It’s long, funny, and angry and damn, did it strike a chord with me. It was written in December, '22 so pre-Reddit meltdown but still very relevant to it.
Some highlights include:
Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop providing content for free and start paying us for the privilege. Stop shining sunlight on horrors and start advocating for more of them. Stop making communities and start weaponizing misinformation to benefit your betters… It’s the same. It’s always been the same. Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control.
Over and over again … I’ve joined online communities, found so much to love there, made friends and created unique spaces that truly felt special, felt like places worth protecting. And they’ve all, eventually, died. For the same reasons and through the same means, though machinations came from a parade of different bad actors. It never really mattered who exactly killed and ate these little worlds. The details. It’s all the same cycle, the same beasts, the same dark hungers.
All … gone. Dismantled for parts and sold off with zero understanding that the only thing of any value the site ever offered was the community, its content, its connection, its possibilities, its knowledge. And that can’t be sold with the office space and the codebase. These sites exist because of what we do there. But at any moment they can be sold out from under us, to no benefit or profit to the workers—yes, workers, goddammit—who built it into something other than a dot com address and a dusty login screen, yet to the great benefit and profit of those who, more often than not, use the money to make it more difficult for people to connect to and accept each other positively in the future.
It does end on a hopeful note, though.
Don’t ever stop talking to each other. It’s what the internet is really and truly for. Talk to each other and listen to each other. But don’t ever stop connecting. Be a prodigy of the new world. Stand up for the truth no matter how often they take our voices away and try to replace the idea of reality with fucking insane Lovecraftian shit. Don’t give up, don’t let them have this world.
Don’t get cynical. Don’t lose joy. Be us. Because us is what keeps the light on when the night comes closing in. Us doesn’t have a web address. We are wherever we gather. Mastodon, Substack, Patreon, Dreamwidth, AO3, Tumblr, Discord, even the ruins of Twitter, even Facebook and Instagram and Tiktok, god help us all. Even Diaryland.
It doesn’t matter. They’re just names. It doesn’t matter who owns them. Because we own ourselves and our words and the minute the jackals arrive is the same minute we put down the first new chairs in the next oasis. We make our place when we’re together. We make our magic when we connect, typing hands to typing hands.
Hello, world. Come in from the cold. This will be a good place. For awhile. And then we’ll make another one.
Stop buying things and start talking to each other. They’ve always known that was how they lose.
OMG those quotes mention so many of my early internet memories. Dreamwidth. And before that, Livejournal before it sucked. And Diaryland. And Diary-X. And egroups. I miss those days so much. Twitter and Reddit weren’t the first to jump the shark, by a long shot.
I cannot read that and feel how short-sighted it is. The death of online communities due to money sucks. But how about the actual death of physical people and their physical communities due to literally the exact same thing? It seems douchey to complain about capitalism killing message boards and not connect the idea at all to how it has been killing everything on earth since humans became a thing.
Here it is: good ol’ “Whataboutism”, I almost had hope that one discussion could survive without someone going “wait, what about this other thing that people know and probably care about, but is completely irrevelant to the current conversation at hand?” but ah well, today just wasn’t the day, I guess.
Seriously tho, to borrow your first sentence: I can’t help but read something like “But how about the actual death of physical people and their physical communities” and think…are people just incapable of caring about two seperate issues of different scales at the same time? I don’t know, maybe I’m weird because I don’t suddenly think of the all starving people around the world and bring them up when the topic of the closing of the food joint a couple of blocks down gets brought up by the regulars…
I output what I feel. I feel that text is blind to itself, it talks about a shitty issue with too much grandiosity. It could be written with some more self-awareness to its place in the general discussion about freedoms. It is nothing, or at least not very much, but presents itself as everything.
I was too harsh in my original comment, I apologize, honestly. I’ve seen Whatabout-ism so much recently and it’s just draining to basically hear people constantly try and change the subject or bring up something completely outta left field instead of contributing to what’s in front of them, I’ll be real with you.
I get what you’re saying, but, well, the issue is that important to the author to be writing about it in such a grand way. Or they’re flexing thier writing skills, who really knows. That isn’t to say they don’t give a shit about the death of people and thier communities or other injustices to people and freedoms…they’re just not relevant to this particular problem they wanna focus on at the moment. They know there’s worse shit out there that also needs attention, most people with half a brain know it too. But that’s a whole different beast to what’s being talked about here.
“Yes, I understand the problem, but have you considered there are larger problems?” is a pretty uninteresting take. You can care about more than one thing at once.
You can also take a step back and see that you’re exaggerating certain problems because you’re being swept away by your emotions. I think that that text lacks perspective and feels narcissistic and blind to itself at best.
I disagree. The way you discuss a subject is important to understand why you are discussing a subject. The melodrama in that text overshadows its message and makese me cringe and disconnects me from its valid point.
If you haven’t already, I suggest reading Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media, a blog post by Catherynne M. Valent. (It’s actually referenced in the article above.)
It’s long, funny, and angry and damn, did it strike a chord with me. It was written in December, '22 so pre-Reddit meltdown but still very relevant to it.
Some highlights include:
It does end on a hopeful note, though.
OMG those quotes mention so many of my early internet memories. Dreamwidth. And before that, Livejournal before it sucked. And Diaryland. And Diary-X. And egroups. I miss those days so much. Twitter and Reddit weren’t the first to jump the shark, by a long shot.
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I cannot read that and feel how short-sighted it is. The death of online communities due to money sucks. But how about the actual death of physical people and their physical communities due to literally the exact same thing? It seems douchey to complain about capitalism killing message boards and not connect the idea at all to how it has been killing everything on earth since humans became a thing.
Here it is: good ol’ “Whataboutism”, I almost had hope that one discussion could survive without someone going “wait, what about this other thing that people know and probably care about, but is completely irrevelant to the current conversation at hand?” but ah well, today just wasn’t the day, I guess.
Seriously tho, to borrow your first sentence: I can’t help but read something like “But how about the actual death of physical people and their physical communities” and think…are people just incapable of caring about two seperate issues of different scales at the same time? I don’t know, maybe I’m weird because I don’t suddenly think of the all starving people around the world and bring them up when the topic of the closing of the food joint a couple of blocks down gets brought up by the regulars…
I output what I feel. I feel that text is blind to itself, it talks about a shitty issue with too much grandiosity. It could be written with some more self-awareness to its place in the general discussion about freedoms. It is nothing, or at least not very much, but presents itself as everything.
I was too harsh in my original comment, I apologize, honestly. I’ve seen Whatabout-ism so much recently and it’s just draining to basically hear people constantly try and change the subject or bring up something completely outta left field instead of contributing to what’s in front of them, I’ll be real with you.
I get what you’re saying, but, well, the issue is that important to the author to be writing about it in such a grand way. Or they’re flexing thier writing skills, who really knows. That isn’t to say they don’t give a shit about the death of people and thier communities or other injustices to people and freedoms…they’re just not relevant to this particular problem they wanna focus on at the moment. They know there’s worse shit out there that also needs attention, most people with half a brain know it too. But that’s a whole different beast to what’s being talked about here.
“Yes, I understand the problem, but have you considered there are larger problems?” is a pretty uninteresting take. You can care about more than one thing at once.
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You can also take a step back and see that you’re exaggerating certain problems because you’re being swept away by your emotions. I think that that text lacks perspective and feels narcissistic and blind to itself at best.
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What point are you even trying to make? That has nothing to do with this topic.
I disagree. The way you discuss a subject is important to understand why you are discussing a subject. The melodrama in that text overshadows its message and makese me cringe and disconnects me from its valid point.