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.
Gwen Snyder is uncivil
Ted Curran M. Ed.