There will come a point when things happening on the web will become more important than what happens outside of it. And maybe, we are already past that, finding ourselves tumbling towards disaster … many of the current political discussions and conflicts come from the internet. I think people still greatly underestimate how much influence the internet by now has.
In my last post, I described large collectives that will emerge with the rise of the Fediverse. However, I have to correct myself: they were always already there, they just now are getting more and more important.
The big digital collectives could be something like the following:
Or in text:
- Pop-Queen Followers/Online-Celebrities (e.g. Swifties)
- Marxists
- Eco-Queers
- Nerds/Open-Source-Community/Reddit
- Libertarians/Musk-Fanboys/Crypto-Bros
- Consumers/Brandists
- Christians/Traditionalists/Conservatives (currently Evangelicals most notably)
- Potter Heads
- Gamers
All of these collectives have their own trades as well as own forms of teaching their members digital skills that are needed in their collective; the Gamers for example through Game Programming, the Pop-Queen-fans are more apt at promoting their own gods on social media, while open-source enthusiasts provide much material for programming themselves.
Probably, no one of these collectives is going to disappear, they will most likely stay. The important thing for the internet community will be, to make sure, they don’t radicalise. Because each one of them has its own radical impulses. Most of the time, this means declaring their principles natural law and try enforcing them on all other collectives.
And our current problem is, that too many of them are beginning to radicalize inside the walled gardens that make most of the internet today.
The Problem: The Different Reigns of the Web and the long Consumerist Reign in the 20s
If these collectives existed since the beginning of the web, of course they also played a major role in its rise and there were more and less powerful in all the time the web has been around.
As we all know, during the early 2000s, the Harry Potter collective had a major reign. After that, during the 10s and late 10s, other collectives threw them off its throne and we lived through the reign of the consumer, gaming, eco-queer and the pop collective. Now, it seems like the right is striking back in the form of Trumpism, bitcoin bros and the gaming-communities’ bad impulses.
But maybe, if the nerd-collective manages to bolster up the Harry Potter-Collective again and collaborates with the other collectives that are still interested in liberal democracy, they might be able to hold back against the backlash from the right. And the only way for this, leads through the Fediverse, which only they can provide. But they will need to control their own impulses and let other collectives thrive within their own space.
But to understand that we need to take a closer look at the history of the web through the lenses of these collectives.
The nerds were the original settlers of the web, and they never forgave for being kicked out of it, though eventually, they had to ally with the consumer collective.
Apart from the nerds, there were also the scientists. They were kicked out of the equation first. I don’t want to blame anyone, but the consumer-collective at some point took over. And at a later point, another big collective appeared, that basically completely took over the position that the science collective once held: the H.P. collective, giving a positive outlook on how the internet should look and most importantly: feel like. Like being in a magic world, were clicks are like spells.
Through this power-shift thanks to the consumer collective, the science-collective was replaced by the H.P. collective and future optimism ran rampant, it could almost be felt in the air. But the coalition came at a price: the consumer collective had become too powerful and not nearly had enough.
The thing is: as long as a collective stays democratic, it should have a right to exist on the social digital landscape. But in the last decade, the evangelical/Christian collective, who didn’t want to join this coalition, felt excluded from this. That’s why now, when they have the chance, they try to get as much space on the web as possible, not knowing that soon with the Fediverse, there will be plenty of space for everyone.
My strategy would be to show them this dream and remind them that their allies, for example people like Musk, hate tradition and traditional hierarchies, they want to dismantle and disrupt them, while they want to conserve them, actually don’t really fit in with their values.
I’m not a conservative by any means, but these people still need their space to grow on the web, if they keep certain basic rules, even if some things of them are weird. But just trying to exclude them from the whole thing won’t work either and for most of these conservative communities, the web really did reck havoc in some of them. They are just not prepared for unlimited access to pornography for example. They, too, need their save spaces, as ridiculous as it sounds, because they are denying them for queer people, but maybe, hopefully, at some point, they will accept them as well? Nothing against a moderate, secularized Christian collective on the web, right? In the Fediverse, this could be possible, in the social media of walled gardens, not so much.
Currently, we see heavy fighting between consumer, eco-queer, gaming and the H.P. collective, because the consumer-collective pushed too hard and eroded too many institutional and societal connections. But they are not coming out of their conundrum and their close interrelation with the consumer-collective without the nerd-collective, which is still angry because it was kicked out of the alliance a while back.
All the while, another contender is aiming for the pole-position, who wants to exploit the bickering of the ruling collectives: the crypto-Musk collective seems to join forces with the evangelical-Trumpism collective.
The remaining non-radical forces factions (yes, again with the consumer-collective) should unite to divide the two, which actually don’t even have that much in common, push through to the Fediverse and ensure a peaceful living for all of them:
Currently, the democratic forces are losing the cultural fight. But the left itself has collaborated way too long with the consumer-collective, which radicalized itself on it and now, they feel bad for it and are in turn even more radical, turning on themselves, while the nerd-collective hides away in the Fediverse with a smug face of the self-assurance that it had always been the right thing not to invest in the web anymore, because it is going to shit now anyways, when all they do is to show their own cowardice and woundedness for giving the web over to the consumer’s collective in the first place (or letting it been done by the H.P., then science-collective) and laughing their head off together with the Marxist collective in the back seats of a truck headed for disaster.
Instead, we can prevent the reign of the Musk-Crypto-Trumpism collective and instead push through to the Fediverse, were no rule by anyone is needed in the first place and everybody can have their own space. But for this to be possible, the queer collective will need to be a bit less radical themselves, because they too have becoming very protective, denying the H.P. to join the democratic part of the collectives.
And we will also need to consumer-collective to join. Because of anything, we want to prevent a trump-consumerism-musk-collective, which would be truly hell and end in a truly dystopian version of the web.
Hopefully, by pushing this whole conflict into the Fediverse, we are still able to solve it to prevent worse, although I’m not anymore so sure about this happening in time …
We should anyways remind ourselves that whichever parts of the collectives map we don’t like – they will not disappear, and we need to learn to tolerate them and only act actively out on them, if they radicalize themselves too much. On the contrary: I would argue that each of the collectives have specific use; I for example was introduced to programming on the web through the gaming collective, to its communities through Harry Potter and to collaborating and actively shaping this space through the open-source and Fediverse-community; and I think most people on the web have a history on multiple of these collectives, while probably feeling closer to some than to others.
To summarize: we take the whole battle somewhere else: the Fediverse. There, the democratic forces of the web can re-order themselves and take a strong stand against trumpist and musk-collectives, which have a much worse standing in this environment (at least if their goal is to divide the rest of the web).
The future of the web depends on it.
The Goal: On Uniting the Web
If this is what the so-called cultural war actually looks like:
Why are the democratic forces loosing? Well, because they can’t get over their quarrelling and just unite.
Of course, the nerd-collectives want to protect the new land that they discovered and not lose it like last time, but to same the web and democracy as a whole, they may need to voluntarily open it up to others to stop greater bad from happening even though they may still want some kind to do it right: they have no choice but to urge them to join.
And suddenly, the situation looks a whole lot of different:
And now who is winning the cultural war?
Another Obstacle, or: The Promised Land
(Disclaimer: Of course, migrating into the Fediverse is something different and in no way literary comparable to the actual colonialization of America with their history of colonialism and slavery)
Many has already been written about the joining of the Fediverse by Threads and what can be said for sure, is that there is a big nervousness about it. And one of the biggest (if not the biggest) reason for this is not that Threads might exploit its power. That’s basically a given. But that the arrival of Threads will mean big change. Many new citizens will come into the Fediverse, and they will be much different from the ones that are there currently and probably, the Fediverse will look afterwards much different than today. In other words: the arrival of Threads means first of all: change.
There is no guarantee that these people will show respect to the Fediverse or it’s implicit rules. On the contrary, it can almost be expected that they don’t care for them. Many of them won’t even know that they are on the Fediverse and will expect the same that from walled garden social media.
And: many of the ones that want to actually build and shape it, will be quite radical. Like it has always been: the first travels are those that seek adventure and leave behind something, they come with very high hopes and often enough, these hopes are not met. Nevertheless, the Fediverse should try to build a place, in which all collectives can thrive, if they hold themselves to some basic rules thus ensuring cooperation or at least a basic sense of coexistence.
So: expect for the next big surge of the Fediverse the Fanatics, looking for their promised Land
Somewhat like with America, the first settlers were puritans, narrow and brutal in their views. And like that, it’s also on the web. But it makes sense: they are looking for the promised land. And it doesn’t mean that one day, they can’t be the shoulders on which the west rests.
If the promises are true, the Fediverse will soon be a sprawling ecosystem, meaning money and hopes (https://www.theverge.com/23990974/social-media-2023-fediverse-mastodon-threads-activitypub) – just like the new land in its time. This will of course also attract fortune and adventure seekers; and those looking for something like their own promised land, like the settlers of America of their time. And these are also often enough fanatics of some sort or the other. Nevertheless, they will be crucial when building the Fediverse and its future. Therefore, we need to think about which people we want to attract and maybe even court first.
This means for the different collectives, the first people to come will be the following:
- Pop-queens: swifties, etc.
- Marxists: Marxist-leninists
- Nerds: ethical hackers, anarchists, die-hard-Linux-enthusiasts etc.
- Eco-Queers: radical activists
- Christians: evangelicals
- Consumers: ?
- Musk-Fanboys: Crypto-Bros
- Gamers: Streamers
- Harry Potter: Potter Heads
And if they are coming, even if it might feel wrong to think that way, we do need to think in which state these collectives currently are and which of them we should invite to join the Fediverse and promote it in their collectives and which are currently in not a good state, and we should try to keep away from the Fediverse for now. In my opinion, the Christian/traditional collective and the crypto collective are not in a good state currently.
It can be said in general that, because they are settlers, the first members of the collectives that will come will be rather radical, outcasts, having nothing to lose, meaning they will push the collectives in the Fediverse to their radical edges, straining their principles or overstepping them, meaning it will at the beginning even harder to keep them together and uphold principles of liberality and cooperation. First there will probably be chaos. Who comes into the Fediverse to help build it, usually wants something out of it: some dream to come true. To reach some kind of promised land, straining the room the Fediverse gives.
But as already seen on the Fediverse, this seems to be manageable: the Fediverse may actually be the place in which the collectives might breathe again and find their stance again to fight the un-democratic forces in its own middle. Maybe it actually has enough room to give all of these dreams enough space that they might just seem possible, while always keeping them from becoming reality by checks from the other collectives.
In a sense, this is also re-assuring: it doesn’t really change that much. Everything already exists on the web, it will just soon even more come to the light and hopefully, we manage to pull it back onto a healthier course.
What we definitely need to prevent is the world tumbling into a world war because they don’t understand the power of their own technology, like it was in World War 1, and which is considered by many (though I don’t completely agree on this) to be the root catastrophe of the twentieth century. Why not learn from history and just don’t do it this time and instead unite and talk? After all, we all have the right to strive for happiness, whatever that might look like, as long as it stays under the hood of liberal democracy.
The silver lining in all of this is that most of the collectives are already here: Christian, Marxists, Harry Potter Fans, Crypto bros, and it works fine enough. At the same time, the Fediverse is still little, but to unite the web and overcome these boundaries that divide us, it needs to grow.
But for that, we need to untangle the whole unfortunate situation of the quarrelling collectives in walled gardens and get them in the Fediverse somehow.
A Possible Solution: A Union with the H.P. Collective (the Queer-Potter-Nerd-Coalition)
I think we can agree that the current situation isn’t exactly great:
It simply doesn’t work like that. It leaves us divided and produces more and more conflicts, which have their effect in the real world as well. The Fediverse is the only thing that can save this from escalating. Now some people will say that some of these collectives we don’t want on the Fediverse. But if someone should be for plurality, it should be those in the Fediverse (as long as they hold themselves to certain principles of course)! But how to get this whole thing started?
Not that it will be very easy to pull the collectives out of their walled garden misery. Many sure still want to stay. The pop queens for example just like the consumers will surely not be interested in building their own place on the web. They want everything already setup nice and clean. And while the gamers probably have the second-best builders (after all, they are already starting to build their own Metaverse on Roblox and Minecraft) they currently have their own problem with toxicity.
So far, the coalition with the queer collective has proven to be very beneficial for both sides, but it won’t be enough: we still need an important ingrediency, maybe the most important of it all: stories and a collective with a fable for them. And in the best case, it would also be willing to help building the Fediverse. The Potter collective has lots of artists, they are the masters of fanfiction, as well as builders and have also deep roots in the queer collective (even though culturally, they are currently someway at odds).
Instead, if we take a look at the people that are already on Threads and that will soon join the Fediverse. Let’s face it: most of them only know walled gardens. They simply won’t get the Fediverse for a long time. The potter heads on the other hand, were always there when the web made a new shift, and they have definitely emancipated themselves from Rowling. And even if some of them aren’t: discuss it with them. The Fediverse is big enough for this. Let’s show the world what the Fediverse is capable of in terms of overcoming borders and in terms of plurality while still fighting for our values. And with their stories and sheer cultural impact, they could give the whole thing some kind of momentum.
In this sense, I think the intolerance of the queer collective stems from the experience that they had on the web in the last decades: that of abuse and harassment in online spaces because of a lack of moderation in spaces operated by the consumer collectives, like for example on Tumblr and big walled garden social media. And because of that, they are now very protective of whom they want to ally with. But this could proof to be ineffective. I think when building a new web that should not be dominated by the consumer collective, we should get all the help that we can get. If we instead try to create the perfect save space, we will only further radicalize. Let’s not kid ourselves that only Christians can develop totalitarian, sect-like structures if pushing for too much safety.
In summary: Potters are alright, and more than that: they could be very good allies in their skills and in their spirit. So yes, I think the best collective to seek out would be the Potter Heads, because they are the ones that could be actually interested in building their own place on the web, as well as having the right conviction to hold against the bad parts of the web. Because they did it before: they build their forums, their own websites, they will be a driving force of the Fediverse anyways, the question is whether we will greet them or try to fight them. If we could win them as our allies, we could really create a shift on the web and it also makes sense: the evangelicals used to burn Harry Potter books. Harry Potter used to be avant-garde! Let’s not forget that.
This could already be enough to shift the tide on the web towards democracy: maybe consumerism, Swifties and Gamers will move over and we can divide evangelicals/trumpists and crypto bros!
I think, it is quite promising:
- The Nerds would have the tech
- The Queers would have the moral conviction for moderation and building save communities
- The Potters would have the stories and cultural heritage to fill it with life
For the rest of the web: we are actually more united than we think; in this
sense: Nerds, Queer Folks and Potter Heads Unite! The Swifties, Gamers and
Consumers will follow on foot!
Instead of hiding away in our shelters, hoping that somehow, it will all turn out all right, we should do what we do best: building. For example a Harry Potter/Hogwarts instance on Lemmy and Mastodon. We should actively aim for a better position on the web of the future and by this, being able to shape its development instead of just reacting to it.
Fungiverse Tales 