Social media and Twitter are bad because you can form virtual tribes and yield to age-old instincts.
The more individualistic people are, the less they join those tribes. Individualists tend to be grumpy though, for which they are bullied by the perfect Twitter moralists.
We exchanged Christmas presents. They helped me sort out how to raise my challenging children. I always had someone to talk with any time of the day or night when I was having insomnia or whatever.
And I haven't had stuff like in recent years. I just thought it was me because I spent a few years homeless.
But then I run into comments like this one that posit people can either connect socially and be assholes or have a mind of their own and (implicitly) no friends and be grumpy.
I don't know what the hell is going on in the world, but maybe my internet life going to hell isn't just about my life going to hell. Maybe there's something else going on and it's sort of "coincidence" that my internet life went to hell at the same time that my actual life went to hell.
But in my experience life does not compel you to either have a mind of your own or have social connections. And having social connections doesn't compel you to go along with being part of a lynch mob or some shit.
That's never how my life worked. I used to have friends and a mind of my own. I still have a mind of my own, but I've mostly not had friends in a long time.
I kept thinking "I must be doing it wrong," but maybe not. Maybe the internet isn't what it used to be or something.
I've found HN to be much better for discussion in general (recognizing that this is not the case for everyone), and have participated in IRC rooms and whatnot where if I spent more time I could probably consider the people there friends, while still retaining individualism.
I tend towards grumpy isolationism however, so I may not be a good standard.
I'm currently working on an early-stage startup on this space, and we're specifically trying to solve the discoverability problem while keeping the group chats themselves small and private (or at least private enough). Do you think you could see yourself using something like this?
Myself personally, probably not. I mentioned I tend a bit towards grumpy isolationism, that's very much the truth.
I will participate in communities I stumble on, but can't see myself seeking them out.
That being said, if I were seeking a community, I could definitely see myself using a service like that.
How you end up in these groups is you either get invited by real life friends or you hang around in a big public group for a while, make friends with people who will then invite you to these smaller groups.
Because users have to be invited rather than just finding the group on a search page, the users are of higher quality and share similar interests.
I really think this is what it is. Internet discussion forums used to self-select for curious people actively seeking out discussion. It wasn't hard to find meaningful interactions because most people who sought out forums were looking for something similar. Now that everyone is on the internet, the random person you interact with likely doesn't have the same disposition as before.
As a counter anecdote, I have a group of about 15 real friends on the internet that I met mostly on an instant messaging app. Real friends to the point of meeting up and going on holidays together without actually knowing their full real names.
I'm not suggesting that it's simply impossible to make constructive connections anymore. I'm only saying that I spent some years thinking the change was 100 percent about me and my life and maybe it wasn't 100 percent me.
Maybe it was at least partly general conditions. And I couldn't see that because my life being derailed was very in my face and I just figured that was the entire explanation.
I do know that my own and others expectation of Tech (from the mid 90ies) was just another utopia and I resent myself for drinking the Kool-aid, and hate myself for having gotten a job in Tech and playing my tiny part in being an ambassador for this type of future among the small group of people I had influence over (family, friends etc who all wished they did the same seeing my salary and lifestyle with much envy). I was so convinced of science and Tech being the answer to all problems we create that I thought teaching my kids to use Tech is a good use of time. But today I can't bring back time and I hate myself for it because I could have gone for a walk with them in the woods and created real memories instead.
another thing that hits me as I get old is it's becoming harder to make new connections IRL. I see my old friends having given up on life by refusing to get out of a stuck marriage, getting fat and lazy, having lost their confidence and ability and interest to do anything new, and the best I can get from them is a statement about what's cool on Netflix these days.
Then I look at myself and realize that I'm as much a slave to the algorithm as them even I do everything to not be part of this. There simply is no escape[1]. I gave up all social media years ago (except HN) and spend at least 2-3 hours outside every day. And my hate shifts from "Tech in general" to myself because I know there is no way out. Perhaps people like David Foster Wallace and others who are no longer with us have seen it coming years ago, and knew there are only 2 options: a) avoid others and be happy with just myself or b) off myself. I'm doing an OK job (I think) managing a) but I can't claim that I'm not looking forward to the day I snuff it either. It feels like the only thing that is worse than dealing with my own judgement and myself is dealing with the judgement or opinions of others (see the idea of "Hell is other people" from "No Exit")
[1] The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...
Because of the internet, I've had friends -- real friends who were extremely important to me -- in Canada, in Guam and in the Middle East. They helped save my life and shape my character.
While largely housebound due to my health, the internet was how I had close relationships with people the world over without exposing me to their germs or them to mine.
I left my corporate job that was helping to kill me and slept in a tent for a few years while trying to figure out how to make a few bucks online. That helped save my life and helped me get healthier when there's not supposed to be any hope for me.
Once, my oldest son said to me "There's both good and evil in all things." I thought that was profound and life giving and eye opening.
I asked him where he learned such profound wisdom given his relative youth. He told me I taught him that. He learned it from me.
That was even more surprising. I didn't have any memory or awareness of having done any such thing.
I don't hate tech. I see tremendous untapped potential in it to build a better world and I flail about trying to figure out how to write about it knowing that I have no audience and I have no credibility and no one believes my story.
I start little blogs that peter out and go nowhere. I start little reddits that sometimes have me as the only member for ages.
And I'm sorry to hear that someone who likely de facto helped to save my life by being one of the cogs in the machine that built the tech that helped me live when, by all rights, I should have died is someone so bitter and disillusioned with the very thing I still find wondrous and life giving and a means to connect with people in spite of my incurable condition and compromised immune system.
I started a BBS network. That was my social life. Those digital pen pal friends were my life line. Probably the most intense, intimate relationships I've ever had.
I don't know what happened in the medium transitions since. Dial up to internet, FidoNet to UUCP & NNTP, FTP & Gopher to HTTP, multiuser to MMORPG, blogs to social media, desktop to laptop to mobile, social media to livestream.
Maybe it's like Chomsky tried to warn us: Anything ad supported is bad for us.
Maybe it's like David Graeber suggests: While winner-takes-all is something like a natural law, we can always find nooks and corners to connect with each other and have genuine relationships.
I really dunno.
Long ago, I trusted people I met online in a way I can't anymore and that creates a barrier that protects me from potential predators, but it also keeps out potential friends. Multiply that across literally billions of people and it's a hard problem to solve.
I don't think the tech, per se, is the problem. We opened a social Pandora's Box and having seen how things can go wrong at scale, we optimize for trying to guard against potential evil rather than for fostering good.
With that, our fears deepen. It becomes a case of "Going to war to preserve the peace is like fucking to preserve virginity."
Ultimately, it comes back to the people and how they live their lives and what is in their minds. Tech is a problem because we've decided The Tech is the problem rather than deciding how we use it is The Problem.
Then we very ironically design new apps to remedy our problems rooted in the idea that The Tech is the problem rather than designing new philosophies and new ideas and new social norms which has historically been the effective remedy for social ills.
I'm casually rereading the media and technology critics. McLuhan, Postman, Chomsky, Shirky, Orwell, others. It's kind of amazing how prescient some of their observations were.
Thanks for the Ellul tip. Will read.
My Twitter avatar is a picture of a fractal I generated with my own software. That reveals (fuzzily) a certain non-obvious aspect of my personality, which you couldn't get just from looking at my face. The majority of people have faces; mine isn't much of a signal to strangers.
Faces are for recognition. If we met at a conference, you could recognize me again by my face. If you don't know me, my face isn't very useful unless you expect to meet me in person. So, a face on Twitter is unhelpful to the point of being counterproductive.
Anyway, that face might not even be theirs.
As a grumpy individualist, I'm not on Twitter, so it's pretty hard to bully me there. There's people there, why would I want to be there?