Unlike the material world where we only have one life, on the internet you can live many lives quite easily, try out multiple paths, until one of them sticks.
When we run into issues, do we resolve them or do we merely replace them?
Are we educating people to think better or are they being taught to follow instructions?
Like let's use me as an example. I struggle with a lot of things and I would like assistance, but that means it would be better if I act the way you like, so that I become popular and have a better chance at securing aid.
If I see a post that has lots of upvotes and I think differently, that discourages me from speaking my mind, it means if I ever run into big trouble, people are less to help me.
And as we all know everyone is precarious worker under Capitalism, that means even if I'm independent now and don't need your help, what about next year? I can act tough now, but say I have a medical emergency happen in the future and I'm known to be a critic, what's going to happen?
At least what I think would happen is people would put on their smug face and say: FOFO
That's something often neglected by the Imperial Core IMO. Cultural assimilation is taken for granted and is seen as willing participation, how many of us are just clowns trying to entertain you for scraps?
I suppose we'll never find out, until our ties are severed and we become sovereign, only then our true selves can really exist.
What you described sounds like the same kind of social pressures that can happen in person. Some people mask a lot in RL (not in the meaning of trying to be deceptive, but more like trying to hold back on the parts that may put off others, or feel embarrassing or shameful to display). Some people show up differently at work than they do at home. Things like that. I do think the internet makes it easier to mask and easier to "reinvent" yourself, but even in text alone, patterns still show through and surface level changes in ideology don't immediately change the underlying behavior of a person.
Either way, I do still think it's a valid point about culture and social pressures in general, and about how actualization as an individual cannot be achieved while people don't have basic needs met. I'm just not sure the internet is all that different from RL in this way. If anything, I'd say the internet applies less social pressure because of the anonymity and as a result, people are more able to be unfiltered (for better or worse). Some people would argue the internet can be nastier than RL words because people feel safe behind the anonymity to get away with it, but I suspect it's more like, people living in a brutal imperial core kind of culture are already socialized to think in brutal ways. In RL, the mask of liberalism shames you for showing this socializing overtly. But online, it's easier to be mask off without consequences. It's just that mask off doesn't always mean such reactionary things. For some people, mask off might be relaxing a constrained way of speaking and infodumping on whatever topic comes to mind.