the town square
there's a square in town. he doesn't fit in very well into most groups. except with the gamers and the bankers.
we should talk about them.
but, first, let's circle back to the square.
on account of his affective problems, the square now owns Twitter.
and that should make us all sad.
Twitter became a surprisingly excellent platform because it attracted the smartest people; some poor, some rich, some professionals, almost all wisecrackers.
It had a disproportionate number of writers of every kind and a daily output of witticisms and wisdom that I had never encountered before.
In fact, encounters were its main feature; you could come across quality ideas, quickly, and mostly avoid toxic counterfeits.
How did it achieve this healthy homeostasis? Was it through moderation?
Not quite, not exactly.
There's a joke that goes "you never want to become the main character of Twitter," i.e., the person who attracts everyone's attention because of a provocative statement.
Some of Twitter's main characters were tragic; they did nothing wrong but a mass misunderstanding took them down, nonetheless. Many, though, were well deserving of their spotlight.
There were even a few who blossomed under the glare of mass scrutiny; they're known as the ones who "post through it" or a "true poster". i.e., players who love the game and recognize it as such.
there's no reason why you should know Hannah Arendt's thesis about the public sphere. nor the Habermas v. Foucault debates. but if any of these ring a bell, then you should know: Twitter was a working lab for discursive power. it was progress.
all that shared gain, the output of millions of unplanned connections, will end soon. and humanity will be the poorer because of it.
why?
because a square got his hands on enough borrowed money to take Twitter down. not overnight but the way most devolution happens: little by little, then all at once.
who is a square? how many are there? how do they fit together? why are there so many in gaming and finance? (for that matter, what is the difference these days between gaming and finance?)
my friends, I wish I had the emotional fortitude to answer these questions this saturday morning; aka, sábado.
instead, I will point back to the same realization I've cited so many times these last few years, as Qanon spread and the center shifted to the far right: Everything is gamergate.
just as there are some sports that reward the tall, there are some jobs that reward the indifferent. and political movements that celebrate cruelty.
it takes a certain kind of affective disorder to view people as inputs. as cogs. (or as vermin.) really, to view them as anything but people. i suppose the genesis for this mindset is a failure to recognize one's own self as dependent on others. frail. broken. prone to mistakes.
look, it's not rocket science. this misunderstanding is why some people are obsessed with making computers more human and humans more like computers.
it's foolish to expect people in "games" that reward indifference to fight the incentives that provide them with HIGH SCORES. (don't hate the player, etc.)
but I do think we all should become far more conversant in the language of debt, the so-called "creative accounting" that turns animal spirits into material power.
because the squares that are fluent in that language own the town square now.
and we're not going to get it back without a fight.
p.s.
an ambient track
a dance track