I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the meaning of community. This is in no small part a response from me to the Bad Thing That Happened, but I want to think my thoughts in a way that is durable to Bad Things Happening. Over the past three weeks, I’ve sought safety through isolation, and (acknowledging my privilege in being able to do so), it’s time to come out into the light, and do something. Indeed, I find myself wanting to do more, and to do better, and my own process of grief and dealing has been bolstered through community - community with my family, my friends, and fellow People From the Internet. In the process, I find that there are many aspects to community that I haven’t considered, and I think the way that we all, or at the very least, I get through “all this” is by participating and engaging in community.
Those of you who know me know that I often say that being perceived is existentially terrifying. The underlying intention of this statement is this - like many millenials, I yearn for annihilation - not in the sense of wanting to die or being dead, but more in the fact of not having existed at all - what would a world without me look like? At the same time, the virtue of never having existed is not having to deal with the weight of existence and confronting the horrors therein.
This is a very particular psychosis that I believe was gifted to us by the neoliberal shift of “personal responsibility” that pervaded our childhood and education. Perhaps not the prototype of this phenomenon, but at least a very clear and obvious representative is Smoky the Bear. Shirtless, he pointed at me at told me that only I can prevent forest fires. Me? I live in the suburbs of Houston - we’re more at risk of hurricanes than forest fires. Demonstrably so - Hurricane Ivan disrupted my senior year of high school and left me with a distinct impression of climate disaster. I remember vividly not being able to sleep at night because it was so hot, having no electricity for air conditioning, and listening to NPR on a battery powered radio in the middle of the night as they discussed the bankruptcy of Bear Stearns and shortly after the impending collapse of the financial system. As a child, it was hard not to lay there and feel like the world was coming to an end. Another anecdote - lacking power for almost a week after the storm, school was cancelled, but drinking water was also in short supply. My dad went to the store, and the only thing he could come back with was Pepsi Max. If you can’t bring your own water, Pepsi Max will do, I suppose.
Am I laying the blame for my own lack of faith and low expectations in our institutions solely at the feet of Smoky the Bear? Of course not - but he bears (no pun intended) some culpability. Despite the messaging of the era, we are not, in fact, responsible for saving the world. We could never be, and to do so is patently unfair, unreasonable, and unachievable. So I’m going to free myself of this burden - I can’t help but to dream big, but the world will be here long after I’m gone, and even if I never existed. I reject that only I can save the world - only all of us working together can save ourselves, and my central belief is that saving ourselves requires us to live in community with each other.
There are many reasons why I feel that being perceived is terrifying. Not insignificant is the fear of rejection - when I was younger, I did feel some pressure to belong, and intense loneliness at the simple fact that I didn’t. But, I think that the precondition to reject this form of being is to acknowledge that there is no such thing as mass culture. By this, I mean that there must be no correct way of being - the malignance of the schoolyard order is that there’s a normative force to conform to a set of standards that are set by the “cool kids”, who of course, happen to be rich and white. And yet - we also forget that the schoolyard has cliques, people on the periphery, and others who have opted out entirely. In this way, understanding the schoolyard as an ecosystem requires us to see that each piece has its part, and that all such parts are needed. In the same way, the neoliberal approach to Defeating Evil ignores the ecology of the environment from which Evil springs.
Rejection being such a powerful motivator, how do we overcome fear of rejection to live in community? First, to the degree you can intentionally form communities, sometimes rejection is good when it’s a sign that the values of this community are not ones that you share. We must also recognize that sometimes rejection can be a signal from your community that you’re straying outside the norms or values of the community. If you generally find yourself aligned to the norms and values of the community, this is a signal to course-correct. The alternative, of course, is isolation. Retreating into your own bubble can help to ensure your own safety, but it is ultimately unsustainable. Perhaps by genetics, we are driven to associate with others? Or, perhaps the nature of collective action problems naturally leads us to seek out others with whom to work in tandem?
This brings me, of course, to the thesis of this piece - the meaning of community is to see others and keep an eye on them, whilst providing the opportunity for others to keep an eye on you. Community without the former is free-loading and commnunity missing the latter is surveillance. Simply put - to be in commmunity is to see and be seen.
While by no means a primary source, I recently read Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 and it’s gotten me thinking a lot about what it means to truly see others. Seeing others, and the relative invisibility of some, plays quite a role in the book. It opens with two coders discussing the role of rules in the financial system, and what might happen if they hacked the government to try and change those rules. High-minded and impractical on its face, of course - such a change would quickly be discovered and reversed, but one of them speculates that nobody would notice if it turns out that they liked the new rules better than the old ones. They have this conversation in their home, wihch is effectively a tent on the a floor of the MetLife building that has been converted into a farm for its residents - a co-op both in the sense of shared legal ownership of the building, but also that the existence of the farm serves the purpose of feeding the building’s residents in a world where climate catastrophe has wreaked havoc with the food system.
Inevitably, one of them decides to put their plan into action, and it results in them being kidnapped by forces unknown. Very quickly, the super of the building (who plays an important role in water abatement in the flooded area of downtown Manhattan where they live) notices that they’re missing, and starts the search for them. Much is made of the cooperative nature of the building - being a co-op, there is both a functional governance structure and set of norms, including a begrudging willingness to take in others that need a place to say (hence, two coders hacking the rules to the financial system from the farm floor).
Another example of seeing others in the book comes when one of the main characters is rushing to a date in his boat (in a flooded New York, boats are the primary form of transportation) when he accidentally causes a much smaller boat piloted by two kids who are searching for treasure to capsize. Begrudgingly (this is a theme - I think it’s notable that helping others out of a desire to do the right thing does not mean you have to be happy about it, if it personally inconveniences you), he lets them onto his boat and ruins his date, in the process kicking off the rest of the plot. The interface to community in this case - the main character literally failing to see the two kids in his boat.
If you haven’t read the book, I recommend it! It’s left me with quite an impression and will likely be one of my top books of the year when the time comes to do the rundown. I will say that it somewhat shows its age, being published in 2017 - at one point later in the book, the author goes on at length about the banality of hedge funds and arbitrage finance, but then points to venture capital investing (in context, seed or angel investing) as being more noble-minded and productive. Again, understanding the book’s historical context, I can see the point the author is making about the relative banality of the two, but I also wonder how he would write that section in our current context - one where the biggest venture capital bets have simply resulted in transfers of wealth from the poor to the already rich, and the prevailing strategy is simply to acquire a monopoly, extract as much wealth as possible, and then let the product lose its quality in the process (“enshittification”).
Overall, the lesson of the book is this - being that there is such safety in isolation, it is tempting to turn a blind eye towards the suffering of others. While it is comfortable to try and ignore suffering, being in community requires us to see that others are suffering and ask if we can help. This does not mean that we need to confront and solve every bad thing that happens - far from it. It’s a rather fine line to walk, but I think that crux of it is that we should ask others what help they need, and not to find an implement a solution in isolation.
All this being said, I find the experience of writing about and seeing others to be exceedingly odd, for the specific reason that I can’t seem to think of anything specific I can do to see and to help others, except for simply doing it, or participating in “direct aid”, nebulously defined. I think that this is because I am simply not in community with many others right now. I obviously look out for the ones that I am closest to - but, I think it is time to expand the circle. I am willing to sit in discomfort at this dimension of community for now.
In my writing, I have a tendency to directly address the reader, and this is deeply ironic because almost nobody reads my writing. This is not a theory, but rather truth borne of the fact that the only javascript that runs on this website happens to be CloudFlare’s web analytics script, and I can see that 95% of the views on my website come from the integration tests that I’ve written for Precis on Github actions! I use golang to test every combination of storage handler, content handler, and both null and dummy LLM handlers - it’s awesome, if I may say so myself, but it also does that mean that most of my writing is effectively shouting into the void.
I’m not caught up on this fact; one of the primary reasons why I write is for myself - I find it enjoyable, and it serves to help me gather my thoughts. But - the other reason that nobody reads my writing is that I’m not trying to get anyone to do so. I don’t promote my writing, nor do I share it anywhere, and nor do I talk about it to others.
Aside from the stinging potential of rejection that inherently comes with being seen, I think that this is the inevitable consequence of largely withdrawing from social media, and public engagement with others. As early as 2014, there was nothing much keeping me on Facebook other than messenger, which I used to communicate with some old friends. I’ve since permanently deleted my account, and aside from the occasional difficulty tracking down where a food truck is because they only post it on their Instagram, I don’t regret it.
The obvious role of Facebook and Twitter in spreading misinformation and normalizing horrific politics under the guise of having a “marketplace of ideas” (aside: there is no such thing, all organizations require the ability to create and enforce norms, and formalize them as rules, and I think that these are simply too big to do so - there is no entitlement to cruelty) leaves me convinced that these are not platforms in which I need to participate. While they may be the biggest platforms, I think it is important to remember that first, they are not the only such platforms, and second, social media is not real life.
In other words, while my intention to be seen may involve participating in social media again, participating in social media is far from the only way to be seen in the way that I want to be seen.
The other lesson that I’ve learned from grieving The Bad Thing is that the extent of my participation in social media cannot be one-sided. As someone who is generally Very Online, I found great joy in TikTok, but it’s clear that the nature of its algorithm in past few months has failed to serve me well. I was not active on Facebook enough to truly understand the impact of misinformation and echo chamber-ing in 2016, but this time it’s very clear that any algorithm designed to encourage engagement is not healthy, neither for content consumers or producers. In this way, I find myself worrying about the wellness of the people who make the content I enjoy, as its quite clear that the algorithm doesn’t serve them. Do they ever think about that? What is the point of producing content for an algorithm that doesn’t value it for its quality, but simply because it makes other talk? I think that this is a clear formula for reactionary content (which is in no way a hot take, I admit). Just like TikTok is allegedly doing to us, I was simply surveiling them.
Interestingly enough, it’s been about three weeks since I last used Tiktok as I write this, and I don’t miss it. I think that it must have been a fount of high quantity, but low quality content. Good riddance, I suppose. Moving forward I will, in general, prioritize forms of social media that aren’t algorithmically driven, and also seek to participate in those forums equally - no more “lurking”! Such is the nature of being seen, so that I may also strive to see others.
Finally - I do want to fully and actively acknowledge that social media is not real life, and realistically, neither is the internet. This means being seen in person; I want to continue to ruminate on what this means, but you (reader, which is hopefully not just GitHub Actions) should try and hold me accountable if I’m not doing that. Again, to be perceived is to experience existential terror.
To those who know me and/or are intrigued by technology in general, after having read the volume of words above, it should then come as no surprise that I’ve joined the Fediverse! If the thing that we do on Mastodon is “micro-blogging”, then we may consider the whole of this post to be “macro-blogging”, and think about this somewhat encapsulated section as a “mini-blog”.
Anyway, yes - you can find me @[email protected]. I’m currently running a single-user instance via masto.host, but the concept of alternative mastodon servers is inevitably intriguing to me, so that may yet change. Sounds like a great opportunity to try out hosting a website for the broader internet (I’ve kind of been itching to try out Cloudflare Tunnels, so this is perhaps the right kind of low-stakes use case for that). I’m sure that I’ll also learn a lot about how data portability works in the Fediverse!
As a single user instance, there are considerable challenges around content discovery; in particular, the only way to find content is to follow people, and the Fediverse has a bias towards consensualism when it comes to federation. This is, of course, highly understandable; decentralized consensual networks are what the internet of dreams is made of - but, it also poses a chicken and egg problem. If it’s important to have reputation, then starting anew on a single user instance means bootstrapping your own reputation. These days, most users aren’t so selective about their followers, but the promise of the Fediverse is to provide that control. Perhaps, just as how I feel that I will be one of the last software engineers to be self-taught, the same can be said for users that start in the Fediverse solely without prior reputation. There is, of course, an easy solution, which is to join another instance and build a reputation before setting out on your own! I’m also running Fedifetcher to help populate my instance with more lively content.
My final unrelated thought on this matter is that the fever dream of the internet as a series of decentralized consensual networks plays prominently in the utopian sci-fi that I love (see: The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz or A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys), and they seem to solve the bootstrapping problem through circumstance of being. Everyone belongs to the network by nature of their birth, or where they happen to live. Whether or not this is simply a replication of the state is a matter for another macro-blog, I feel.
Some additional housekeeping -
It’s always felt deeply silly to feature LinkedIn so prominently on my home page; it seems only right to replace that link with the Fediverse.
If you’re a human reading this, feel free to reach out on Mastodon! I also plan to start sharing my macro-blogs to Mastodon.
I may join Bluesky yet, depending on my appetite and capacity for participating in social media. This post by one of the main contributors to ActivityPub does a great job of describing how to perceive Bluesky (or rather, its protocol) - Decentralized in theory (but not in practice, due to impractically high maintenance cost), but less so than ActivityPub, not Federated, but meant to be resilient to the “credible exit” of BlueSky.
As does the author, I find the latter to be very interesting; will the protocol evolve to make it easier for others to provide a AT Protocol-based alternative to Bluesky? Or, will the cost of doing so remain high enough that only large corporations can manage to do that? Alternatively, could a sufficiently determined group of self-governing individuals pull it off?
All I know is that is my Mastodon instance is run by me for my own benefit only.