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.
@gwensnyder
I honestly think it was ready for it 15 years ago. It's just that the people who had the polish also wanted to figure out how to make the money off of it.
They got hold of the culture as it was becoming ready, and they trapped it.
Gwen Snyder is uncivil
Christopher