activity on social media were bot networks, with more and more of the human population checking out.

Word about the movement spread generally by word of mouth through tightly knit internet groups, and ironically through notable influencers on trusted, verified accounts. The De-Digitalization movement is seen as somewhat connected with the start of the 5th Great Awakening, as the ideas of de-digitalization directly led to the founding of the Luddite church and Awakening movement. Much like the Temperance movement, De-Digitalization made its way into politics as well, primarily on the right.

The De-Digitalization movement found its way into the Republican coalition and affected policy such as DeSantis’ legislative war against big tech, a return to more non-digital ways of living, and even social media prohibition laws in various counties across red America. Despite attempts at prohibition, tools such as virtual private networks and the free nature of the internet meant most of these prohibition laws were a failure, and the legislative portion of these laws faded away by the 2040’s, though there still exists counties with social media prohibition laws on the books. These legal challenges, as well as sharp downturn in the culture did however destroy the silicon giants of old, with many of the old silicon giants being forced to form United Silicon in response and keep themselves afloat amidst declining popularity. De-Digitalization would ultimately be seen as a counter-reaction to a culture overly saturated in digitalization, and over correcting before society found a more sensible middle ground in the middle. What it would also do was clear out the information technology space, and with the rise of the Awakening generation would make way for Cortez’s tech giants of the 2040’s.