We finally really did it!

We moved. 

You learn a lot from moving, especially the older you get. 

Our shells get bigger. 

We accumulate literal, material history.

What can you toss, forget? What should you carry along until you are being carried.

In an urn, not a casket. (What is death but a chance to be liberated from the physical?)

Before we moved, I wrote the letter below, but I did not send it.

Because I didn't have a happy announcement to start with.

And all of us – every single one of us – enjoys getting good news first.

Imagine yourself waking up on a "weekend" morning. Sleep has gently robbed you of your memories. 

You're listening to this absolute banger of a track  and you're feeling upbeat. Anything is possible. 

Then the news begins…

Oh my God. I'm back. I'm home.
All the time, it was... 
We finally really did it.​

We were always already here.

From 2008: Should You Invest in the Long Tail? ("No," Harvard Business Review) 

From 2014: Conform or fail: Social media's broken promise (The New Scientist)

From 2018: How social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump (MIT Technology Review)

We've known for a long time now that the path the Internet was taking was moving us further away from a better future; one where strangers come together (I don't mean it that way, but, truth be told, online dating once did wonders for strengthening intergroup ties.)

As Becky and I pointed out in 1998, when cyberspace became another "real estate" boom, our ability to use online sites to build fraternal structures – solidarity! – was forever imperiled. 

Of course, the groups that colonized the open web would eventually destroy the very structures they built in its place. They're not driven by the desire to build useful things but rather shareholder value. 

Yes, these two outcomes should coincide but under certain conditions (e.g., the last ~40 years) they don't have to!

Did not the East India Company create a lot of value?

The defense of colonization is always to equate it with civilization.

But then what remains? Ozymandias. 

For the last few weeks, I've been reading about the end of the social media era. This was inevitable. Not because these services have been replaced by something better (look at Twitter, or TikTok) but because such is the logic of so-called "optimization" in our current regime.

If the only consequences of such folly are memes and memories, we would be wonderfully richer for it. But the opposite is true: twenty-five years later and our ability to conceive of collective action, let alone take part in it, has been greatly diminished.

What I mourn is not the end of "social media" as it was, but rather our understanding of what it means to be a part of society – as a result of the platforms we were given. 

The language of collective action – our very purpose on this planet! – has been co-opted. Progress means personal goods. "Touchless", "Frictionless", "Personalized".  

Thus, what we have called "social" media is, technically, not at all social; it has been explicitly top-down and antagonistic. Most of all, it's atomistic because it's driven by personal consumption.

Parasocial media doesn't have quite the same ring to it and yet that's often what it is. (Note also the return of the group chat as a way of circumventing these shitty services.)

What unites us on these platforms – our common events – are typically moments of spectacle that advance the commercial logic of these platforms. There is no "outside". 

Unless it's a catastrophe: the end of a world order.

Or an apocalypse: a brief peek at a different world order.

TikTok grew fast during the quarantine period of the pandemic and then the mass public demonstrations in support of Black Lives Matter. It wove itself into the lives of millions during a time when our social fabric was tearing apart.

But TikTok's purpose is not to heal. It literally produces forgetting.

To enjoy TikTok, one must forget what one has just seen, every minute. 

Story, climax. Forget.

Story, climax. Forget.

Story, climax. Forget.

That's a lot of forgetting at a time when the tools and organizations we rely on for our survival – collective remembering – are being dismantled because they don't serve the material purposes of our hypercapitalized elites.

We can say the same thing about blockchain, which promised "decentralization" in order to extend existing regimes of libertarian individualism. 

Or the current wave of interest in AI, which appears to be driven almost entirely by the desire to further discipline labor – at a time when workers have become unruly.  

Some would say these are all examples of technology that is value neutral (or even liberating!) being co-opted by bad actors.

The Revolution cannot fail, it can only be failed.

But this, too, is a failure to imagine the reality we are in. (More here.)

The truth is that the logos is always inscribed in the technē. 

Robert Miles, the AI researcher whose work I highlighted in my last email puts this quandary very simply:

The main problems that AI is trying to solve are philosophical. And philosophical problems take centuries if not millennia to solve.

One such philosophical problem, if not the most important, is:

how we do we best work together to solve common problems?

Right now the boundaries of our imagination begin at the corporation and end at the totalitarian state (with lots of blends of both in between.)

R&D over the last 40 years has been driven by very specific people making bets. Those bets are not value neutral! They are usually only liberating as a byproduct. And not equally so!

Yes, corporations are better than most of what came before it.

Give me a boring corporation every day of the year instead of a money laundering front or a family business.

But to look at our society, its modern infrastructure crumbling, and say:

OK boys, we solved the fundamentals, it's time to optimize!

is lazy, unimaginative and the true Luddism. 

We dumped billions into Uber and got subsidized rides for a few years. Had we put that money into 21st century infrastructure, we’d have subsidized rides for the next two decades. 

This mental rot, this inability to recognize the greatness of collective action, even when it's staring us in the face (Operation Warp Speed) is why we can’t have nice things.

We don’t build things to last. But we used to.

We didn't forget how. We forgot why.

Of course we can, we must and we will do better to organize our labor and the fruits of same. (No, it's not UBI under the benevolent rule of princelings like Musk or Thiel or even dual citizen Harlan Crow.)

We will do better because labor is dignity.

And dignity is the due of every human being.

No matter their luck, of where they were born, of their proximity to capital and the seemingly endless second chances this affords.

…Is this is the happy news I promised you?

OK, OK, here's a story that made me optimistic.

The house we moved into has two wired speakers set into the ceiling of the living room; this was popular "high tech" about 40 years ago.

After we moved in, I found a hole in the wall with speaker cables tucked into it…

Would they work, I wondered? 

Via a Craigslist link from a friend, I bought a used FM radio receiver from a nice Korean couple. We met outside their storage unit. I had to use PayPal, and then they couldn't get into the email they had given me. But they let me leave with their receiver. 

When I plugged the speaker cables into the receiver… it all worked. 

(Specifically, I ran an alternating current into them – a technology that is about 140 years old!)

Then I found my first – the first? – iPhone, and plugged it into the receiver using an 3.5mm phone connector (a 1950s invention! based on an 1880s technology!) and it too… just worked.

So far, so great. This ability to build upon standards is what civilization looks like. (Like, google "The Renaissance". Why was it called "a rebirth"?)

But then I needed to find some music to play. 

First, I went to Spotify.com on Safari. It wouldn't load at all.

Then, I went to use iTunes. No luck. I couldn't log in despite providing the credentials. 

What I could do was play songs via my Music app but there were only about 20 of them.

What worked?

Here's what YouTube.com looks like on a ~15 year-old "phone". (A party.)

Kudos to Google for making a tool that works for more people. 

Music

Before the move, I made this fun ending for the song you heard last time.

I hope it's fun for you.

Footnotes

What of all the great videos on TikTok? The kids doing history lessons and the encounters between strangers? They're detournements. Byproducts. Delightful bugs. The optimization that turned the teenage riot of MySpace into the mausoleum of Meta will come for them, too.