Community Is Possible Online
Axioms of what I’m working on right now:
Community is possible online
Online community is supportive to people both with and without strong offline community
Online community space should be private
Algorithmic, public social media are moderately helpful for recruitment (at enormous cost of time and sanity and with some personal risk)
Participation in algorithmic, public social media should be entirely optional for someone with strong online community
I am launching what you might call the sustainability component of this website in one week, and I have reverse-engineered these axioms from the way it has taken shape. It found its form just by making sense piece by piece, but what it adds up to does look like taking a stand for these principles.
I created this website a year ago this month in order to protect what I’ve been doing online from the umpteenth user-hostile convulsion of the social media business I’ve made it through, dragging my suitcase of blog posts and hobby horses around. But this convulsion has been different than the others. Bigger. It feels like a long-term realignment of where things happen, who’s in control of them, and what the features and priorities are of the interfaces through which global, public human interactions are mediated.
Not all of the changes are clearly for the good. But at this point in the development of communication media and world history, I prefer chaos and instability in media to stagnation. For people with effective combinations of values and tools, there is life-changing opportunity here.
By now, this site has withstood many of the biggest developments in this realignment without a need to pivot. Its strength has been tested. I’m ready to take it to the next level. And I plan to do that by opening up a space inside of it that is fully private — inaccessible to both the dysregulated human hive mind and the algorithmic intelligences learning to mimic human intelligence from its most horrific and humiliating manifestations.
Every kind of thing I have offered publicly here will remain. I will continue sending out signals through the algorithmically governed public social matrix in order to reach the people who would be allies. But that will be the purpose: to make initial connections, which we can then bring out of reach of the preying fangs of the algorithm and into a place of trust.
Social media has been useful in realigning the world. I would argue its greatest contributions have been twofold: It has attuned the mass of people to the possibility of making meaningful connections online, and it has produced tested interaction patterns that have allowed truly democratic technologies to liberate the features that attuned people to this possibility from the clutches of the advertising and propaganda companies that made them popular.
This sentence found in my notes this morning was written about astrology, but it feels more poignant today in reference to the internet:
It is an ideological blindness to believe that a powerful tool can only be used for liberation and not also for oppression.
I refuse to let these powerful tools be owned by advertisers and their demands for a predictable, pliable population. These demands have reduced humanity to its most base and vile forms, because those are its most predictable and pliable forms.
I have been blogging in public since 2003. That’s 20 years. More than half my life. It’s time for me to admit that my grasp of the power of online communication is vaster and more complete than that of nearly any corporation that influences its direction today. I know what I’m doing. And next week, I’m going to do it.
