I’ve been having conversations on social media of a kind that I’m not sure I’ve ever had before. I’ve had long years of arguing on reddit, of trying to post thoughts on Twitter or think of pithy put-downs or comebacks, but here is the first place where I feel like we’re all going “yes, and!” at each other the whole time.
I’ve had conversations about underinvestment that went via cybernetics and marxism and safety engineering and long posts about how it feels to live in an America that’s slowly going wrong and I’ve learned about how reinforced concrete spalls and then fails in the process. I’ve had a big discussion this week about dying malls in San Francisco that led me unexpectedly to consider that perhaps SF is a victim of being the only walkable city in an area experiencing a constant influx of foreigners with high salaries, a desire to live somewhere as walkable as their home cities, and often a lot of migrant bootstrapping to do before they can even consider buying a car and living in suburbia. I’ve watched discussions about how generations have grown up in enshittified strip mall hell and how boomers yearn for a world that they’re barely old enough to remember from before the brands rolled through and took away all the small ways that a town can feel like a community.
There’s an expression here, and I don’t know if it translates to the US or elsewhere, for when you have these kinds of rambling, hours-long deep conversations with a good friend over a drink or a coffee: setting the world to rights. I don’t feel like I get to have many of those, these days. But somehow, it feels like what we’re doing here, in this place, is a bit of that. I feel like my understanding of the world is growing, I feel like I’m finding new understandings and new ways to look at problems and getting a bigger picture.
It’s nice.
I want to take each and every one of you that I’ve had those conversations with out to dinner, to sit and talk all evening, to meet all the thoughtful and intelligent people I know from on here and to rekindle my friendships with the ones I’ve met before but not seen in ten years. It’s a way of being that’s new to me, or at least, that I haven’t tasted since twitter was an SMS-based medium. I go on the internet and feel engaged, rather than like I’m consuming content. I go on the internet and feel connected to people. It’s a hole in my life I hadn’t recognised until it was filled. It’s nice.
