Not cohost, cohost is still cool! But Twitter, Reddit, Bluesky, Discord, all are making really fucking terrible and user-hostile decisions!!!
the era of free money is over, and all of them are panicking. they see their advertisers, data brokers, and investors as their customers, and forget that their platforms only exist and remain solvent at the whims of their users. They tailor things around the ways to make money, not realizing that advertising etc only works if people are there to lure people to the adverts.
it's a labor issue, but not as we generally think of it. but the production only happens with the users' labor.
The Great Libraries of Alexandria are burning, and all I got was this stupid blog. The internet is one of several places where information lives, and is the greatest singular technological concept, industry, and infrastructural framework that our species has ever truly produced. Comprehension of the scale of the internet is almost nonsense, visualize countless databanks in server racks all across the entire planet using like Gigawatts of power, and that's roughly how extreme the situation is.
Queer Spaces Online depend upon the internet, and my ongoing writings and unpublished essays are slowly feeling out and refining my thoughts about the matter -- but my Narcolepsy seems to be hampering me enough that people will find out the shit I've been typing all year maybe in a few weeks. In my other life (an alias I won't reference excepting this quote), the saying I use to describe my findings goes as such:
DECENTRALIZE your online alias TODAY!
Nowhere is BY us. Nowhere is FOR us.
...and if you have a passing interest in Queerness, Neurodivergence, Nerdery and other subgenres of personhood, you'll probably have already figured out just what I mean by this quote.
Hi. I'm REP, and I am claiming to be your favorite transgender dinosaur friend from the internet that you engage in a parasocial relationship with. Let's talk about how everything we know is burning to the ground around us in real time almost entirely because of investor overconfidence and the financial consequences of projecting Infinite Growth.
The Situation:
We really thought we'd called it in 2018 when the first early ripples of big-tech investor panic started to be visible from the shoreline. After nearly a decade of comfortable use while in the set-up / grow userbase phases, these sites started to have to find ways to deliver. Twitter of course had figured this out pretty early because before Musk it was actually somewhat competently managed. The model that UBER, DoorDash, Discord, and many other big tech 'solutions' companies had was always about upscale of operation, and forcing their way into a mass adoption market with a pretty okay product. Monetization was an immediate concern for Discord after it made waves and displaced Skype for me and mine in 2016. Discord Nitro dropped in January 2017, but was at first marketed as an "option to support development". It was feature sparse, and the tone of implementation was that of a "paid early access". They'd follow that up with a few promotionals and the launch of their game store during 2018, but the gamestore itself was dead on arrival and was closed out by the end of 2019. Everyone knows the Social media bubble of late Q1 2020, and the gains and pre-market jitters held things off for a while.
Three years and some months later though, it's clear that the sustainability was not built into these websites and online services. Low friction, high-volume media uploads with very little in the way of data management has seen most of the internet's infrastructure groan under the weight of redundant, low-quality, or otherwise pointless 'content' spammed en-masse. A friend of mine, and later (by coincidence) Linus Tech Tips, put it like this:
We are exiting nearly 20 years of stable internet infrastructure.
It ultimately is a clearly documented problem. Youtube Channel Cold Fusion has a few episodes on companies of relevance here, such as WeWork, Theranos, Meta, FTX, and so much more. We can cut to the chase: this kind of Speculator Bubble is both (1) ignorance and greed of investor driven, and (2) almost always in part motivated by the greed of key founders and stakeholders. It's a story as old as time, something you should know by now from the Enron Disaster.
Where we are headed:
You might recall Internet Archive losing an important case to the Supreme Court, another blow against the internet as a tool of Archival of Digital Records, and ultimately the gutting of the strategic infrastructure advantage the internet had. More and more, myself, peers of mine, and former colleagues of mine have learned the lesson of Offline Storage, and Non-Synchronizing Tangible Media. We might look at bit-flip speedruns of Super Mario as a one-off cautionary tale about the exposure of data to the great enemy that is our complicated reality, but truthfully cosmic radiation is the least of our concerns. War in Ukraine brought about pressing and urgent Energy Insecurity for Western Europe for one of the first times in recent memory, and as the global ballet of competing economies dances along merrily in ignorance to Global Warming, the problem of Demand Demand Demand and mismatch of Supply is getting intense.
Now one might think that we're maybe going to thread the needle here and bridge the gap between fossil fuels and renewable energy through technological breakthroughs in power generation. After all, Fusion is getting cool isn't it? But behind the utopian promises of a brighter future, there is still an ongoing geopolitical contest of nations escalating between the United States and China, and you can also factor whatever happens to Russia. The Arctic Circle's melting is opening up resource access, an ironic bonus Pandora's Box is the higher than previous likelihood of both WW3 happening in the next decade AND another global pandemic released through Arctic Exploitation, where-in ancient diseases are released from permafrost. Africa and South America are both major targets of the US/China influence competition, with China seemingly having moved first and the US having to play catch-up at virtually every angle. All of these are to say that rare metal extraction through natural resource exploitation is proceeding as normal, child labor remains a pressing concern in nearly all of Africa.
Public Policy Pressure Points
All of the above is to illustrate the great lie of modern speculative finance and economics: there is no such thing as Infinite Growth, merely periods of growth. Some would argue that sun spots, solar cycles, or other forms of seemingly evidence-based independent phenomena (which hope to predict rises and falls in the Stock Market without accounting for the diversity of human enterprises on a case by case basis) can somehow stave off calamity for joe-blow investor's portfolio, selling at the peak of the curve instead of predictably losing his shirt on the dive. This "boom and bust" mentality represents an apparent and accepted reality in economics, and as you may imagine the infrastructure strain caused by the rippling recession of a post-COVID world make for a great predictor of economic calamity. When the bottom fell out for all of us little people in 2020, things we somewhat knew would happen from many years of pre-pandemic hypotheticals came to life. Famously in the US, Meatpacking Workers were among some of the most noteworthy early casualties due to increased exposure via literal Executive Order.
The more a society struggles with basic needs for its average person, the more pressure the institutions of that society which support those people have to bear. This creates deficit zones and pressure points which are often utilized by political actors to motivate change, though in the US as of late, it seems like progressives and liberalists are losing. In this background of economic uncertainty for us US Citizens is a conservative party that seemingly is only interested in eradicating Queers from the Nation's territory, something which was started aggressively under Trump's general policy direction with the name of "Project Blitz". Blitz? Stands for Blitzkrieg, yes that one the Nazi's liked, Lightning Warfare -- rapid policy creation and adoption targeting non-christian and non-conservative members of the US's population, and so far Blitz seems to have worked despite some optimistic claims it has 'been defeated'. Blitzwatch.org is one of the monitoring organizations that was set up to track policy of this nature, and it seemingly has failed in its stated purpose or been self-limited into irrelevance. Policy is the ultimate weapon of the Political Emergency as a tool to push through change, and right now the fear and gut-response of conservativism seems to be winning in the US and much of the world.
Queer Erasure is Canary in the Coal Mine
As soon as they come for the Queers, you should be counting your days. The internet has seen increasing scrutiny leveled at LGBTQIA+, Neurodivergent, Human Rights Advocacy, Educational, and Scholarly focused enterprises and support organizations. Tumblr's infamous purge of NSFW content at the hands of Big-Tech was almost entirely decided in a boardroom without anyone else's consent. A space that is owned is not yours, you are not entitled to it, you can be removed at any time. This is what I harp on about in that Quote from my other Alias, speaking truthfully there is no such thing as a "Public Square" online because the internet is OWNED. The internet is PROPERTY. The internet is LIMITED. For every "well but-" you might have about internet infrastructure, I don't see anyone as being free from the impact of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter, Meta, and TikTok. Moreover, Obscenity Law and other blunt legal implements constantly threaten Queers with monetary deplatforming, it is effectively an industry standard to bill via a generic paypal invoice for illustration work when someone (like say a furry artist) is illustrating pornography for their job.
Removal from Paypal, Patreon, Stripe, Amazon Web Services, and so many other vendors under this vague threat of Obscenity Law is part of another major thesis my other alias is involved with, a little thing I call The Riolu Paradox, itself part of a grander discussion of Queer Erasure at the hands of Social Conservatives in the name of purging everyone who doesn't fit their prescribed hegemony. Utah, Arkansas, Montana, Mississippi, Louisiana and many more parts of the US are attempting to restrict pornography to people who can be carded for their state issued ID's by the websites themselves. This all is part of a larger narrative of actually declaring wrongthink and creating affirmative behavior-deterring policy, something the US's Republican Party will accuse its rivals in the Democrat Party of doing constantly. Ironic that this growing withdrawal of spaces online (the Reddit problem, Telegram and Discord's key vulnerabilities, Twitter under Elon Musk, etc) as being free and accessible is coming hot on the heels of Big Tech seemingly crashing and burning under unsustainable practices. There might not be a Google anymore, that is a POSSIBLE outcome of the coming decade.
AI as the next bubble
Unprecedented times await us. My advice to everyone is to Write It Down, an ironic problem is of course that I am doing so through electronic means without a tangible media backup of any kind. It may seem a bit wonky and privileged to tell people to record their thoughts on paper and archive the documents in secured containers... but that's probably the best long-term strategy to avoid being totally erased. If the above co-occurring phenomena referenced aren't chilling you yet with the sensation of impending doom, let me remind you that Climate Change is putting strain on literally everything with increasing relevance. Famine could hit the Western World for the first time in decades, and while we all could stand to lose a little weight, that is a dramatic underestimation of the scale of crisis the US faces. Almost everywhere right now? Fresh Water is a growing concern, and Famine takes a lot longer to kill you compared to thirst, ask an Arizonan (that's me). People have various copes right now available to them, from prepping to [jumping off a stack of blocks in minecraft], and I can't pretend to assuage anyone's fears.
Artificial Intelligence is probably going to make things briefly worse before its use as a tool will actually start solving problems. Right now in my mind's eye, I am seeing our species heading into a great filtering event where-in the physical calamities of today will greatly whittle our species's populations in-line with existing predicting factors in Quality of Life (particularly in food, medicine, education). AI Technology requires a lot of resources, we're at that part of Satisfactory or Factorio where you have like 8 different steps to produce precursor resources for the big thing(tm) that a single one of is required to make something cool. The enterprise and scale of industry to push for AI development is another bubble that might burst before yielding fruit, the current crisis of Information Destruction awaiting the Noosphere (the biosphere of our species' information space through documented and recalled knowledge) has major problems that AI could solve: Brevity, Clarity, Efficiency. If information is more directly stated, has more obvious citations and validations, and is demonstrably useful through grounding in tangible reality, it may very much reinvent our species, or the technology that does this will replace us in some way.
Closing Thoughts
I proposed the idea of Noology in a few places online in the last few months, this idea of studying the space where information is stored, how it is transferred from person to person, how it mutates in memory and how documentation preserves certain types of information from mutation. Noology and the Noosphere are intended to be modeling tools where we look at the things we have [documented and known] as an adaptive tool our species has evolved in line with other adaptations such as civilization, agriculture, animal husbandry, tool use, and all of the macro-level structures like infrastructure and global societal cohesion. We are all little cells within a macro-organism that may one-day reproduce through population splitting, the implication being that the Noological elements become distinct from one-another. We can see a small-scale example of this in the accessible media and public knowledge/opinions of Russian, Chinese, North Korean, and other citizens of Dictatorships, but true detachment is likely to be caused by distant colonization of other planets orbiting other stars.
Space is incredibly large, and seemingly only getting larger. Our species is rapidly approaching a moment where-in it may no longer meaningfully reproduce through sexual reproduction and recombination of genes, but it may instead reproduce through the spread of ideas between generations, or through the seeding of replicas with their Noological data. The question now is something Michio Kaku has asked openly for a few years in his writings:
"Am I going to live long enough to live forever?"
Of course, 'forever' is sort of... not how reality works. Entropy comes for us all, and we're not quite masters of our reality enough to avoid that fact. In microcosm, our spaces online being destroyed actively by politically-motivated belligerents and profit-motivated assholes resembles the grander destruction of our planet at the hands of Industry. The ecosystem becomes "reduced" in complexity, until extinction claims all but the most useful, hardy, or dangerous.
Nowhere is by us.
That means owned spaces are the property of actors without your interest in mind.
Nowhere is for us.
That means spaces online are not provided with the intention of their use by you or me.
Decentralize your Online Alias Today.
That means that your self you put into this Noological Space is fragile, and you can insulate it from deletion through use of multiple information and data service platforms.
We only exist in our lives for so long. Grateful Memorials to the dead are best preserved in Stone, not Twitter. We should be looking into government-funded, public-operated, decentralized and strategically minded Spaces Online to fill the void of the private internet. A quite little Cafe isn't sufficient to serve as a social space for everyone, and when the doors are closed, no one can benefit from it. Think of our internet as a gentrified city with no sidewalks, and only parking lots. This twisting labyrinth of owned spaces can and will close down in time with cycles, and unless you take matters into your own hands? The Cafe will eventually fold when Starbucks opens, and when Starbucks folds, you can only hope the replacements will be sustainable Co-op's and not another corporate actor. Excepting the governments of the world creating a framework of Publicly Provisioned spaces online? We have no green spaces or public parks in our conceptual city of 'the internet'.
Consider starting your own Noological Co-op someday. In the US, you might even be able to qualify as a 501-C tax exempt organization! I plan to promote this idea until it is tried properly as replacement to Social Media and antiquated Forums and Gallery Websites, the only examples of this rough idea in practice? Shareware, public-ish works like Mozilla Firefox, Open Office, that kinda stuff. Even then those projects are super limited, but think about where Firefox stands in terms of web browsers: it's shocking that they can exist with Google and Apple dominating the space. I think maybe, that's just for the best. People who do care about the future, about the Queer, about our species should be self-selecting into focused groups by nature of specialization and time constraint. Small communities aren't useless, and I think maybe if we rethink the scale of the problem and the potential for Decentralization as an adaptive solution in our toolkit, we can insulate ourselves from removal.
Thanks for your time and consideration, if you read this far. Comments, likes, and especially reblogs are greatly appreciated (commentary provided or no).