(2023jun1 thread) in response to the time war story, bigolas dickolas:

I’ve told variations of this story several times but it bears repeating

When I was about 8 years old and I first sat at a computer and typed words into a forum and got replies from people elsewhere in the world, I swear on my life I instantly knew I had found The Holy Grail

everybody in my life told me I was weird and misguided. But it was just so plainly obvious to me. In the years since I’ve found a bunch of other people who also got it. David Bowie was one of them

Montaigne understood it 500 years ago (men of letters). In his time, you had to be much more privileged to take advantage of the world of letters, which he was. In our time, all you need is a smartphone. there is still tremendous opportunity in plain sight that the vast majority of people continue to overlook and disregard every day (maybe for good reasons, but still).

Jane Jacobs said something like all wealth is downstream of specialization and trade. the internet allows you to construct your own trade networks. by ~13 years old I completely lost interest in school; why give a shit when you can build your own trade networks?!

a question I asked myself was – how many people are there in the world like me? Even if I’m 1-in-a-million rare, and I don’t think I’m that rare, that means there’s 8,000 of me. Those people will wanna be on my team. And they will be looking for me just as I am looking for them. So all I have to do is be prolific, visible, earnest, honest, wear my heart on my sleeve and not die. That’s basically it. Sure there’s some nitty gritty stuff like solving for distribution blah blah (written about that too) but if I keep talking to people, success is inevitable.

The important thing to understand when thinking in dominos is we don’t need everyone to agree with us, we just need enough of the right people to get to the next domino.

✱

It clicked for me that I want to write a post consolidating most of what I’ve said about the internet. I want it to be… inspiring, sure… thought provoking, compelling, a call to action/arms without necessarily saying it directly. One of the threads is a renewal of a more grounded optimism that’s not too naive.

In May 2019, I got on a plane in Changi Airport and flew across the planet to San Francisco (via LAX), paid for by internet friends. It was the culmination of one of my dearest hopes: that if I loved the internet, it would love me back. I only had to persist for about a decade before it came true.

• I loved the internet from the moment I saw it. I wanted to participate. I wanted to have a homepage, my own home in cyberspace, that I could welcome people to, have them sign my guestbook. I dreamed of running a cybercafe of my own. I had a friend who worked in one, and I was kind of envious of that. He was basically getting paid to sit at a computer, overseeing other people sitting at computers.
  • “it’s a politically meaningful act to have a personal website”. was explaining to my wife how much it meant to me and still means to me to own http://visakanv.com. it’s a space that’s *mine*, where I can say basically whatever I like. I can lay out cathedrals & labyrinths of info for anyone to peruse. When I first encountered the internet, it immediately struck me as a read-write (not read-only) hyperlibrary. I was determined to contribute. a website is speech that endures. You can direct anybody to it. If you write a good blogpost, even without Google or SEO or whatever, you can personally share it with every single person you meet for the rest of your life. This is a tremendous power that our ancestors didn’t have. I’ve been called a (political) activist for simply remembering history. A personal website is a simple way to shoulder remembrance.
  • I was raised on the internet, the internet is my mom
• I have to say somewhere that witnessing Venkatesh Rao from Ribbonfarm do his thing was very compelling for me. Here’s an internet author who seems to basically make a living from being a thoughtful person. Sure, he doesn’t seem to be fabulously rich, and I’m sure he must have his frustrations, but that’s a life I want for myself too.
• favorite essay of all time – how the information gets inside us. innovations in media tech lead to culture wars. it’s easy for people to lose a sense of proportion. I kind of want this essay to be a followup to this one, but idk if I can do it justice in one sitting.
• from village to metropolis
• tripping through time on the information superhighway
• Magic Mirror. The internet is a magic mirror that roughly gives you what you want, assuming you use it properly. There’s ~3-5 variables that account for most of the experience. Self-sense. Your sense of what you want, and your relationship with it. if this is messed up you’re gonna hurt. People-sense. Some kind of plaintext literacy, social dynamic literacy. Once you have a good sense of each of these things you can do word-artist-magician shit and basically* summon the reality you want into existence. (*Terms and conditions do apply.)
• A lot of human intuitions are calibrated for a pre-internet world. Even after ~30yrs of internet, and 10yrs of smartphones. most people’s intuition seems to develop in a halted incrementalist-ish way. The new is interpreted through the lens of the old. In 2007-ish, a bunch of people at the frontiers were raving about how radical it is that anyone can talk to anyone for basically free, and how that upends traditional networks. Those talking points have now been covered with the dust of familiarity, BUT THEY ARE STILL TRUE. AND THEY ARE STILL UNDER-APPRECIATED. because people still interpret the new through the lens of the old. This is something that causes problems, but is also a sign of opportunity. I often tell the Jimi Hendrix story here.
• naive techno-optimism Some of the early TED talks were quaint in their optimism. The overton window at the time seemed to be like, well there’s a lot of silly frivolous nonsense and cat pics with memes, and also porn and erotica, but there’s also real-time community aid networks, which are awesome. What they hadn’t quite properly anticipated – and it’s unclear to me whether they didn’t consider this, or they chose to omit it, but it seems like more of the former – is that each new media tech is a vector of attack and abuse. Every tool is also a weapon.
• We are still in the early days. If you think from first principles about the billions of people who haven’t come online yet, basically every major internet company is still undervalued. these things just take longer to play out than most people have the patience for. Today is still a great time to start a blog, a youtube channel, buy bitcoin… we are still in the early days. I realize the word “undervalued” might have some specific meaning in a financial sense, I don’t know much about that. I mean more in terms of how people feel about things. I’ve heard from several people “isn’t starting a youtube channel in 2020 kind of a losing game?” well if you’re framing it in terms of not getting the benefits of being the EARLIEST adopters, yea, you don’t win as fast. but “not winning as fast” is not the same as “losing”. pretty important distinction. even twitter… I’m thinking of trying to persuade some of my smart friends who are not on twitter to get on twitter. it’s easier to do it now that I have a bunch of people that I can introduce them to, so they don’t have to waste years kind of bumbling around. the “don’t have the patience for” part is actually particularly interesting to me right now. I think longtime posters, bloggers, etc do get sort of burnt out and quit – I have witnessed myself in that sort of headspace. the internet doesn’t quite correspond to human intuitions.
• Internet memes (not just funny pics – the whole shebang) work inside the OODA loop of most… people. to contextualize this we could say that oh, well, what’s nationalism? What were the religious wars and crusades and so on? People have always been unwitting hosts doing the bidding of memes and memesters. Fair… bleak, etc. and, modern comms tech continues to accelerate… the adjective “internet X” is increasingly becoming redundant, it’s just memes. Ideas. They’ll transmit however they can, through whatever they have access to. “Internet” here is really mostly “hyperconnectivity – all nodes are graphed” and “near 0 barrier to publishing”… but mainly the thing I wanted to get to in this thread is how rethinking this sorta clicked for me how/why so many people get so fucked up by becoming famous. part of it is that fame is hard, yes, but I was never fully satisfied with that explanation. it *gets inside your loops*… that’s not a new idea either I’ve written threads about that for sure- “it’ll change you”, “you have to use filters, which are not without costs”… but there’s something about the idea of GETTING INSIDE THEIR LOOP that really hits for me rn… when a bad actor is inside your loop, it feels like you’re being directly smited by a vengeful god. they’re seemingly always 3 steps ahead of you. (In a *sense* they are? but also not.) every time you turn to face them they’re already gone… there is really then a sense in which you cannot win thru conventional means. and this… checks out, right? No individual person can expect to resist a coordinated assault from the best minds working in tech + marketing + outrage + sex etc all going after your attention head on… winning, or not losing, will almost definitely then involve a very strange-looking oblique strategy. The enemy’s gate is down, that sorta thing. you have to go in a direction nobody expects… I’m still workshopping this, already made a few suboptimal choices I’ll correct in an essay
• Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens is one of my favorite essays about the internet.
• Walking through walls. I have always wanted to walk through walls. Most of what people experience as walls in everyday life is cultural, imaginary, hallucinated. That doesn’t mean they aren’t real. But it does mean they are negotiable. Steve Jobs quote about “everything around you was made up by people no smarter than you”.
• Arguing on the internet – when is it worthwhile? Arguments happen when people have different interpretations of events.
• All rhetorical questions on the internet will be answered literally. This is in part because of context-collapse, and in part because there’s a kind of person who likes to spend a lot of time and energy on the internet who is very literal-minded. Some of them are autistic.
• Smartphones – the world has changed so much since smartphones. I feel like we never really took a moment to collectively, properly talk about this. Somebody should make a good documentary or something. Maybe in time for the 15th anniversary of the iPhone? —— the ability for everyday folks to record a video on their own, and upload it so that millions of other people can watch it within minutes, for effectively free, is something that has, in a sense, aggressively percolated through culture like some kind of memetic plague —— the underlying mechanisms are not shocking in retrospect; you can draw a curve from previous media tech innovations. MTV, radio, the printing press, etc. Historically, each new media tech innovation opened up a new front for a new class & scale of culture war. ——
• Onlyfans… I think onlyfans is changing something about the game in a way that I haven’t seen many people openly talk about yet — it couldn’t quite have happened until instagram, snapchat, patreon etc took off first and normalized the behavior patterns along those lines, and then it removed steps from the process – which always changes the game to some degree — society isn’t quite ready for how the game is changing. things will have to be reimagined, reevaluated and renegotiated because there are new options that didn’t exist before. which changes the game (couple of interesting replies)
  • Veera: the love/hate I see some dudes have towards onlyfans girls reminds me of the love/hate I’ve seen some locals have towards wealthy tourists. “you want them. U hate that you want them. so u direct your self-loathing at them. which feels gd but is self-emasculating in the long run” to Kirsten, who didn’t know: some argue it’s the most ethical form of porn around now. lots of interesting conversations tbh. some say it’s unhealthy and will be worse than porn bc it blurs fantasy/reality further. lots of valid POVs from different angles
  • something has been sticking in my mind about how social norms take a while to change in response to technological innovation enabling new behaviors – and i’m thinking about this particularly in the context of social media. twitter, ig, onlyfans, tiktok, all of it —— on one hand, it feels like talking about this is not a “new and exciting” thing to do; discerning observers and players have been doing it for a decade now. and yet, from where I’m standing, it still seems like there’s tremendous opportunity for real artists to play and explore —— one of the big changes is how quickly and easily it’s now possible for some “random” person, a “casual”, to rapidly gain a large audience. it might be temporary and fleeting, but it’s also something you can leverage and play with. our social graphs are all connected online, and– —— the norms have been such that most people didn’t really want all that attention. lots of people, when something goes viral, tend to mute, or lock, sometimes even delete the tweet. but also as we accumulate viral events, opportunists have started to discern opportunity —— around the late 2000s until the early 2010s, I remember there was a lot of “blogger discourse”. People would argue about whether “citizen journalists” were “legitimate”. I feel like that argument has kind of withered away. As with all disruption, Y doesn’t beat X in a fair fight —— I want to reflect on past phrases like “15 minutes of fame” – sometimes people are dismissive of the present media landscape and say “15 mins? more like 6 seconds” – but they seldom acknowledge that artists have more control than ever before. you can charge $$ almost directly —— I’m still thinking about that comment that asked me why I put in so much effort into things when there is no discernable payoff in the near-term. I think it boils down to my faith in people. It’s a very direct reflection of my undeniable optimism. But also it’s… just… math? ——
  • caught wind of some interesting onlyfans drama where some girls offer to manage other girls for like a 20% cut and some other girls are mad about it. — the value proposition of course is that we will increase your earnings by more than 20%, so it’ll be net win-win – basically the same as artist management in any other domain — I think the marketplace logic dictates that as long as there is real money to be made (and lust has long been known to be one of the fundamental forces of human nature) then the gangs and syndicates will continue to have the upper hand over most casual players.

asian people taking pictures of food https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1572856015732633600

blogosphere – twitter search

Less likely to be included:

• Joking is not allowed. one of the less obvious rules of the internet is that anytime anything crosses platforms – whether it’s from tiktok to twitter or twitter to reddit or reddit to tiktok, doesn’t matter – the general assumption is that anything posted is 100% earnest with no sense of humor. i’m not sure which is stronger, (1) the assumption that “those people” who are not from our blessed homeland must be stupid and incapable of humor, or (2) we just wanna be mad and we will attack any target that seems vaguely acceptable especially if they cant/wont retaliate. It’s the same picture?

Consider the meme (8jan2023)

What is the history of writing 

Old timey how you think you look and how you actually look memes

Why are they so consistent 

Pompeii graffiti look like modern tweets

History of art, song, music

What’s the story, what’s the argument? What can people learn and know? How are we to live in this world?

what is fandom, what is community? What is the internet, how should we consider ourselves in relation to it?

Role of text and symbols in our lives? Stories, flags, money, talismans? Who are the thinkers we ought to consult to make sense of things? Campbell, Rollo May, Emerson

International, anime, global village, financial system, everything is a remix, Terence Mackenna; we are all systems and we are all programmers

Apple invented iPhone… before that Sony invented the Walkman, Polaroid invented the camera, each changed the way we think about ourselves, our spaces

we used to go online, in a portal, plug in, that matrix metaphor of going into a different world, the information superhighway 

Today the highway is everywhere and nowhere, we carry the hypertext with us

Reenchanting the world… every supermarket is a miracle that we’ve come to take for granted, every tweet potentially a converging point for millions of minds from all over the planet, instantaneously for free

It’s a curious thing to rewatch Ted talks – those videos that were at some point in time like a herald of optimism, that have since kinda strangely fallen out of interest – it became something like a status symbol, and TedX diluted the brand by basically allowing anyone to do a Ted talk. And if anyone can give a talk, why bother with the prestige label? Why not just talk into your own phone or laptop camera?

And how has the camera changed the world? Not just the camera by itself but the whole package of the camera and the social media tech that you can upload those images to and have anyone anywhere see them, share them, comment on them, remix them. In the old Ted talks they were described as cat pics and erotic smut, scientific journals… somewhat innocuous compared to the true full extent of debauchery available to us 

Ev Williams said if you want to build a billion dollar company just take a human desire and remove steps

This forces us to come face to face with some of our desires that we might not quite be ready to

Zelensky’s tv show, parents getting drunk on power, my wife telling me about lottery winners losing their shit, it takes some focus and discipline to wield power appropriately, that’s a bit part of why there are always guilds and training phases