an internet underworld

for messy messy human thinking...

In 2006, Facebook introduced the News Feed. Engagement went up 50%.¹ Huge success right?

It depends what you measure.

Facebook measured engagement, because advertisers measured engagement. (Facebook really measured advertiser dollars).

And so, the fact that users “absolutely hated the change” wasn’t the headline. Nor the fact that millions of Facebook humans were protesting the change online. Nor that people were literally protesting in person outside of Facebook’s offices.²

People’s relationship status changes (breakups!—which a friend previously could only see by intentionally checking your profile) were now blasted to all your friends at once. Personal lives were no longer personal.

Zuck responded by listening openly, reconsidering, right? hmmm

The News Feed led us to an Impersonal Internet. Whose content is almost all made and distributed by companies with marketing budgets, or by influencers. Whose interfaces make most of us feel like consumers, not creators… like we’re being loved for our attention, not our intention.

I’m sure we’ve all experienced moments in our lives when we’re valued for our attention, not our intention. When you’re in a group of “influential” middle school friends who want you to laugh at their jokes, and you nod along with their takes rather than say anything new yourself. You’re made to feel like a Shell-Of-Yourself. Sensible parents will do everything they can to encourage you to find spaces where you’re rewarded for being a real person, rather than a nodding automaton. And of course, we sometimes bite these bullets—nod along in these occasional situations—when/if you know you have space elsewhere where you can be a real person.

But the Impersonal Internet, crowded with news feeds, has no such space. When the only ways for you to express yourself online are to share what you’re thinking with literally everyone you know, or to each of the thousands of people in a certain subreddit, or with literally everyone on your newsletter—when doing so is the only way to find the people who get you, who want to hear and then add on to what you’re saying—well most of us then never share. And so never have the experience of sharing online with people who get you. And so never have the online experience of having others who care about the things on your mind, add onto to what you’re thinking, and engage in real conversation with you.

Text conversations are wonderful with fewer than 8 people. But any more than that—like a Discord with 100 folks—and we just start to take on the role of being a Shell-Of-Ourselves again.

We have an internet that’s funded by our feeling that, even our convincing ourselves that, the best role for each of us is that of a consumer.

But if you think back to the physical world, you know that’s not the best role for you. You know you don’t feel best when you’re nodding along with a person you disagree with. You know that lacking space to say what’s on your mind can lead to depression or angst or anger and years of mental un-digging in therapy.

This would be bad enough with the significant current chunks of our lives eaten away by our time online. But think about the future. Are we going to become more or less online?

I have a lot of respect for the folks who commit to smash their screens and meet up in a jungle soon to avoid AGI chaos.³

But for the rest of us, for the vast majority of us, the internet is only going to engulf our lives more. Which means: it’s generally hopeless to think about small ways we can revert to a pre-2000s life without smartphones or addictive central feeds. It’s not the right path.

The solution, if any is possible, is to figure out what internet spaces look like that give you space and ritual and community—all the things that people used to find in religions and that young-adults who reject religion now crave—but that let you connect to others because (not in spite !) of the weird particular things you’re thinking.

What does it look like for humanity to unite through each of our fucking weird minds, rather than through the influencer memes that spread through the wires of an electrified public square (X / all its clones)?

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I set up Plexus in order to figure this out. We want to figure out what kind of space can be most universally accessible, but at the same time, what kind of space can be the most warm and connected and fuzzy.

We’re imagining a space that feels like a magic room, where the right people, thinking about the right things, filter in exactly when those things are on your mind. This wouldn’t just be an isolated corner—we’re not advocating for many decentralized and therefore disconnected (mastodon-like) www pockets. Instead, what we’re after is a kind of Internet Underworld, where all of us can be the pre-conformity versions of ourselves. With childishness and curiosity and mischief and questions and weird sounding laughter—all the things that have been ironed out of us by big-city etiquette and workplaces—but that makes us feel like artists. Like humans. Like intentional creatures, rather than attentional robots.

———————

The most sinister evolution of technology would be the transformation of humans into robots, and robots into something much different. We will have lost radical human energy.

I don’t believe there’s anything objectively right / sacred about human energy. I have no absolutist moral / religious arguments to make. Five years from now, this piece of writing, honoring humanity just for humanity’s sake, might be treated as amoral and sacrilegious.

“How can you claim that non-human-consciousness is any less?” our five-year-ahead-selves will proclaim.

I don’t know. But I feel it strongly. My sense is that many of us feel it strongly. That there’s something so sacred about individualistic human mischief… deeper than any of us can understand.

And so we’re committed with Plexus to serving mischief, and human mischief, forever.⁴

1. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/engagement-after-facebook-news-feed-algorithm-change

2. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/09/facebooks-news-feed-is-10-years-old-this-is-how-the-site-has-changed

3. I’ve made a smaller commitment with my cousin, that when AGI goes berzerk, and the world starts to feel dizzier than we can handle, we’ll meet at the trailhead where we last hiked.

4. This is hardly a blog post. It’s more like a Walk. I don’t know where it ends or begins. Just that it captured a real moment of my life, a real 43 minutes in which I typed in a frenzy, ended with almost as much energy as I began, and am ready to love and adore the weird things that define each of us for the rest of my life.