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.
Gwen Snyder is uncivil
pascale