(h/t @Archie8 via @dynamic)

2023 Feb 12: Wired:

God Did the World a Favor by Destroying Twitter

by Paul Ford

Excerpt:

Twitter’s troubles are due not just to Musk, who appears to be both shooting himself in the foot and cauterizing the wound with his own brand of flamethrower. No, Musk is merely the vehicle. The real reason Twitter lies in ruins is because it was an abomination before God. It was a Tower of Babel.

[...]

God does the wrath thing a lot in the Old Testament, punishing humans who would challenge divine authority. It makes sense to read the story of Babel in that light. But having lived through the past couple decades of the internet, I believe the story carries a different lesson. I’m an atheist, so take this theory with a grain of salt, or maybe even a pillar: God wasn’t keeping us out of heaven, smiting us for our arrogance. God was protecting us from ourselves.

[Continued]

[continued]

Every five or six minutes, someone in the social sciences publishes a PDF with a title like “Humans 95 Percent Happier in Small Towns, Waving at Neighbors and Eating Sandwiches.” When we gather in groups of more than, say, eight, it’s a disaster. Yet there is something fundamental in our nature that desperately wants to get everyone together in one big room, to “solve it.” Our smarter, richer betters (in Babel times, the king’s name was Nimrod) often preach the idea of a town square, a marketplace of ideas, a centralized hub of discourse and entertainment—and we listen. But when I go back and read Genesis, I hear God saying: “My children, I designed your brains to scale to 150 stable relationships. Anything beyond that is overclocking. You should all try Mastodon.”

I think I disagree with this, but I find it hilarious.

And what small communities are like is often psychologically claustrophobic, repressive, conformist, isolating, stressful, conflictual, vindictive, and sometimes downright toxic.

The idea that people are generally happier and mentally healthier living in small communities is kind of wildly wrong. Small tightly knit communities are typically things their members flee - sometimes for their lives, often for their sanity.

One of the main reasons people leave small communities for the big city is for freedom: for a chance to get to know themselves instead of being defined by others, for a chance to express themselves in novel ways that weren't not tolerated in their community of origin, to simply have privacy and not have everyone they know all up in their business all day every day.

The next most important reason people leave small communities for the big city is that there are things you can only have in extremely large populations.

There are things that are a numbers game. If you belong to some tiny minority - maybe it's your sexual orientation, or maybe it's just an interest that you have that nobody around you shares - your opportunity to meet other people who share that with you goes way up if the tiny slice of the pie is taken from a much larger pie. If only 1 in 100 people share some trait you care about with you, in a community of 200 people there's only going to be one other person to talk to. In a city of 100,000 people, there's going to be a thousand other people to share that with.

There's not a lot of orchestras in communities around the size of the Dunbar number. Not a lot of ballet companies either. They're probably not going to have a lot of fine dining, not unless they bring in a whole lot of tourists.

Larger populations can support entire forms of culture that smaller populations just can't.

And I'm explaining all of this because I think it matters when discussing the internet, and Twitter versus the Fediverse.

The authors understanding of the Fediverse differing from Twitter the way small villages differ from big cities is correct. It's his argument that small villages are better for human well-being that's wrong.

The Fediverse has some of the scaling problem of small villages: the way federation has been implemented has made it extremely hard for small minorities to find one another and to coalesce into scenes here. I'm not saying it's impossible, and I'm not saying that none of them have done it, but I am saying it's harder here than on Twitter simply because of numbers.

@siderea

Your commentary is persuasive but I think there a truth in Ford’s original point. The whole idea of a global town square, which is one of Twitter’s justifications for existence, is preposterous. No one but celebrities, influencers or politicians really cares about talking to the whole world. It is much more productive for people to talk in small groups. Twitter is like trying to have a conversation in a cramped cattle car. Social media should be more like having a campfire chat.

@JoeLamport

> No one but celebrities, influencers or politicians really cares about talking to the whole world.

Which one of those was Mary Wollstonecraft? How about Frederick Douglass? Karl Marx? Adam Smith?

> It is much more productive for people to talk in small groups.  

I think that people talking in small groups can be wonderfully effective, but Martin Luther King is not remembered today for his talking in small groups (though his talking in small groups was indeed hugely influential and important).

> Twitter is like trying to have a conversation in a cramped cattle car.

No, Twitter is like a large crowded public park. Some people are there because they want to get on a soapbox and address the crowd; some of the people there are there to listen to being those crowds and listen to those people up on their soap boxes. Other people in the park for other reasons, like holding picnics with their friends.

These are *all* valid and good and useful to have.