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   jonny (good kind) (jonny@neuromatch.social)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 23:45:06 JST jonny (good kind)

   • Erin Kissane

   The dangers of the situation are obvious and real, but it matters that we remember that the world’s big platforms are steered not by shadowy forces, but by teams of gold-rush-addled dorks whose sometimes-well-meaning employees are stuck frantically LARPing world government on internal forum software.

   It’s equally important to remember that the patterns we’ve experienced on mega-platforms are not the only way to do networks but the result of specific combinations of under-thinking and malign commercial pressures—and that the currently ascendant systems are not inevitably annihilating forces, but legal and financial constructs that can be brought to heel, forcibly reconfigured, or just replaced. Keeping these basic facts in mind is oddly difficult, because there’s so much money involved, and money is a spell for blurring the truth.

   I think our failure to remember that the mega-platforms are just intentionally extractive constructs run by brainmelted but very human weirdos is a failure of accountability, but our failure to remember that it doesn’t have to be this way is a failure not only of imagination, but of nerve.

   Great piece from @kissane
   https://www.wrecka.ge/against-the-dark-forest/

   • bhaugen repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     jonny (good kind) (jonny@neuromatch.social)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 23:45:20 JST jonny (good kind)

     in reply to

     I literally could not agree more

     The public social internet is worth designing and governing in a way that demonstrates less than total amnesia about the history of human civilizations and the ways we’ve learned to be together without killing each other. For people with the ability and willingness to work on network problems, the real choice isn't between staying on the wasteland surfaces of the internet and going underground, but between making safer and better places for human sociability and not doing that.

     bhaugen repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     jonny (good kind) (jonny@neuromatch.social)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 23:45:29 JST jonny (good kind)

     in reply to

     And most of all: The social internet should be a forest—not The Dark Forest, but something much more like a real one: Interconnected from the densely mycelial underground to light-filtering overstory but also offering infinite niches and multi-scale zones of sheltered exchange and play. Deeply human in the way that real forests are the result of human and other-than-human collaboration running back into unrecorded time. Balanced, neither extracting too much from its component organisms nor pretending that a pantomime of a return to a pristine and ungoverned state will solve any problems at all.

     Yes yes yes