David Emery OnlineA community isn’t a garden, it’s a bar.
7 December 2022
Bars are responsible for serving only so much alcohol per drink, not serving someone too intoxicated, not serving to anyone below a certain age. Keeping track of every drop of alcohol. And if they break any of these laws, they can be shut down permanently, owners can lose their license, people can go to jail. Why? Because alcohol is dangerous. With Facebook inciting genocide in Myanmar, mass shooters in America being radicalized online, the January 6 insurrection that was planned online, and nazis reinstated on Twitter, can anyone still claim that poorly managed social spaces are any less dangerous?
Derek Powazek
I could have quoted all of this, it’s well worth a read.
It feels like we’re going through a few substantial shifts in technological thinking, all at once. For a long time it felt like we were coalescing around a few large, American, ad-supported social platforms. With the rise of TikTok and—to a much smaller extent—Mastodon, and the fall in Facebook and Twitter, that seems to be undoing.
At the same time, half of my social feed is screengabs of ChatGPT. A year ago it was all terrible mass produced art of bored monkeys, so I guess that’s progress. ChatGPT—or at least, its productionised successor—as a virtual barman for a social community? That’s an interesting thing to think about…
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