Distributed communities on the Internet are an *extremely* powerful acculturating force, often derided for being low status, disruptive, or somehow unserious.
I think we’re not really anywhere close to reckoning with this, or current and future implications on society.
I think we’re not really anywhere close to reckoning with this, or current and future implications on society.
This applies to everything from the online feeder system to startupdom to Extremely Online political factions to online radicalization to parasocial relationships spawning tribes to ...
And I think people pervasively underestimate all of the above because in many cases they don’t look like traditional belief systems or economic networks.
But eventually it’s just a numbers game, right?
But eventually it’s just a numbers game, right?
You can’t come anywhere close to replicating the number of words of dogma that e.g. Catholicism has with one hundred talented writers spending 20 hours a week for two years, but you can very easily create something which is robust enough to consume *all* of someone’s time.
And if you think “How many hours does an institution get with X prior to them being thoroughly aligned with it?”, some employers might say maybe 10k, schooling laughs and bids 15k, mainstream religions bid a few hundred, most brands say tens, and then *have you seen mobile stats*
Not to mention the platforms are basically licensing out extremely effective technology to attract, sort, engage, and retain communities, including economic engines for them, and teaching people (including kids) the art and science of community management.
This isn’t intrinsically good news or bad news, but it’s one of the biggest and least appreciated stories in the world.
You sometimes see it on the tip of the tongue when politics/etc are discussed.
You sometimes see it on the tip of the tongue when politics/etc are discussed.
“X is too responsive to the mores of Twitter.”
See that’s *so* close, but what actually happened is that X is undergoing internal rapid institutional change as a result of an unprecedented culture shift by a tribe which has attracted key X stakeholders.
See that’s *so* close, but what actually happened is that X is undergoing internal rapid institutional change as a result of an unprecedented culture shift by a tribe which has attracted key X stakeholders.
The tribe has iPhones, sure, and the fact of those iPhones has connected them to each other, sure, but they are a tribe, with a hierarchy and a belief system and a dogma and intertribal relations and all of this messy humanity that we have definitely seen before.
