illuminesce

Queer indie dev. Kinda feral.

I co-run a video game cooperative called Studio Terranova with @mabbees.


💚 blog 💚
illuminesce.net/blog/
interface drama + games discord
discord.gg/NUg8ny8Qv2

When I think about posting something Relevant about the Latest Discourse or weighing in my opinion about an issue in the tiny communities I belong to, I have to remind myself that the Internet is flat.

It's not the same as a group of people, though many groups of people use the Internet. As a television show is a moving picture of people doing things, so is the Internet a flat snapshot of people and their attitudes. The Internet, as far as I know, has always been flat; it has always been snapshots. I read someone's blog; I get an idea of who they are, but only what they are willing to share with me.

As an ethnographer, I run into this in field research, too. The best way to get to know a person in a short time is to live in their house for a week. But unsurprisingly, it's not the most scalable or comfortable way to do research. If you manage one 2-hour visit, then the participant may show you around their house—but don't open the closet, it's dirty and I don't want you to see.

Web 1.0 is a research visit, over time, to someone's house. The closets remain closed and there's nothing "spontaneous" happening that was unplanned by a participant, but at least these snapshots are in order. Maybe you'll see the closets one time, but just a peek. Web 2.0 is snapshots with no context, out of order. You visit the participant's house, but only on last Saturday (because last Saturday they had a party and it was the most "happening" day to visit). You don't even pass by the closets this time; everything is cleaned and curated. The next wave, it seems, is snapshots mixed in with robot-generated snapshots. Imagine, if you will, a researcher visiting a person's house...over and over again at the same party with the knowledge that only one of the participants they visited was real. The rest were AI-generated.

Right now, it is extremely difficult to get a clear snapshot of what a person looks like online. They are fragmented across social platforms, and each of these social platforms is designed to show you only the most popular snapshot of this person.

At the Tokyo Trans March last year there was a conflict involving some members and the management. Onsite, people were friendly. They made mistakes; most of the time people were gracious about it. But in the shared LINE chat, where people could only see one another's usernames and avatars, some people were angry; the rest wanted to distance themselves. The LINE chat was summarily shut down; people with no place to vent went to Twitter.

Did it prevent the Trans March from being successful? I don't think so. But it did leave community members and some organizers with bad tastes in their mouth so they're less likely to listen to feedback and be more welcoming to volunteers in the future.

I bring up this example because I've noticed this a lot in small, tight knit communities whose main way of communication is through digital mediums. I don't know how else to explain it beyond flattening; nor am I an expert in this. We don't seem to be looking directly at one another's faces; we're looking at unordered snapshots of each other.

When I think about this, I realize how little data I have to make judgments of others and how it's on me to scrape through content and jumbled snapshots to make my own sense of a person. I usually lose faith that I could capture anything meaningful before I even write the post, all because the amount of time and research it would take for me to educate myself on a particular person is far more hours, quite frankly than I have in the day. Me personally, I'd rather be boots on the ground protesting than writing an article saying we should protest, so I lose patience and give up.

Perhaps this will turn into something longer—but for now, I'm thinking a lot about how jumbled and out of context this digital world is and how it fucks with our human perception...and how perceiving bullshit in the world is critical to fixing it.


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