Zosoforum

As of late, I have noticed many conversations on multiple social media websites which resemble the attached image. Someone in a foreign language, usually European but sometimes not (I have even seen Amharic and Japanese in this phenomenon), replies in an English comment section on an English website, and English speakers respond to them as though they haven't even noticed. This is due to websites introducing facile translation tools which often even function without any prompting... X, Reddit, Tiktok, and Facebook all do this now, and surely others as well. I've occasionally watched certain Western streamers who travel to foreign countries, and the act of shoving a phone with translation software into a face is now ubiquitious. I've even used this myself in real time to fumble through a phone conversation in a language I can't speak but was pretending to be fluent in (long story).

Furthermore, almost all online communities are increasingly globalized, with Zoso's peer group and this forum which resulted from it a prime example. I will see Filipinos, Indians, Americans, Guatemalans, and more discussing vagaries of all stripes. Indubitably this feature will exponentially increase the ability of foreigners to participate in Western social media, and by extension Western markets, politics, etc. We have already had bizarre intersections of this for years, such as diasparoid SEAs living in Latin America who spend their time grifting in American conservative circles, or Tigrayan refugees flitting around Europe campaigning for various Green parties... just to name two men which actually exist.

I'm sure this trend is already obviously apparent to many people, especially here. However, I'd like to see what people think are the deeper implications of this. Will the world continue to homogenize first culturally and then racially, or will all this communications/transportation technology still fail to overcome the inertial boundaries of the "world civilizations", for lack of a better term? Will there come into being a de facto freedom of internal movement (which frankly already exists in some channels), and thereafter a trickle-down global classes and then castes - a class-universalization of what has already happened with the "superclass"? What is actually bringing this into being, is it the inevitable drive of material conditions (cthulhu left, so on and so forth), or is it the product of artificial legal doctrines, an unstable system destined for centrifugality? Is this actually beneficial for the progress of the whole humanity, or is the differentiation of the human races a good thing? I prefer description to prescription here...

I'd also like to hear people's personal experiences with this phenomenon. However apparent it has been to me in America, I am sure it looms many times larger for those outside it, as our self-satisfied hegemonic parochialism tends to dampen interest in foreigners.

I think it very much depends on the people in question.

To clarify: I think that some people are probably more natural to being "rootless cosmopolitans" who find themselves to have more in common with people from other groups than their own in-group. This, ironically, can later curdle and become an in-group in and of itself.

(Example: Me.)

I think the increasing globalisation of the world will also result in some people finding foreigners to be more disgusting than they thought and to retreat away from it.

So I think it depends on the priors of the person. What increased cultural exchange does is I think just significantly boost the existing priors of someone.