Creating online communities is easy; but doing it ethically is not.
Over the last few decades, we’ve developed many hacks and tricks - a playbook, if you like - for tempting communities of like-minded humans to gather into online echo chambers, where they can be manipulated in demographically unified buckets. So before I go too far, I need to ask myself an important question: Is blogging inherently evil? Or is it possible to thread this needle without crossing over to the dark side?
The more time I put into getting this new site ready, the more possibilities I see for turning it into my central (and only) communications portal. But could this be more? Could this finally be an end to the demon of my “telescoping effort” conundrum?
I spent decades on social media, right from the very beginning, and in that time, watched them drift from exciting virtual communities into soulless commercial marketplaces. What finally drove me away wasn’t a single post or policy change - it was recognizing the slow erosion they’ve inflicted on how we think, and how we treat each other.
You know that AI Apocalypse we’ve all been dreading? Turns out it wasn’t algorithmic intelligence we should have been worried about - algorithmic greed will do the job long before real AI ergos its first cogito sum.