Engagement Exodus
Kia ora koutou, and thanks for being here.
In my current teaching role, September and October have morphed into the busy time of year, compounded this time by getting my immune system absolutely slammed by Covid, (with all the scheduling, timing, energy and motivational fuckups that ensued). So it’s been such a relief to get through to the end of another difficult semester, with my time now freed up to get back on my bullshit in a big way.
Though I’m still running my narrative design course over summer again, this fits thematically into the ongoing work on Fictive quite well, so I expect I’ll have a lot more to say and do around that general topic over the next few weeks.
With all my focus this year on building a creative writing and editing environment, I frequently return to thinking about the adjacent space of web publishing, old school blogging and RSS reading. While not quite at the stage of pivoting everything away from narrative design into content management and web-centricity, I do wonder what I can do to make it easier for people to publish their writing and creative projects online as a slow web alternative to the world of data surveillance and corporate social networks.
Hence these thoughts I’m sharing here are not just commentary on the present moment, but also thinking in public around the kinds of outcomes, affordances, form and content needs that might make sense, in order to provide sustainable and stable alternatives to whatever-the-fuck is currently happening online. I’m in a position of considerable privilege to be able to do something about it (however substantial or insubstantial that might turn out to be).
Worldbuilding and Wonderment
Fantasy versus realism is an expired frame and we really should talk more about: “the decision to accept that there is a world and to live in it, and allow that decision to affect the rest of the writing you do”.
There are many different engines that power stories—pushing back against the dogmatic discourse that all fiction is distinguished through the binary of plot versus character development.
A perennial design pattern for TTRPGs is to treat everything like a dungeon—in this example, it’s mystery stories and time-sensitive situations. Read in conjunction with the classic advice on mysteries in RPGs and the Three Clue Rule.
Cultural distress and ‘easily-created shame’ and how it gets exploited. (I think we need to do much more than just acknowledge its existence though.)
Shakedown 1979 1997. A deep dive into an extraordinary time for music at every level. Bangers, all.
Reimagining social media for the next decade
After several months of some of the most outrageous ‘will he/won’t he’ speculation, financial leveraging and legal manoeuvring in recent memory, the so-called Muskrat has acquired Twitter.
While not the world’s largest or highest volume social network, Twitter has taken on a central role in the mindscape of the contemporary western world, establishing itself as the hub for breaking news, journalism, cultural speculation and spectacle. The place where everything happens so much. The place where we should be able to mute America, but emphatically, cannot.
It’s still too soon to predict where things might land, given we’re currently right in the middle of the implosion of tech industry spectacle and hostile takeover nonsense towards Twitter employees, with looming as-yet unanswered questions over the return of prominent Nazis and harassers.
Over the last couple of years, various appalling situations at Facebook and Twitter have prompted many people to investigate alternatives and start divesting from these platforms. Despite so much motivating energy and anger, the bursts of new users onto community-run networks like Mastodon and Cohost have never been sustained and are mere tiny blips at the overall scale of the major platforms. Many people migrating—especially those with large audiences—drop off their engagement very quickly when they don’t receive the same level of insta-engagement and UI gratification. Yet an unmistakable trend is that slowly over time, more and more people are sticking around and finding their own place.
Federated social media isn’t perfect, but latent in all the recent growth in community-organised hosting is a prefigurative politics for a new internet culture of human scale social media.
Rather than strive to make alternative social media more like Twitter or Facebook, what if we leaned into the slower pace and less distressing tone, and tried to make it more like the (old school) web? Could we incorporate the growing fediverse with a resurgence of personal publishing, homebrew websites, blogs, journals and the like?
ActivityPub and Webmention are now published as official W3C specifications. The emerging technology and protocol stack runs far deeper than just a bunch of open source project conventions. It’s entirely possible now to have a personal website with comments for friends that are interoperable with the federated networks already out there.
The main reason why this hasn’t caught on more seems to be the double-edged sword of network effects/addictive design of the major platforms, and the lack of easy to use on-ramps and accessible hosting for people who aren’t massive nerds about it all. Going where all the people you know are hanging out will always have a pull that far outweighs high-minded values and principles.
Yet despite this ongoing tension and the impossible odds of gaining massive traction, I am hugely optimistic about the emerging possibilities. A deeper strategic logic here was aptly expressed by Erik Olin Wright who explained it as the typology of eroding capitalism.
Unlike the neoliberal logic where any alternative to the dominant economic system is scorned, shunned and actively repressed—even when this introduces fragility and instability that existentially threatens the future of the system itself—the logic of eroding is to acknowledge that no system is completely sealed, reducible and all-enclosing, and thus to seek out spaces in the margins to build new social realities, pioneering new forms of exchange and value.
One way to challenge capitalism is to build more democratic, egalitarian, participatory economic relations in the spaces and cracks within this complex system wherever possible, and to struggle to expand and defend those spaces.
The general public has no control over the gamification and compulsion loops of the mass algorithmic timeline platforms, but we do have control over ad-free community-centric alternatives that operate at a more human scale. It’s important to emphasise that this is not just a technology and community challenge, but a speculative and imaginative challenge too.
Beyond migrating to new timelines, we need to reconsider the whole idea of the timeline itself, like what author Robin Sloan has been doing with the Spring 83 protocol where form and content are structurally part of the same expression.
Webgardens on Neocities, the Gemini Protocol and the rebirth of webrings similarly hint at the potential for reclaiming the lost space of the www simply by reasserting its basic conventions.
The call to action we need is not necessarily an admonition to delete all our social accounts and move on, but to be mindful, thoughtful and intentional about how and where we post. To actively seek out and support new initiatives and alternative ways of thinking about social media and the web as a whole, rather than just waiting to see what will happen to the status-quo.