Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Arjun Rajagopalan's avatar

Thank you Demi for this clearly thought out, well articulated essay on the brink of the precipice that humanity is poised at. As right-thinking people, we need to react in a strong fashion or risk being swept away in the flood. The solutions that you propose may seem Utopian to those of us who have given up, but fight we must. Jaron Lanier, the wise pioneer of the internet, predicted the hijacking of the web, way back in 2006. Writing in Edge, Lanier talks about the "tragedy of the commons" and "Digital Maoism"and goes on to say, "What we are witnessing today is the alarming rise of the fallacy of the infallible collective. ... Why isn't everyone screaming about the recent epidemic of inappropriate uses of the collective? It seems to me the reason is that bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology." Again, this was in 2006.

The internet still remains the primary weapon for carrying the fight back into the camps of these dark forces. Social media got hijacked by commercial organisations with massive resources at their command. The recent rise of federated platforms like Mastodon permits small voices to hold out but as yet has not come out with a strong, user-friendly set of tools. With great hope, I signed up with one "instance" and was really enjoying it when it folded up for lack of money to keep it going. This looks like a problem that is likely to be recurrent and needs solutions.

As you point out, we need to reform and grow physical communities like in days of yore. I think it was Richard Dawkins who said that despite being a confirmed atheist, he goes to church because of the one-on-one social networking and community-fostering that places of religious worship have always provided. The internet, for all its benefits, has created isolation and loneliness of a historically unprecedented dimension.

Expand full comment
Preston's avatar

This is an absolutely necessary read for everyone.

Expand full comment
28 more comments...

No posts