Have you ever played the video game Minecraft? For those who haven’t, in the game you are simply dropped into a virtual world consisting of cubes (called “blocks”) made of various different materials (stone, wood, iron ore, etc.) that you must mine and use to craft items, buildings, etc. to survive. It’s one of the most popular games in the world, and people have built some truly incredible models & structures in the game (peruse the top posts on /r/minecraft sometime: people have built scale cathedrals). However, ultimately, what’s being built in Minecraft isn’t real.
The hours spent building cathedrals, while an accomplishment to be sure, are ultimately just data on a hard drive somewhere. I personally don’t find anything per se wrong with that; people have the right to spend their time how they want doing harmless things they enjoy. Nevertheless, I also believe much of the time spent in Minecraft has gone from a means to an end (i.e. entertaining oneself), to an end in itself (i.e. putting value on these digital constructions). That’s what I’d like to talk about today: what, ultimately, are we building in virtual communities like social networks, and how much does it matter?
While I may have opened with a metaphor about Minecraft, this is fundamentally a broader values question: how much does what we build online versus in the real world matter? I’m broadening from Minecraft to basically all online communities now, whatever they may be. I’ve been on the internet a long time (unfortunately), and I’ve seen many digital empires rise and fall. I’ve used, in semi-chronological order: IRC (rip freenode), AIM, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, reddit, Discord, and a wide variety of forums, while dabbling in many others (e.g. usenet, geocities). Many of those are gone or vastly changed from their original incarnation; the only two I currently still use are twitter and discord.
I’ve spent a lot of time, and seen friends personally and millions of people broadly spend thousands of person-hours building things in a digital community, only for that to be swept away. The reason for the community falling away may vary: it may be changes in technology, admin/mod drama, an influx of new users, decline in interest in the community’s subject matter, etc. Nevertheless, the reason the community falls away is ultimately irrelevant: once decline reaches a certain point (“terminal event horizon”), the community dies.
When the community dies, what those thousands, if not millions, of hours that were spent building something eventually end up simply deleted, with the disks sent for recycling. There are, of course, some archival attempts – e.g. of Geocities – but there’s no community there. Those archival projects are just for the archaeologists, anthropologists, etc. writing papers about the state of internet culture circa [time period]. Very few of the former users go back to the graveyard of posts past.
Some sites do stay online, even as the community dies. For example, Something Awful does still exist. But these are just hollowed out shells of their former selves: the old community is dead. New posts are still made from the die-hard ~200k users (as an aside, that article lays out much of what I’m saying here), but the overwhelming majority of the old community has long since moved on. The name on the page may be the same, but the community that comprised it isn’t.
People are obviously aware that a community is dying as it happens; the leading members of the community often try to bring much of their friends/audience over to whatever new platform is replacing the old, but this is never a easy task and much is lost in the transfer. This process is also, for lack of a better word, bitter and messy. Anger is the second stage of grief, and people understandably get upset that the writing is on the wall for something they may have spent literally years of their life [posting] on.
The old quote, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” applies here: time and again, those both clinging to the old place and those starting at the new tabula rasa quickly descend into hostility. The reasons for this are varied – grief at the decline of the old place, trying to get to the head of the pack at the new one, new entrants joining the fray, etc. – but ultimately irrelevant: the former community goes to war with itself, and hastens its own demise. People’s worst sides come out, former friends become suspicious of each other’s motivations, and bad actors also crop up during this time. This is the terminal event horizon.
This has already happened time and again, and will happen in the future. Thousands of hours of work, friendships, content like art will be relegated to a .tgz on some anthropologist’s computer 20 years from now. At some point, today in my case, we have to ask ourselves the very simple question: is this all worth it? Is putting in the effort to build [your place in] [another] digital community, that will be inevitably swept away and replaced in a messy switch to some new place, worth the time?
Moreover, to touch on what I said at the beginning: when does the time spent constantly building and rebuilding communities go from being a means to an end (i.e. socializing, informing oneself, etc.) to an end in itself (i.e. growing and/or maintaining your position, online), and what cost does that have? In economics, there’s a concept called opportunity cost: spending an hour doing one thing deprives you of the opportunity of doing anything else, and that has costs. An hour online is an hour not doing anything in the real world.
Furthermore, I’ve become increasingly convinced that every hour spent online has hidden psychological costs. I don’t even mean the angst that occurs when a community is dying, I mean the brain is molded by long-term immersion in any community, online or otherwise, and that these online communities increasingly detach their heaviest users from what’s important in the real world, instead with a near-pathological focus on their particular Macguffin[s]. I’m certainly not the first to notice this. I must thus ask, is becoming, for lack of a better way of putting it, divorced from reality worth the reward of Being A Noted Participant In Our Online Community (which, again, will eventually be replaced)?
If you’ve ever seen the movie Inception (that sound you just heard is me careening wildly between metaphors), there’s a scene where DiCaprio’s character talks about the appeal of being able to build impossible structures in controlled dreams, but later notes that spending endless time building in dreams often causes people to lose their grip on what’s real and go insane. I’ve come to believe that the internet is much the same: thousands of people are simply too online. We’ve built fantasy cathedrals in our digital spaces, and in the process, to varying degrees, lost our grip on the real world.
Today’s crumbling digital cathedral is twitter.
Today’s internet community that is falling away – the ultimate subject of, and motivation for, this Poast – is twitter. I’ve spent a lot of time on twitter: per my screentime app, I spend around ~24hr/week on the site. Twitter is truly an incredible accomplishment, and just speaking personally, I’ve witnessed the last ~decade of history unfold on the site (from Obama winning reelection to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and many more). It is the only social account I have (besides discord, which is a small chat app for friends). The sheer utility of twitter for the ability to find and share useful information is probably unparalleled.
Twitter is going thru the community death I’ve just outlined above, a fate suffered by myriad places before. We can talk about why – basically, but not entirely, Musk – but the reason doesn’t actually matter: the community is rapidly approaching the terminal event horizon. As I’ve watched the site become less usable and the community inevitably become [more] hostile, I’ve started to ask myself how best I should be balancing my time between twitter and with the things happening in my real life.
I personally am not happy about twitter’s impending demise, to be clear. Twitter wasn’t just a utility, an app to watch the world happen with – it’s not a television. It was a place where I made some of my best friends, met clients, and promoted myself. On my main account i have over 685,000 tweets, plus another ~50,000 on [deleted] alt/bot accounts: I am losing thousands of hours of work I put in over the last decade of my life. Perhaps I’m writing now to make my peace with that going away.
Twitter has always had a bit of a problem with being an end in itself. The site isn’t fun unless people are, you know, actually using it, and this has led to a broad class of posting called “Discourse”, where people find accounts with insane opinions and elevate them (“main characters”), back and forth between various factions on the site, reiterating the same six [current] arguments, etc. It’s intrasite drama, the site’s particular modern flavor of the flame war. Much of the posting on twitter now is simply engaging in the Discourse.
The idea about twitter as a means versus an end in itself has been in my head for years now: Minecraft is an apt metaphor here, and why I lead with it, as it’s a game literally about building virtual structures. I use the Minecraft metaphor daily in my own life, as a yardstick for assessing how I spend my own time (am I building something real or a virtual Cathedral). This gets back to the question I raised at the beginning of this post: how much does what we’ve built – and continue to build – online actually matter? More specifically: is the community on twitter a means to an end (e.g. finding that useful information) or is it an end in itself (e.g. being the best at The Discourse)?
Twitter is (was?) another digital cathedral that’s being swept away, and as I’ve stepped back and taken stock of the site and my engagement with it (all 685k posts….), I couldn’t answer the simple question of why did we do so much of this in the first place? Sure, finding that useful information (so many charts…) definitely mattered, it made me better at my job, I met friends, but the rest of it, the “discourse” – why?
To be sure, the users may be able to move on, to shift to The New Place and (re-)build the community there, and do discourse again. I’m asking, quite simply and bluntly: should we fucking bother?
I put some lights in my workshop yesterday, replacing the last of the old school fluorescent tubes there. It took me ~90 minutes. I could have spent that time on twitter, engaged in the latest Discourse about some bullshit nobody will remember in 3 weeks (let alone 6 months). Speaking personally, this is a crystal clear example of how I’ve come to the firm conclusion that building things in a virtual environment should not take priority over the physical world.
Installing those bulbs is a means to an end. Those lights I installed will serve me for years to come. I use that shop multiple times per week, and that 90 minutes I invested improved a key part of the room (the lighting). I cannot imagine how engaging in 90 minutes of Discourse, on twitter or whatever replaces it, would aid me over the long term. Building a cathedral in Minecraft may be your entertainment, and that’s a perfectly valid means to an end, but the savefile isn’t an end in itself (it won’t improve your life): neither will endlessly engaging in The Discourse on twitter or whatever comes after.
I don’t think I’m alone in choosing to log off instead of building yet another cathedral in the latest shiny-new digital space. We have lost track of the point of the internet: it is a means to an end, improving human life, not an end in itself. Humanity’s end state is not being permanently online. Getting on a site to engage in the discourse for no point other than that’s what we do on this website is burning person-hours for no change in the physical world, and will be eventually consigned to the archives of the internet.
Perhaps obviously, I am certainly not the only one to notice this. Businessweek had a great article on how everyone is logging off: most people just want to see posts from their friends, maybe some news, sports, celeb content, and then simply do not care about what else is happening. The People do not want Discourse. I personally am writing something longer – currently languishing in the drafts, I’ll link it here when it’s done – about how we’re returning to a Web 1.0 era (and maybe that’s a good thing).
I’m touching on something I want to be explicit about: this seems to be something that only affects a certain type of person. There are probably millions of normies who just wanna post/see pictures of their friends and don’t care at all about The State of The Internet Communities. This is why Facebook & Instagram endure. Being extremely online and engaging in discourse is a niche type of person, just as people who build cathedrals in Minecraft are several standard deviations away from the average player.
My point here is: we must return to an era where social media isn’t Social Media, but just another tool in the toolbox, a means to an end, not an end in itself that we engage in for its own sake. Posting shouldn’t just be for the sake of posting, but for the sake of actually making ourselves, and our community, better. Engaging in The Discourse, or whatever it’s called at whatever replaces twitter (if anything), does nothing more than build that virtual cathedral.
Finally, don’t get me wrong, I will continue to post on twitter. But I don’t think I’m going to be around the place much otherwise, and certainly not engaging in The Discourse. It was great to build the cathedral there with [most of] y’all, and I certainly sure did enjoy looking at it while it wasn’t crumbling – but I think I’m gonna be installing LEDs in my basement for a while instead.