cyber-balkanization is (hopefully not) a sigmoid
we, the frog, are nearly boiled1
Walter Cronkite ... ššššššššššš ... "I love Tesler!!!"
I suspect cyber-balkanization will be a key term for historians
I think it's a real shame that twitter became what it is (enshittified megaphone for edgelords and grifters that hardly functions except to hoard everyone's attention on it) and so I'm really excited about Blue Sky / atproto... however, I do worry that prolonged entrenchment is a net negative for society and I don't see a lot of discussion on this. maybe I haven't yet found a great place to look. Credit to johnny, uplifted octopus for saying something in this vein (likely more eloquently) a while ago, somewhere on x or bsky.
I think the two-party thinking + predatory types of capitalism in virtual spaces has driven us to something like insanity. What I mean by insane is, like a rat with a cocaine-spiked water bottle, returning to bankrupt partisan eigenvectors for reinforcement in some public moral takedown of their directional political foe (RE John Cleese extremists) for abstract internet points. There is smooth gradation between "EDUCATED PROFESSOR OWNS NEPO FRAT BOY" and Sam Harris, just to sample one dimension (woke-ism), and boy oh boy are there many dimensions one could sample. Whether or not its about politics is almost inconsequential. I believe our addiction to boolean moral frames is crippling, but I do think we're possbily redeemable.
the water is boiling and its time to get out
The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. I saw this thing where Tom Holland talked about how it was surprisingly difficult to stop drinking for a Dry January. It was an inspiring story and I decided (having turned 27 on March 13th) that I would start a period of time without drinking and see how I felt. I'm only 9 days in, and I don't think I had a serious problem, but already I do recognize ads and scenes where people are drinking as temptation. I'd say I feel marginally better e.g. I sleep poorly after drinking, but mostly I think I'm just aware I'm "making a healthy choice" for myself.
There's that old saying about having to learn the hard way, no matter how many times your parents say things. I've repeatedly found this saying apt in retrospect. However, I'm not familiar with an old saying on watching the Facebook culture wars destroy your hometown's social fabric, or heroin killing or incarcerating your high school sports idols.
If that seems like a random sidebar to you, I understand. My point is just that addiction-at-scale is the shared feature. Phones, substances, social hierarchy games, high fructose corn syrup. Addiction is an eddy, God is Navier-Stokes and we're just trying to navigate these energy sinks and get laminar amirite? Ok fine I'm just smoking weed now instead of drinking, you caught me. More genuinely, everyone knows someone relatively closely with a life-changing addiction whether it's drugs, online content, ego (or cheese curds).
so for the love of this so-called God, can we try to figure things out and disagree like normal people? The ad-hominem on both x and bsky (as exemplars of latent political norms) and downstream conversations just seem more insular mean-spiritedness than constructive. I'm surprised at the ire for centrist viewpoints. People deserve dignity. It's good to work hard. Science deserves funding. Put your oxygen mask on first. Family is a good reason to live. Is it so hard to find commonality? Ideally without invoking archaisms with hardline stances on unverifiable things, thanks! Let's identify and toss whatever numbing agents are enfeebling our discourse, start seeing positive intent where it exists and politely blocking/ignoring those willing or unable to speak calmly about real life. Our digital space need not have any inherent "left"/"right"/other political orientation. "Winning" your begrudgingly self-assigned team's argument, while dopamine-rich, is arguably less productive than steel-man-ing the perspective of good faith actors who ended up on the other binary center of mass by chance of initial condition and gradient of techno-capitalist gravity. Whoever is reading this, I bet we agree on 75%+ of things. We can change norms or cede to Caesars and singularity moths in their wake. My suggestion is only that we need to continually resist bifurcation until we can create a calmer space to talk in. I do only want 1 microblogging app (decentralized town sqaures), but neither covers the full range of interesting space (counterexample: andrej karpathy) right now. A straw-man ideal: move X to atproto. Move into the same substrate, and then we can start arguing in good faith about how our shared features of reality should function. Tend your garden, block your nazis or your libtards and/or explore nuance in the middle - at least we have the opportunity to interact and maybe realize we both pay for eggs.
hypothetically, would you agree that focused virtual spaces oriented around interests, like the birds feed or woodworking sound like promising (if primitive) possible futures? Perhaps the frog boiling could be advantageous here, connoisseurs bonding over a niche in zen mode.
as probably-not-Christopher Walken once said: "It was politically ambiguous - politics is irrelevant to birding. (turns to face camera) Turns out Jim from Oklahoma is one helluva fellow!"
P.S. one reason I'm over-simplifying life by comparing the nature of discourse on popular microblogging sites to real life is that people around me (chicago 2025) do definitely carry online experience into the real world, in probabilistic bursts of intensity. I know virtual space is just one place where people develop worldviews, but I believe it's influence on our reality is non-trivial. I am just a person thinking out loud in an effort to be constructive.