When does the next thing happen?
A few weeks ago, I wrote some text about the new dialectic, which tl;dr is a constellation of small, private, pseudonymous spaces. Since then, social media reached its permanent & definitive conclusion. The realization of this fact hasn’t yet been fully distributed, but it will be soon enough. In response, some people followed me on Mastodon. Fine. Another person asked me to explain my social system over dinner, wanting a “tech wizard” to express the totality of their independent community vision. Fine.
Mastodon seems to consist of three things in equal proportion: people talking about Mastodon, people talking about the aforementioned conclusion of social media, and people talking about literally anything else. The latter category is of interest. One must think less about what Mastodon “is” and more about the atomization of collective thought, which is far more relevant and will be far more lasting. This does not appear to be the default as of press time.
There must necessarily be no single answer to the new dialectic. The answer is 5 or 6 things, instead, spread evenly. This allows us to loosely overlap in a way that ruggedizes attention while honoring our mental models. For example, my own “social network” is a blend of Signal, iMessage, Slack, Discord, my robotexter, multiple mailing lists, and, yes, Mastodon.
Social media was a useful hive mind while it lasted, but we were not really built for such a system. Plus, information overload tends to predict structural collapse. Knowing this, then, what is right relationship? The new dialectic begins to form a fleeting answer. It will be different for everyone, and it will require a restructuring within each of us about who “matters.” Attention is finite. Friendship, in this society, has always been optional. What do we do now?
If you’ve followed any news in the past month, you are thinking of an answer to this question. Ask this: what already nourishes you, socially? Who governs the things that nourish you socially? What are the structures of power that allow for the systems that socially nourish you to exist? How okay are you with the systems that you exist in? And if not, what steps can you take to exist in right relationship to the systems that do nourish you?
Why do systems matter? Because they govern what we say, how we read, and what we experience. They govern the way that we divide our attention – and where we put our attention matters more than anything. They decide who we meet and who we don’t meet. They decide whether we doomscroll or not. It is necessary to question the leveraged power that exists within the systems that create relationships online – including this one.
It’s always a good time to go through such an exercise, but there’s never been a better time than now, when we collectively exist in a liminal space and are curious about creating something new. What will that look like? How will you move?