I have, at times, started (and then abandoned) quite a few drafts to post here. I eventually realize I struggle to condense my thoughts into something that's accessible to others. I prefer to discuss rather than pontificate... that's part of my nature. I'm very aware that I don't know everything, and rather than sitting here and pretending I do, I just ... simmer and do nothing.
I logged in today on a whim and noticed a common theme among all my unfinished drafts — some of which consist of no more than a title. Most of them read something to the effect of “you don't hate k, you hate how k is used”.
On the surface, I think that's a really good point and important to remember. The mere existence of a technology is not a great reason to fear it, dismiss it, or avoid it. Most technological advances have great potential to be used for good. When they're not used for good, and this is almost always the case with unchecked commercialization of technology, the technology itself usually gets the bad reputation rather than whoever is behind its misuse.
I posted on Bluesky a couple of weeks ago about the practical use of technology versus the visionary. In the modern VC-backed, grow-at-all-costs economy of the internet, new ideas trend heavily toward the visionary rather than the practical. Listen, I understand that practical solutions don't make the type of money venture capitalists like to see, but they are much more likely to solve a problem now. Practical solutions handle issues directly rather than pretending they don't exist or working around them without a solution. The most prominent example of this was how social media evolved.
Social media was a great idea initially. It provided a digital means to maintain your existing real-life connections. It was similar to face-to-face human connection in eons past. You had a core of friends and family. There was also a small margin of acquaintances on the outside, and these acquaintances could slowly evolve in and out of your core community. This was a practical use of technology.
Then the money came, and with it, the visionaries who sought to drastically change the nature of human connection. Untold amounts of money were spent building software that was not subject to these natural — yet soft — boundaries of community we all had in the name of increasing connection. To be fair, this is exactly what the algorithms did. We were all suddenly so connected that for a brief moment, society was essentially atomized... not unlike the amorphous goo a caterpillar becomes during its transition to a butterfly. We were reduced to little more than individuals in contact with a bunch of strangers.
The immediate goal was achieved and we were all connected, but to such an extent that humans found these strangers more interesting than the people in their actual life. The economics of such ubiquitous connection led the algorithms to nurture these new connections, and the butterfly that emerged was, to be honest, rather ugly.
As it turns out, people tend to retreat into a bubble when confronted with these shocking changes to the social model. When given the entire world, we self-select into groups with people who are most like ourselves, which takes away the number one moderating factor to extremism — exposure to differences in personality, beliefs, and opinion.
Social atomization led to social fracture, and now that this is the norm, technological implementations popped up where the "bubble" is the point. Internet forums became Discord servers (which I have lamented previously here). Facebook became a shell of its former self, as did Twitter, which led to alternative social walled gardens like Gab and Truth Social on the political right.
The political left also joined this trend with the rise of ActivityPub-based federated social media, dubbed the "fediverse". What started out as a well-intentioned replacement of centralized social media where a person or group operated a section of an interoperable service quickly devolved into a collection of bubbles where instance admins hold fully loaded guns to each other's heads, not hesitating to go nuclear with defederation on behalf of potentially thousands of users if another instance so much as dared to host a single person deemed Undesirable. You can probably tell that I've been witness to more than a few testy mailing list threads between fediverse admins, which should confirm my left-leaning cachet — I did gravitate toward Mastodon rather than Gab, after all.
I get why all of this happens. People different from you in one way or another will invariably challenge you. It's human nature to avoid the mental effort and emotional labor involved in questioning yourself, but in the end, this fragmentation and atomization of communities self-optimizes to extremism. For those with the mental fortitude to at least avoid extremism, it's easy to fall into a trap of apathy, or worse, nihilism.
What am I doing about all this? For one, I'm opting out wherever I can. I've deleted the Facebook and Instagram apps from my phone, haven't opened TikTok willingly for about a month, and nearly all of my messaging (that isn't done via iMessage on my phone) is done via Matrix, the E2EE federated messaging protocol. I yeeted my Twitter account the day it came under new ownership and my account on whatever Mastodon instance I was on sits all but abandoned.
As hinted earlier, I do use Bluesky rather prolifically, and I feel Bluesky PBC has done a good job of building something that looks and behaves a lot like Twitter (that was their intent) but functions wildly differently. The underlying AT Protocol technology is the most "open web" thing I’ve seen come out of the 2020s.
Of course, as a public benefit corporation, or PBC, Bluesky also isn't legally required to solely consider shareholder value or its own profitability in whatever business decisions they undertake, which means that some billionaire can't just show up with a truck full of money and force them to sell. For some reason, very few people believe that fact, but maybe that would be a reason for another blog post!