I grew up wearing Whole Earth Catalog pages thin, listened to transhumanist podcasts, read breathless histories of WELL, loved The Palace chat and almost wrote my thesis on Second Life.
Adored Snowcrash.
There's liberatory potential in this stuff, it's just getting squandered.
It's absolutely true that a lot of the Whole Earth Catolog/WELL types were libertarian, sexist, and problematic.
We live under white patriarchy, it replicates itself in subcultural spaces unless there's extreme intentionality around preventing that.
The internet has unlimited community-building potential.
Tech has enormous community-building potential.
The problem isn't tech, it's tech bros who want to own and control our communities.
They want us there & paying, but they don't actually want us to build or leverage power.
I'm coming out of this Twitter dark night of the soul with clarity that we've been on their turf for too long.
Telegram, Twitter, Facebook: they're all playgrounds owned by billionaires.
I don't think popular online culture was ready for a platform like Mastodon until now-- existing social media was too comfortable, too widely adopted, and also we were able to influence their operation.
That's no longer true, and the digital displacement is tragic but also an opportunity.
Twitter's dying, and that's a great loss.
The silver lining is, we can take this moment and use it to shift to a communications infrastructure that takes control away from the billionaires.
We just have to seize this moment and use it to migrate and build.
That isn't going to happen spontaneously, though.
We need journalists and other influential folks to use their platforms-- on and off Twitter-- to make the case for a shift to Mastodon and more broadly for a movement towards digital decentralization.
And, we need to be talking about building community redundancy.
We can't rely on single platforms anymore.
We need to be strategic about backing up not just our data, but our communities.
That way, when the unexpected happens, we don't get stuck rebuilding from scratch.
Someone on here said to me recently, there are no happy endings, only sad beginnings.
We're in a sad beginning moment.
We built some really beautiful stuff, but we built it on a foundation of sand and it is rapidly washing away.
We can and should mourn, but we also need to learn, plan, and organize.
That's how we turn moments of loss into moments of growth. Always.
On necessity of leaving #twitter and how users should recognize their own agency and power:
https://robertsonp.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-the-twitter-quitter
Gwen Snyder is uncivil
Will 
Hamlet of Melnibone
SilverSalmonAK
Lilith
Jenny Carlson Ph.D. (she/her)
Phil Robertson
FranannigansD