I quit all Meta Platform Inc. (formerly Facebook Inc.) products about eight months ago.
It was part experiment, part protest in response to a company that has a long history of overreach without much consequence. This has been exposed to greater and greater degrees as Facebook have increasingly shrugged off their direct accountability for how their products and the ways they are designed impact people.
And yet, you quit the platforms and you feel the impact they have on our lives!
My time spent Off Platform has been interesting, and itās helped me to reflect on - and hopefully understand better - how people connect with each other and what we depend on in order to make those connections. Going cold turkey was challenging - it ripped out a massive hole in my connection to the world around me, and it made me realise how weak we are as a society now without these platforms at the centre of what we do. For a lot of people I dropped off the planet.
Too many of our connections between people depend on a limited number of platforms with too much control.
More than ever Iām concerned by how much connections between people and communities seem to have become wholly dependent on a limited number of platforms, all owned by massively wealthy and influential companies. It seems difficult to overstate these companiesā direct influence over how people perceive the world around them. This has been covered at length, and has been debated hotly ever since social media started switching from chronological to algorithmic feeds.
Whatās really interesting is that this trend of dependence on massive companies isnāt just restricted to social media, or how we communicate: itās a reflection of the broader world around us and how we function economically. Itās been super interesting watching the way in which modern economies have continued to escalate their obsession withĀ scale: the quest for the greatest possible amount of sustained growth.
Everything is a vehicle for scale these days. Any business or project that doesnāt scale will be crushed.
Everything about a companyās valuation - itās estimated worth - these days is all about its opportunity forĀ scale, becauseĀ scale is the opportunity to get the greatest returns from the most operationally efficient mechanism. Thatās why venture capital (VC) is obsessed with it: they make bets on businesses that are losing money in the hope that they can crack a formula that will help them fail.
Unfortunately - and this is the central point of this piece:Ā actions motivated by scale are all too often at the expense of humanityās best interests. Itās a cold, clinical desire to get as big as possible, to have the largest user base, the greatest growth trajectory, etc.
I fear that scale works against the principles of community, and community is the lifeblood of civilisation. In other words: the weaker our community networks are, the weaker our bonds with our fellow people.
Weāve never had it so good.
We have so much aimless time. Itās insane to think about the conveniences that are available to us, the amount of downtime that we have that companies are waiting in the wings to pounce on to dazzle us with advertiser impressions or take our subscription fees. Thatās aided by convenience: weāve never had it be so easy to live. Our floors clean themselves, our dishes wash themselves, our laundry washes itself. Our food or online purchases arrive on our doorsteps effortlessly, eliminating any appreciation for the labour that went into acquiring it.
Our life expectancy is longer than ever before. We have more time than ever for leisure - but what do we fill our time with? We haveĀ Netflix competing with sleep for minutes. We have social media companies that are measuring the success of their platform via minutes or interactions spent per session. Doesnāt matter whether any of that time is meaningful - just time spent, so they can feed more ads or stave off subscriber churn.
So what are we investing in to strengthen connections between individuals? We see that people have less and less extracurricular activities beyond food and drink (mostly drink). Faith-based communities are shrinking and donāt engender the trust they used to (for good reasons). Opinion pieces are written on the ethics of workplace relationships, with many arguing that theyāre necessary because people have increasingly fewer places to meet people.
When I talk about theĀ fabric of communityĀ Iām talking about everything from the connections we have with the people in our street, the connections that we have with the people that we share common interests with (DIY music or model airplanes), the people we might have nothing in common with that we nonetheless share a society with, and the people around us that need to be looked after.
Instead, everything has been outsourced for some kind of elegant solution with a neat financial model. Everything a person needs is someone elseās problem - something to build a company around. So much of the ugly details of survival are conveniently attached to some kind of price, and our individual responsibility is lessened. In areas of particular interest to us, we might take the step to be further directly engaged by donating to a not-for-profit organisation/charity, but unless weāre actively involved in some way itās all someone elseās problem. And then it becomes the charityās responsibility to effective market to ensure it can continue to attract dollars.
And when it comes to the things that make our lives and localities more vibrant, more exciting, more meaningful - Iām really passionate about live music, for example - itās so easy to assume that an industry is going to provide us with everything that will scratch that itch for a connection to culture that we assume lies underneath the surface.
Conversations are more fraught than ever. Having a conversation is less an exchange of ideas and more an art in getting engagement through punchy impact, even if loses nuance in the process (Iāve made a great decision writing 1,606 words to get my point across then).
When social media first started to mature, I was incredibly excited, especially when Twitter arrived. It was amazing to see a way in which connections could be made that were previously not possible: conversations were happening between people that have never been had before, in a way that seemed more authentic and opportunity-rich than anything Iād seen before. What we saw with a platform like Twitter in its early days is an environment that fostered little microcommunities, and allowed for discovery of the people that were advocates for those microcommunities. It was such an exciting time: speaking personally, I discovered so much of Sydneyās music community through the early days of Twitter, and built friendships that have lasted upwards of a decade. I first met my now-partner on Twitter.
Yesterday my partner and I were reflecting on whether our friendship wouldāve been able to develop if we had both joined Twitter today, and I think in some respects itās less likely but not impossible. Twitter is an animal that is all about scale now, and the horse bolted along time ago when they started prioritising user growth rather than quality of engagement.
Now, itās all just yelling into the void - exemplified by the āpick a side and scream about itā discourse of Gamergate, US political discourse, and more recently the polarity of opinions on pandemic response. We havenāt done well at understanding the motivations or concerns of people with different opinions. We just shout louder.
So I want to introduce the idea of scale being the enemy of true āvalueā in a human sense. I believe that scale can definitely create financial value, it certainly has a dramatic affect on the valuation of companies, but itās quite clear to me that scale as a vehicle for growth is the enemy of true, deep human connections that help people to have a greater appreciation for the world around them and to explore, learn, and feel a greater connection to taking individual responsibility for their part to play in the world around them.
The good shit has gone underground
There are good communities thriving, but theyāre walled away in dark, invite-only group chats, Slack workspaces and Discords. This makes discoverability difficult, but the quality is high because the engagement is strong and the limited number of individuals (and lack of engagement being a driver for content visibility) means the human values are stronger.
What are you going to do about it?
Principles for good community building could include:
Enable hubs that can self-propagate
Theory: if somethingās getting popular, it can be split into further niche communities
Enable discoverability
. Make it possibly for people to find stuff that isnāt motivated by fads (burger joints) or advertising dollars (industry).
Ā
that keep spheres of interaction small and āknowableā. Donāt focus on growth, focus on substance.
Find a way to map microcommunities
. People should be able to direct their own discovery - enter via one sphere of interest and then navigate across different vertices.
Where to begin?
So what's that look like?
The journey is beginning at SydneyMusic.net. We've intentionally started small, but we have a two year journey in mind that we're going to keep using to explore, learn and refine our thinking.
