November 11, 2022

Living in the dying mall

I’m always apologizing for my newsletters, I should stop doing that. But here I am. This one is looooooong. I’m sorry!!!

Living in the dying mall

Like many other nerdy young millennials, I was an early adopter of all things web 2.0 (the social web, remember it? RDF and rel-links, rss, “the semantic web”). I’ve been on Twitter since 2007.

Before that, MySpace, then Facebook, and then finally Twitter: the birth-death-birth of the public square of the internet. Although that chronology is incomplete and a bit off. And the gravitational centers were never that neatly defined. Friendster, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Reddit—you name it I was at least adjacent to being there. This is a personal reflection, don’t let the citations and footnotes fool you into expecting rigorous research.

I remember when Facebook was cool. When the statuses started with “Justin is…” (thinking about what to eat for lunch, etc) and being a fan of things like “the feeling of the cool side of the pillow” was a fun troll. Facebook told us we could all stay in touch, and it delivered on that promise, provided we all hung out on Facebook. But Facebook was cool enough, we could have fun there.

Facebook worked better than most others. More people were there, and it was pretty reliable compared to the alternatives¹. Importantly, Facebook was one place to go.

We didn’t know it at the time, but Facebook was Walmart, or the mall, or something like that. Where previously there were 30 small shops and a flea market at the fair grounds on Wednesdays and Saturdays, now there was one place. And they always had everything, and easy parking to boot. Some of the more visionary types knew, or suspected; most of us didn’t know until the tipping point. When “everyone” was finally there, it stopped being quite so cool.

Our parents and older relatives finally got on Facebook, so as we grew up and found our voices and our people, we (my crowd anyway) mostly did that away from Facebook. We found ourselves on Twitter and Tumblr and god knows where else.

The chronology is blurry now, but roughly: First The Arab Spring, then Occupy, pushed Twitter’s weird spontaneous and publicly self-organizing style of conversation into the national spotlight. Many of these movements used Facebook too, but the hashtag is one of the most interesting socio-technical innovations of my lifetime²: I first saw it come to life around hurricanes, tornados, and the ensuring recovery work. Twitter was a place where global events happened.

Skipping a bunch of global events brings us to the 2016 election cycle: Facebook had become a perpetual thanksgiving dinner, exhausting and infuriating, an inescapable argument with your racist uncle who never knew when to let things go, and now he had all his racist friends with him. Before that, we learned about PRISM; afterwards, Cambridge Analytica. Facebook was an information superweapon disguised as a public square. It was becoming untrustworthy and uncool.

The mall is dying

Right now, as Elon Musk continues what others began, I think a lot about the web we lost: the weird, chaotic, exuberant, dangerous internet that I only just barely got to experience³. I also think about the eternal plight of the commons: not tragedy, enclosure. The replacement of commons with things that look like commons but are actually weapons.

• Microphones on public transportation, snitching to the cops
• The invasive tracking technology used in your favorite store
• License plate readers recording your every move
• The near-total dominion of privately owned and hostile public spaces

I think about GamerGate and the backlash to #MeToo and the harassment that queer communities and people of color experienced for years. I think about how I left Facebook in the same way that many of us left our hometowns. I think about how I personally gave up on Tumblr after a catastrophic number of missteps by the staff, driven out by a thousand little annoyances. I think about so many of us changing to “it’s complicated” with Instagram.

I think about how, as many people look to change their relationships to Twitter, there’s no new-Twitter for us to go to.

Twitter is, for better and for worse, where so many of us ended up. There’s a reason for that. The moderation policy shifts, algorithm shenanigans, and fragmentation of other digital spaces make it hard to replace what we get from Twitter. We live in a dying mall, and the other stores closed up.

We’ve neglected our non-internet spaces as well. I wasn’t intending to write something about our unraveling social fabric or whatever, but I think it’s important to mention the feelings of profound isolation that have been spreading for a while.

I think about Anne Helen Petersen’s writing during the early settling of the pandemic about how working remotely was going to require us change our relationships to work and to our communities, and how that change could be for the better: questioning the suburban (and, frankly, white) dynamics that center the displaced and distant office, a quasi-religious nowhereland that gathers together people who have, primarily, their source (and often general degree) of income in common and encourages them to bond over that commonality.

All this at the detriment of neighborhoods that see their residents gone most of the day, pulled to different places of work where we build community (sometimes quite meaningfully, despite the conditions) with people who are not our neighbors. In one extreme, we succumb to airspace, moving from place to place to place in a haze of faux neutrality, moving from one box to another. The question posed: remote to who?

I really wasn’t planning to address the modern malaise. I feel like I’m writing the introduction to an anti-yuppie movie circa 1990.

Okay but, maybe that’s part of it?

Into the forest

I cannot stress enough: we have to invest in our communities and our community spaces, online and offline. We have to find and build communities, participate in them, value them enough to return when maybe it’s easier to just pack up and move (we also have to know when to move on, and support people when they choose to do so). We need to build spaces where people can be safe, spaces where we can engage with dangerous ideas amongst friends, spaces where we can learn together with strangers, spaces where we can work through our bullshit, spaces where we can heal, spaces where we can relax and let loose.

And so, that’s what I’m doing. Or trying to do.

I’ll be on Twitter, because there’s still a community there that I value. But I’ll also be elsewhere, investing in other communities, online and off.

My relationship with social media has been changing for a while. Algorithms are designed to encourage certain behaviors that just don’t work for me, and I’ve never really responded well to having my behaviors designed. I use Twitter to track the pulse, talk about research, and to ring an antifascist alarm bell from time to time. I’ve found wonderful people and thoughtfully considered ideas on the hellsite. I only get notifications from mutuals and relentlessly prune away any “recommended for you!” type shenanigans. That helps quite a bit.

I use Instagram for stories (just as the good Zuck intended), mainly to post things to get them in front of people or to reply to people’s stories, usually with a podcast or article recommendation. Signal boosts and conversations starters. But for anything else, it’s complete garbage now.

Over the summer, I’ve engaged in some experiments: Twitter Circles, email newsletters, Discords, Signal groups, Slacks, Mastodon, good ol’ group texts, reading circles, local-pub-meetups, and many more. Some as an instigator, some as a participant. At least a few of you participated in some of these experiments along with me.

After all the experiments, I don’t have any conclusive answers. But I do have some reflections to share and some things I’m going to start doing. I’ll share more on these over the next few weeks (I’m already on track to break 2,000 words), maybe a guide or two for the curious — for now:

• Discord has proven itself a handy place to organize things like reading groups, meetups, and ttrpgs. Some of the richest communities I’ve participated in are Discords, even ones where all I do is lurk. Discord is like a back patio (at the small side) or a community center (on the bigger side).

• Mastodon and the broader “fediverse” (I really hate that neologism) are very promising spaces. I think there’s still a bit missing over there, but some of the servers have built impressive community norms (every server is wildly different, just FYI). I’ll be hosting my own server and participating on a rad community server I found:

  • → On my personal “home” server as justin@social.futureresearch.club: expect thinky thoughts and weird experiments.

  • → In “public” as _justin@kolektiva.social: expect more engagement from that account since it’s on a known and well-moderated server.

• Signal has become my favorite place for messaging. It’s got most of the best features of Apple’s Messages app with some extra boons — specifically, being cross-platform (for my one Android friend). Recently Signal added a stories feature, which, along with improvements to photo sharing, make me think I’ll be replacing my Instagram feed with group texts soon. This is also where I’ll be doing a lot of my recommending. Text me if you want a podcast to listen to: I probably have a few to recommend.

• Email newsletters are both wonderful and horrible. I’m probably a grump but I miss RSS and I hate inbox overload. I hope to start publishing more regular email dispatches via Buttondown soon. I’ll probably start off with some rants about the broken informatics of email newsletters and some thoughts on how to fix it, interspersed with all the research-y thoughts I keep promising to write.

• Personal websites, blogs, and blog-rolls are an important part of our digital communities, but we need better tools for figuring out when our friends and colleagues update their websites. I’ll be rebuilding my personal internet page to be, frankly, a bit weirder (and up to date). I really love what Glitch is doing. More of that please.

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See you around

The above are just a few reflections on finding, building, and nurturing community outside the dying malls we live in. Maybe we’re not ready to completely abandon it, and maybe we shouldn’t be. We should probably keep in mind that other people live here in the mall with us, and other people already live in the forest too. But perhaps we can start to blur the edges a bit, creating paths that lead from here and there to elsewhere, to make friends in the forest and find corners where we can sit around a campfire and have conversations late into the night.

You’ll still find me in all the usual haunts. While it can feel exhausting to add to your list of places to be, I’ve found that even as I increase the number of places I’m present, I’m able to better focus what “being present” actually means. So yeah, I’ll be around, even if the roof starts to fall in, and even if what I mean by “around” starts to change. But you can come hang out in the forest with me too if you’d like, I’ve already made a few friends out there. Maybe we can build a treehouse together in the parking lot.

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Coda

As if 1,900 words wasn’t enough

I realized through writing and editing this that there are some important things lurking just below the surface here, things that informed how I’m thinking about this but aren’t directly connected. I’m pulling them out here as further reading, as a way to add context and also repay some of my epistemological debts:

• The fight to save the Weelaunee Forest in South Atlanta
• Conversations about what solidarity, community, and relationality even mean — conversations I’ve encountered via #CriticalUX events and in books like Joyful Militancy⁴.
• The idea that a community (or organization) is a container for information, which I came to via Information Activism

I also have to acknowledge the many conversations I’ve had with many friends and neighbors (physical and digital), and the various roles they’ve played along the way. And of course, anyone who actually read this far. Now you’re complicit as well. And I’m glad for that. Doing any of this alone would be absolutely pointless.

See all of you out there.