. . . yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever.

― Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

I know we all have the attention span of a goldfish now, so if you want a tl;dr on this post, it is the above quote. I am going to be talking about Twitter, but this is not another lament for Twitter. This is really about building things for people, “being online,” and what I want to do with my time.

Doom and Gloom

If you follow me on Twitter or have met me, you might have heard me talk about a tv show called Halt and Catch Fire which paints a reasonably accurate picture of the technology life cycle. Here is how it usually goes:

1. You want to create a Thing using technology. So far, so good!
2. You want to work with other People. Oh no. This is where things usually fall apart.
3. But if you get past this point, you need other people to use the Thing. As we have established above, People are the worst.
4. Against all odds, People use the Thing. Hooray? No, no, hooray. Because now, you need to figure out how to keep People using the Thing, and your opinion on People is well documented.
5. So, now, you try to add things to the Thing to keep People engaged. These things are not the Thing, but occasionally you might stumble upon the real something that all these People want from you.
6. Congratulations! You have a purpose now.
7. People love your Thing! But hey, people are fickle, and they might love another Thing, so you must compete and never be satisfied with your Thing.
8. Eventually, for you to continue caring about the Thing, you need to make Money.
9. Look, there are many steps in the middle, but eventually, we all end up at the same place.
10. Everyone is mad.

I was born in 1989. Or 1990 depending on which parent you ask. I only had a personal computer in 2008. I was studying Computer Science in India. I did not have internet access for another year. I remember, as I am sure you do, the appeal of it all. Reach out and talk to all your friends. Wait, not just that. Reach out and make new friends. No, no, there’s more. Reach out and talk to anyone. How much did it cost? Nothing! Well, sure, there was a bill, but I didn’t have to pay it. I don’t have siblings, and all my cousins are older than me, married with kids older. So, I took to the internet with an unparalleled hunger for knowledge and connection. I would read Wikipedia all day, all night. My introduction to Social Networks was Google Chat. Do you remember that little chat window in Gmail? I used that to talk to my college friends. Then came Orkut (and Google’s other failed attempts like Buzz and Wave, which are good band names), and eventually, begrudgingly, I joined Facebook.

To quote from “Message in a Bottle” by The Police, which I downloaded illegally via Limewire after finding someone on a forum mention how much they liked it, we all were just castaways, certain of our isolation, surrounded by a sea of loneliness, looking to be rescued. Then we found a place online, somewhere we thought we could call home.

That was Twitter for me. You could talk to anyone without being yourself. The irony of this, in light of the place “be yourself” has in the self-help advice pantheon, is not lost on me. I was funny, I was clever, I was charming, but I was never a chubby twenty-year-old. I can’t remember the first time I bought something online, but I can remember the first time I felt like I belonged, thanks to a bunch of pixels. There was always something to explore. I never really ran into nastiness online. I had crushes on people I had never even met. I had what you and I and all the Yous and Is that have ever existed have wanted. To know and talk and share and be recognized for who we are, without fear.

For a brief moment in time, I forgot that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Perhaps, I have been willfully ignorant. As someone who works in technology for a living, I should have known better. It has always been this way. Everything that exists in the World exists with someone wanting to extract value from it. Our search for connection is and always was monetizable. We have repeatedly created a space for ourselves in the World, and its cruel machinations have taken them away from us. Promise, almost fulfilled, snatched away at the last minute through the same means. The details are small. The cycle repeats. The hunger remains.

The Thing That Gets Us To The Thing

A character in Halt and Catch Fire repeatedly says technology is not the thing. It is the thing that gets us to the Thing. Technology creators might not like it, but they need to understand this. You can get mad, you can throw tantrums, you can insult all your users, you can carpet-bomb your users with adverts, you can pretend that you don’t need moderation, you can discover that you do need moderation, you can exploit your users’ data, you can accept shady investment money, you can go public, you can ignore user research, you can continue to pretend that your goal behind all of this is much more sanguine than “making all of the money” but know that your users don’t care. Let me put it this way: the average Pornhub user doesn’t care what Pornhub wants.

More intelligent people have put time and effort into answering what the future of social networks looks like. Network effects ruled the last decade of online software building. I turned Twitter (insert your most used social network here) into my home page. I started looking to Twitter for everything. Do you know how odd that is? I use Gmail more than I use Twitter, but I don’t expect Gmail to do anything more than receive and send an email. Well, if Gmail let me read your email, I might start using Gmail for that. If your software gets more people using it, it will lead to more people using it, and hopefully, the software will get better too. This doesn’t happen if there is only one big software company that has no incentive to be better. We all need to distribute our interests across different tools. Choice makes the web better.

Right now, there is someone somewhere in the middle of the world diligently maintaining a forum for collectors of ceramic kitten figurines. This person and the users of this website are the happiest people in the World. The site creator has never made money, but it exists, and it will continue to do so because people like making things, and people like things made by people. Makers imbue tools with themselves. Technology does what people do with it. You and I make these spaces ours, and this includes the people who create these spaces.

We will find such spaces, and we will make them ours. Even as, around us, other things and spaces are overrun and divested and bartered by barbarians with no understanding of real value—connection, potential, knowledge, love. Our new haven might get invaded too. I know it feels like this keeps happening again and again. Loss is inevitable, yet few of us accept it. Maybe you have to be an early winner of the “Childhood Trauma” lottery stakes to see it. Perhaps you have to be jaded. Maybe it is just the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean we get to quit. Camus called hope the last evil in Pandora’s box. He also said the first thing to do “is not to despair.” This is the hard part because it is so easy to give up. There will be a next time, and we will make the same mistakes again. Probably. I am not going to pretend there is an answer to any of this. Money doesn’t grow on trees, and servers don’t run on coffee. A good home needs a lot of time, money, and care. Scale brings with it more challenges. Needs must, etc. And, no one can expect any of this to be done by one person and, least of all, out of the goodness of someone’s heart. The grass is less green all around, and it needs water constantly, and there are weeds, and there is some new rabid pest attacking the grass but tending the lawn is its own reward. We all need to do the work. Don’t ask me how. I don’t know just yet, but I am going to spend this year trying to figure out the answer.

The other thing I know, having worked in tech for ten years now, is that it is trial and error all the way down. No one knows what they are doing. We all learn these lessons the hard way. Four different failed “startup” ventures and six years of corporate employment have taught me this lesson. We all are assembling the parachute on our way down. Nothing is settled. History is not dead. In fact, History seems determined to come back to life and run after us like a zombie (the fast-moving 28 Days Later kind). And people seem to be a lot less friendly than they were in the blissfully ignorant “good ol’ days.”

We have a lot in common. There is a gaping hole at the heart of all human existence, and we all do things to try and fill it. Yes, this is the hopeful part. We all want the same things. Joy, vulnerability, burritos, cute animal pictures, absurdist theater, photos of vanity car plates, medieval tapestries with weird drawings, pictures of food, meeting people, loving and being loved, fig jam, stained glass windows, the smell of fresh paint, toads, meeting our heroes, not being productive, wanting Mulder and Scully to kiss, dancing to LCD Soundsystem when we are alone at home. Ok, not all the same things, but you get my point. And here is another thing we all have in common: We are all tired. Tired of being hit in the face by a mirror whenever we try to reach out. Tired of being ourselves, especially online, when our reward for this is rebuke and disappointment, and exploitation. Being yourself presupposes that you know yourself and can then become that self. We are tired of being told to be ourselves without any acknowledgment of how much work being ourselves requires.

I don’t know where “there” is, and I don’t know what “there” looks like but we will get there. The cycle repeats. I want to make things, and I am sure there are others like me. I have to keep trying and hope that so will others and that we will find each other. Because what is the alternative? Stop reaching out? We can’t stop doing that. We need to leave our doors open. Yes, we need more empathy. Yes, it is hard to be empathetic in a fundamentally indifferent World, to feel for one another amidst the ruins of everyday life, and not to let yourself be overcome by the guilt you feel for never being able to do enough.

I know a part of this answer is me looking around and noticing what I already have. I have built small communities locally, where I live, through my interests. I do standup comedy, not out of some altruistic goal but because it makes me happy. I enjoy writing short stories to explore ideas and generate empathy. I have taken up analog photography, film development, and printmaking because I enjoy the physical process of making things. I will continue to invest my time in them. I will try to give back to the people I share this city with.

Don’t worry; I am not one of those “let people enjoy things” freaks. There has to be a way to harness the energy generated when everyone gets excited by a ship getting stuck in a canal, right? The sense of community you feel by finding other people who like Wordle and also from finding people who hate the people who like Wordle. In an ideal world, we would all accept each other as we are. We would share our time and attention with what we love because that is what we must do. Wear nice jackets. Argue about protein shakes. Re-watch Twin Peaks. Look at photos of Japanese Halloween costumes. Don’t let cynicism get to you. Always seek wonder. Be kind. Create a space for ourselves and others.

We will always find something else as long as we don’t stop looking. We are meant to be searchers. We may always keep moving. We might have forgotten it now, but it was our thing a long, long time ago. Hello, world.

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