One of the most important skills I’ve ever learned in my life is actually quite simple: knowing when to leave. This can take many forms: leaving a job, party, relationship, whatever, but I’ve never felt any sort of lasting regret for following my gut’s signal to take the exit. Indeed, I can think of multiple occasions where staying at something, against my better judgement, has landed me in situations that I do have lasting regret over (I’ll spare the details, they’re not relevant here).

I wrote about 6 months ago about packing up to log off twitter and accepting the tides of digital empires, but in the last ~2 weeks it’s become abundantly clear to me: it is time to go. The reasons are myriad, be it the fact the place is a ghost town now, the absolute rank hatred (incl. anti-semitism, anti-islam, anti-LGBT, anti-women, etc), the rampant bullshit (e.g. passing Arma3 videos off as actual war footage), but ultimately they all boil down to the same single idea: the place simply isn’t worth my time anymore.

Read more “Starting a Substack”

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?

Read more “Building Digital Cathedrals”