We’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue the Calmth blog and step away from maintaining an active public presence online. This decision comes after careful consideration of what it truly means to be “publicly present” in today’s digital landscape, and we wanted to be honest about why we can no longer participate in it.
The Reality of Modern Online Spaces
We need to be direct: the internet has become demonstrably more dangerous. What was once sold to us as a space for connection and community has increasingly revealed itself to be a breeding ground for exploitation, predation, and systemic harm. The dangers are no longer theoretical—they are documented, pervasive, and actively evolving.
Predation and Grooming
One of the most disturbing trends is the normalization of grooming tactics across multiple platforms. Grooming takes many forms:
- Sexual grooming of minors: Predators operate with alarming sophistication, using games, apps, social media, and other platforms to build trust with children before exploitation. The sophistication of these tactics has become more refined, with predators studying psychology and using psychological manipulation at scale.
- Financial grooming: Predators groom victims for financial exploitation through romance scams, investment fraud, and coercive financial control disguised as relationship building.
- Ideological grooming: Communities online systematically groom vulnerable individuals into extremist ideologies, conspiracy theories, and radicalization pipelines, particularly targeting those who are isolated, young, neurodivergent, or struggling with mental health.
- Professional/power-based grooming: Adults in positions of authority use online platforms to groom subordinates, followers, or vulnerable people for abuse and exploitation.
- Cult-like community grooming: Certain online communities employ cult tactics—love-bombing, isolation, obedience testing—to groom members into increasingly unethical behavior and financial extraction.
The infrastructure of social platforms actively enables this. Algorithms designed to maximize engagement inadvertently (or sometimes deliberately) connect predators with vulnerable populations. The anonymity or pseudo-anonymity of online spaces removes natural social barriers that would normally protect people.
Sadism and the Celebration of Cruelty
What is perhaps more unsettling than predation itself is the mainstreaming of sadism—the deliberate enjoyment of others’ suffering. This manifests in disturbing ways:
- Harassment campaigns: Coordinated groups attack individuals with the explicit goal of causing psychological harm, often targeting vulnerable people including minors, women, and marginalized communities.
- Revenge porn and non-consensual imagery: The creation and distribution of intimate images without consent has become a casual weapon of control and humiliation.
- Doxxing: Personal information is weaponized to facilitate real-world harassment, threats, and violence.
- “Lulz” culture: Communities form specifically around the goal of causing chaos and harm for entertainment, with no concern for the human cost.
- Streaming cruelty: Platforms host live content where users watch and encourage increasingly dangerous and cruel behavior in real-time.
- Bullying at scale: What might once have been limited schoolyard bullying now occurs 24/7 with audiences in the thousands, with permanent documentation and amplification.
The psychology here is particularly disturbing: online spaces create distance and anonymity that allows people to express sadistic impulses they would suppress in face-to-face interaction. The feedback loop of likes, shares, and community validation reinforces this behavior. Cruelty becomes entertainment. Suffering becomes content.
Sexual Exploitation and Abuse Material
The proliferation of sexual abuse material (SAM) has reached industrial scale. What was once relatively rare and criminalized is now:
- Generated at massive volume using AI, making it cheaper and easier to produce
- Normalized in certain online communities
- Often featuring real victims whose abuse is documented, distributed, and monetized
- Accessible to children who encounter it accidentally or are deliberately exposed to it
- Actively recommended by algorithms that profit from engagement
The trauma inflicted on victims doesn’t end with the original abuse—it is perpetuated and re-traumatized every time the material is viewed, shared, or discussed online.
Radicalization Pipelines and Extremism
Online spaces have become systematic radicalization engines. The pathways are well-documented:
- Algorithm-driven radicalization: Users watching seemingly innocuous content are gradually recommended increasingly extreme material by engagement-driven algorithms.
- Community reinforcement: Insular online communities reinforce extreme beliefs and punish dissent or questioning.
- Real-world violence: Radicalized individuals move from online spaces to commit acts of violence, terrorism, and mass harm informed by ideologies cultivated online.
- Conspiracy ecosystems: Interconnected conspiracy communities create “rabbit holes” where individuals descend into increasingly detached-from-reality belief systems.
Disinformation and Psychological Manipulation
The deliberate spread of false information has become a tool of manipulation and control:
- Health disinformation: False medical information spreads faster than corrections, leading to preventable illness and death.
- Election interference: Coordinated disinformation campaigns influence political outcomes and undermine democratic processes.
- Personal targeting: Disinformation is weaponized against specific individuals, groups, and communities to cause harm.
- Manufactured outrage: False or misleading information is deliberately spread to trigger emotional reactions and drive engagement, with real-world consequences.
The speed and scale at which disinformation spreads vastly outpaces the ability of truth to catch up. Algorithms actively reward sensationalism and emotional provocation over accuracy.
Data Harvesting and Privacy Violation
Personal data has become a commodity, and your participation in online spaces means consenting to unprecedented levels of surveillance:
- Behavioral tracking: Companies track not just what you do online, but where you go in the physical world, what you buy, your health status, your location, your movements.
- Predictive profiling: Your data is used to create psychological profiles used to manipulate your behavior, influence your choices, and exploit your vulnerabilities.
- Data breaches: The accumulation of personal data in centralized locations makes you vulnerable to massive breaches that expose intimate details of your life.
- Misuse and sale: Your data is sold to anyone willing to pay—including scammers, predators, and bad actors seeking to exploit you.
- Government surveillance: In many cases, governments access this data, often without adequate oversight, to monitor and control populations.
There is no genuine privacy in mainstream online spaces. The illusion of privacy is maintained only through ignorance of what is actually being collected.
Addiction and Mental Health Collapse
The platforms themselves are engineered to be addictive, with severe mental health consequences:
- Dopamine exploitation: Platforms deliberately use variable reward schedules (the same mechanism used in gambling) to hijack your brain’s reward systems and create compulsive use patterns.
- Anxiety and depression: Studies consistently show correlations between heavy social media use and increased rates of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and suicidality, particularly in young people.
- Body dysmorphia and eating disorders: The culture of image curation and comparison drives psychological disorders, particularly in adolescents.
- Sleep disruption: The stimulation from constant notifications and content consumption disrupts sleep, with cascading effects on every aspect of health.
- Attention fragmentation: The constant context-switching required by these platforms literally damages your ability to focus, think deeply, or be present.
The addictive design is not accidental—it is deliberate. Companies employ teams of engineers and psychologists specifically to make their platforms more addictive. Your struggle with these platforms is not a personal failing; it is the intended outcome of systematic manipulation.
The Normalization of Harm
Perhaps most insidious is how these dangers have become normalized. We see:
- Predatory behavior discussed casually: Discussions of grooming, manipulation, and abuse often occur in spaces where such behavior is normalized or rationalized.
- Victim-blaming infrastructure: When harm occurs, systems typically blame the victim rather than the predator or the platform that enabled it.
- Regulatory capture: The companies responsible for these harms have successfully lobbied against meaningful regulation, ensuring that the dangers persist.
- Gaslighting at scale: When people report harms, they are often dismissed or told they are “too sensitive,” even as evidence of danger accumulates.
Why We Can No Longer Participate
We began this blog with genuine hopes of contributing meaningfully to online discourse. Over time, however, we’ve come to recognize that:
- Participation has costs: Simply being present online exposes us to predation, manipulation, data harvesting, and psychological harm—regardless of how carefully we curate our content or monitor our activity.
- Visibility creates vulnerability: Having any public presence makes us targets for harassment, doxxing, and coordinated attacks. There is no amount of security measures that fully eliminates this risk.
- Complicity is unavoidable: By using these platforms, we are participating in systems we find fundamentally unethical. Our content and engagement fuel the algorithms that enable the harms described above.
- Mental and physical safety cannot be achieved online: Despite best efforts, the fundamental architecture of modern online spaces is incompatible with genuine safety, privacy, and wellbeing.
- The problem is structural, not individual: This is not about being “careful” or “using privacy tools.” The dangers are embedded in the very structure of these platforms. No individual action can make them safe.
What This Means
- No new posts: We will no longer be publishing new content.
- No social media presence: We are stepping back from all public social media platforms.
- Limited digital interaction: We will not be actively monitoring comments, messages, or engagement.
- Offline living: We are prioritizing presence in physical community, face-to-face relationships, and spaces where we maintain genuine control over our information and safety.
A Reflection for Others
We recognize that stepping back from online spaces is a privilege not everyone has. If you work in fields that require online presence, or if you depend on online spaces for community or support, we understand the bind you’re in. We’re not judging those who choose to remain online—we’re reflecting on what our own wellbeing requires.
However, we encourage everyone to honestly assess:
- Are you staying online because you genuinely want to, or because you feel obligated?
- What are you getting from your online presence that you couldn’t get elsewhere?
- What are you sacrificing—in terms of time, mental health, privacy, and safety—to maintain it?
- Is the cost worth the benefit?
For many people, the answer to that last question is no. And it’s okay to say that out loud. It’s okay to leave. It’s okay to be less visible.
In Closing
We’re choosing quiet. We’re choosing privacy. We’re choosing spaces where we have genuine control over our information and our safety. We’re choosing to invest in local community, in face-to-face relationships, in activities that don’t require documentation and broadcast.
The internet does not need to be our reality. And increasingly, being present online means accepting a level of risk, manipulation, and harm that we are no longer willing to tolerate.
Thank you to everyone who engaged with our content. We hope you will also take time to reflect on what your online presence is costing you, and whether the internet as it currently exists truly serves your wellbeing.
We are choosing to believe that there is profound value in being present in the physical world—with people we know and trust, in communities we belong to, in spaces where we are genuinely safe.
~ The former authors of Calmth
If you or someone you know has been harmed online, resources like the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, and local law enforcement can provide support. If you’re struggling with internet addiction or compulsive use, organizations like Internet Addiction Anonymous and mental health professionals who specialize in digital wellness can help.