What Twitter can you learn from Quakers? A reflection of Sloan’s poem about what Twitter can learn from a Quaker

It is a failure of imagination to think that our choice is the social media platforms we have now or nothing. I keep thinking about something that Robin Sloan, a novelist and former Twitter employee, wrote this year: “There are so many ways people might relate to one another online, so many ways exchange and conviviality might be organized. Look at these screens, this wash of pixels, the liquid potential! What a colossal bummer that Twitter eked out a local maximum, that its network effect still (!) consumes the fuel for other possibilities, other explorations.”

Allow me to make a strange turn here. I became interested this year in how Quakers deliberate. Early on to abolitionism, equality between the genders, to prison reform, and pressuring governments to help save Jews from the Holocaust are just some of the things that have been ahead of the moral curve time and again. Quakers have gotten some wrong, but what has led them to do so much right?

The answer suggested by Rex Ambler’s lovely book “The Quaker Way” is silence. In a typical Quaker meeting, Ambler writes, community members “sit in silence together for an hour or so, standing up to speak only if they are led to do so, and then only to share some insight which they sense will be of value to others.” If they must decide an issue collectively, “they will wait in silence together, again, to discern what has to be done.” There is much that debate can offer but much that it can obscure. “To get a clear sense of what is happening in our lives, we Quakers try to go deeper,” he writes. We have to let go of our active and fretful minds in order to do this. We go quiet and let a deeper, more sensitive awareness arise.”

I find this powerful in part because I see it in myself. I know how I respond in the heat of an argument, when my whole being is tensed to react. I know how I process difficult emotions and questions, when there is time for my spirit to calm. I know which is my better self.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/11/opinion/what-twitter-can-learn-from-quakers.html

Is Twitter the Town Square for your Digital Life? Comments on Musk at the OpenAI Open AI Summit in Helsinki, July 15 – 26 November 2009

Democracy is not and will not be one long Quaker meeting. There’s more than just wisdom here. When our minds are active, we do not make our best decisions. I’m not surprised that a description like ” active and fretful” is so precise. Because of having put us in an active fretful mental state, and having encouraged us to make statements on divisive subjects with one eye to how quickly they will rack up likes and/or retweets,Twitter encourages us to make statements with only one eye on how quickly they will rack up likes It is insane.

And it will get so much worse from here. OpenAI recently released ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence system that can be given requests in plain language (“Write me an argument for the benefits of single-payer health care, in the style of a Taylor Swift song”) and spit out remarkably passable results.

“I am happy to discuss it if this is interesting”, he said, in a text to Musk. He continued, opaquely: “Twitter conversational OS—the townsquare for your digital life.” This is how billionaires communicate: in slogans, brand identities, and occasional large sums. It is up to everyone else to figure it out.

Musk replied that he does not own it yet. (To be fair, he was fielding a lot of texts at that moment.) He owned it and by winter it was a huge issue in the public eye. Whatever magic spell kept people together on the platform seemed to have broken. It was like the plot of Encanto without the happy ending: “The graveyard for your digital life.”

God Did Us a Favor by Destruction: The Story of the Shinar Tower and the Birth of a Better Town Square in the Old Testament

People usually interpret Genesis 11:1–9 as a mythological explanation of why we have so many tribes, so many languages. The story goes that the descendants of Noah were living in Shinar and decided to build a skyscraper so that they could walk straight into heaven. The Almighty did not go in my backyard. The people were confounded by their language. The story that God personally destroyed the tower is apocryphal.

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 think that the theory that God wouldn’t keep us out of heaven is a tad overstated, or maybe even a pillar. God was protecting us from ourselves.

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.” It is a disaster when we gather together in groups of more than eight. 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.”

Source: https://www.wired.com/story/god-did-us-a-favor-by-destroying-twitter/

A Content Polycule for the Fediverse Web Apps: A God-did-us-a-favor-by-destroying-twitter

People are moving away from the tower to other places because they are able to find similar real estate elsewhere. And some are finding their tribes in the Fediverse, the set of decentralized web apps that includes Mastodon.

The Fediverse is, by design, thousands of servers in many languages. They are cheap to run, at least for small groups, and relatively easy to administer. You can chat with your server kin, and you can connect with other people in the world. The Fediverse apps are all built on a set of rules called the ActivityPub standard, which is a little like HTML had sex with a calendar invite. It’s a content polycule. The questions it evokes are the same as with any polycule: What are the rules? How big can this get? Who will create the chore chart?

Source: https://www.wired.com/story/god-did-us-a-favor-by-destroying-twitter/

Gotta did us a favor by destroying twitter? The case of Borel and Mastodon with a “big bad idea”

Mastodon and other similar services are designed to collapse. If you want to quit a server, you have the option of following with all your followers. If the server stops functioning, you can find another one. It isn’t one guy. It came with a huge sticker that said “Bin Laden built in” as it accepted that as we centralize and debate we melt down.

How will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized? This is a tough question for the billionaires. Happy people, the kind who eat sandwiches together, are boring. They do not buy much. The six versions of their phones have badly cracked screens. After fixing bicycles, they talk about it, showing their friend how they did it and he says, ‘Woah, good job’. That doesn’t seem like enough to build a town square on.

Source: https://www.wired.com/story/god-did-us-a-favor-by-destroying-twitter/

Scattering: What Happens When the Babel Story Comes Into Being? Why Does It Matter? Where Do We Stand, How Do We Get What We Want?

Someone will figure it out. The reason that the Babel story matters is because it happens many times over and over again. The internet is used in both processes. Mastodon’s rocky soil will eventually grow engagement for brands. Billionaires will order the construction of new marketplaces of ideas. As long as the tower remains, everything will centralize again and it will seem eternal. Let’s savour the scattering for now.