Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

I bet you're wondering how we got here...

CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE

DEC 22, 2022

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I’m just so angry.

It’s been boiling and bubbling (and toiling and troubling) for awhile now. Not just since a spoilt, sadistic emerald heir stole—and yes, I am using that word; I’m using it deliberately and with fury aforethought—Twitter out from under the people who created it and made it the “town square” that so many seething gargoyles want to control.

Not even (only) since 2015 when that same space became a fascist’s favorite trench from which to bomb democracy. Since the mid-aughts, really.

Maybe earlier.

Maybe the early 90s, if I’m being honest.

I’m sure you can already tell from those numbers that this is going to get long. That’s what fucking happens when you smear shit all over the microblogging platform that corralled my primal screaming into a character limit. Take that away and I don’t have to replace ands with ampersands or pick and choose what profane adverbs to use. I get them all back.

So strap the fuck in because I am livid and I’ve trimmed a lot of goddamned words in the last 14 years. Having a Substack means I don’t bloody have to anymore.

LET’S DO SOME HISTORY SHIT.

I’ve always rather liked the year I was born, 1979. The cuspy Oregon trail Xennial micro-generation to which I belong. It means I’ve seen a lot of transitions I might have missed had my parents not both been oldest children who had me young. All my siblings are significantly younger than me and missed a great deal of what I remember. Add to that a very politically active mother, a digital early-adopter father, and a creepily good memory and you have an elder millennial who nevertheless recalls some key Gen X touchpoints from a tiny child’s point of view. I’ve always valued that perspective as time and the internet has gone on, and it sure as fuck makes me madder now than I ever would’ve been if MySpace was my introduction to social media networks.

So this clown car isn’t just going back to the turn of the millennium or GeoCities, but to Granddaddy Prodigy.

Prodigy, for the youngs, was a kind of proto-AOL pre-internet. It strove to do the same thing AOL eventually did: make “going online” a thing any regular person could easily do, instead of a technical process only technically-minded people even knew about. It was silo’d and its UI made simple and a little cartoony so random suburban children could use it. There wasn’t a TON to do besides the most rudimentary online shopping, a few games that you could play with strangers, and something like chatrooms and email, though neither were called that. (I don’t remember what they were called as I was a tiny baby 12 year old at the time. I remember a yellow and black interface and that’s about it.)

The thing I liked most on Prodigy was a kind of penpal service where you could be matched with other users and send messages back and forth. The process was much more like email/letters than instant message—nothing about Prodigy was instant, I cannot fully express how 1991 all this was. I had nice conversations with old ladies in the Midwest and for a lonely kid, that was everything. I wasn’t judged for being a kid; I was a good writer even then and it was never obvious how young I was. It was a nice place where people wanted to talk to me, a thing I found vanishingly difficult to acquire in the real world. And because Prodigy was the safe plush padded rubber bounce playground version of the internet, I literally never saw anything that would so much qualify as “not that nice.” It wasn’t Usenet, where forum culture was already a thing and you could run into some very nasty treatment (and topics) without warning. It was just…nice.

But this is what I remember most about Prodigy, and I have thought about it just about weekly since 1991. That’s not hyperbole. I think about it every time something I enjoyed online gets ruined by greedy companies or narcissistic despots and/or billionaires or just plain users who love witnessing pain more than anything else in their lives.

I saw an article in my dad’s morning newspaper about Prodigy. And I obviously wanted to read it immediately because I already felt this was an important, powerful thing that I loved. This ability to talk to other people and connect with them without cruelty or judgment.

The headline was:

PRODIGY SAYS: STOP TALKING TO EACH OTHER AND START BUYING THINGS

I was stung. I was hurt. I was…doing something wrong? Something Prodigy, the best thing ever, didn’t like? Just by talking to a nice granny in Minnesota? I was twelve. I didn’t understand. A minute ago it hadn’t even been possible to buy things without physically going to a store. In many ways, it really still wasn’t. There was no Amazon. No eBay. The crap you could buy on Prodigy was random, weird, often useless, the kind of tat you’d see in a bargain bin at the grocery store. And anyway, I was a kid. I couldn’t buy anything on Prodigy. This was not an era where many parents even had credit cards, debit cards didn’t exist, online currencies like Robux were barely even science fiction, and I certainly didn’t have access to anything approaching invisible lightspeed money. It was baffling. You couldn’t put a dollar into a screen. What the fuck? What did Prodigy want from me? I was just lonely and no one listened to me except Granny Minnesota who told me how to make eyeshadow look not-insane and said it was okay to mostly like books more than people, because mostly she did too.

If I didn’t figure out how to buy things from the screen, would this one solitary place where I felt like I mattered be taken away from me?

Well, turns out…kind of. Yeah.

Prodigy was upset that people were, by and large, using the free communication service they tossed on there just to have more content and not their weird Random Garbage You Don’t Need Storefront. And in many ways, that complaint has only gotten louder over the decades. Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop providing content for free and start paying us for the privilege. Stop shining sunlight on horrors and start advocating for more of them. Stop making communities and start weaponizing misinformation to benefit your betters.

It’s the same. It’s always been the same. Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control.

Stop being human. A mindless bot who makes regular purchases is all that’s really needed.

Over and over again since that prodigal moment of shame and hurt and confusion, I’ve joined online communities, found so much to love there, made friends and created unique spaces that truly felt special, felt like places worth protecting. And they’ve all, eventually, died. For the same reasons and through the same means, though machinations came from a parade of different bad actors. It never really mattered who exactly killed and ate these little worlds. The details. It’s all the same cycle, the same beasts, the same dark hungers.

1. Internet good! Want to make website.

2. Oh no need users. People no use non-storefront site with nothing to do on it.

3. Provide a bunch of loss-leader tools to let users make their own reasons to use the site. Chatrooms, blogs, messaging, etc. Use good moderation to make non-monster humans feel safe expressing themselves and feel nice about site so they use it more.

4. People love site! Use all the free tools to connect with each other and learn and not be lonely and maybe even make a name for themselves sometimes.

5. Hey stop talking and start buying things. Internet not supposed to make only some money. Internet supposed to make all money. It’s the rules.

6. People don’t really want what little a site that’s now solely supported by the free content created by the community has to offer. They want the community.

7. Yell about it. Insult userbase. Blanket site with ads. Get rid of moderation. Moderation keeps out users who will spend money to be mean. Oooh right-wing press LOTS of dollars into screens. Sell user data to anyone who wants it. Crack down on marginalized communities because your advertisers/investors don’t like them. Get VC capital. Do an IPO. Splinter formerly-free services and start charging for them. Probably don’t pay any attention to the oncoming train of changing trends and don’t bother adapting to them, because with the help of evil dickholes, you’re making money now, so why bother?

8. Everyone is mad.

9. Sell the people you brought together on purpose to large corporation, trash billionaire, or despotic government entity who hates that the site’s community used those connective tools to do a revolution.

10. Everyone who invested their time, heart, labor, love, businesses and relationships into this site is shit out of luck and scattered to the winds. Maybe they find what they had again, maybe they don’t. But your shareholders and/or buddies have more money so who cares?

11. In a couple of years, what happened finally comes out, but it’s just a Wired article no one reads. The site may or may not still be technically accessible, but it doesn’t matter. What made it good is gone, because what made it good was us.

12. Use new money to fund weird right-wing shit that hurts the people who made website popular because right-wing shit says no taxes and new money hates taxes.

Lather rinse, repeat. Prodigy, geocities, collegeclub.com, MySpace, Friendster, Livejournal, Tumblr, Twitter. More besides. More next. And if one were to get big enough, like Facebook, this cycle doesn’t stop, it just sort of happens all at the same time without interruptions in service. All while we diaspora from site to site hoping there’s at least one more goddamned Diaryland Andrew out there who gives a fuck about the little universe they created and tempted human beings to set up their lives in.

That’s right, fucking Diaryland, of all those places and their kin, is still up, still run by Andrew out of, presumably, ancient Prothean servers run by the multi-generational families of spiders living in them. It still has the same site design it always did. It still has some users. A few new ones every day, even. If you go through a retrieval process, you can still get back your old content. If you pay two bucks to sign up to prove you’re not a bot, you can live the old life again. It’s never been on the stock market or cannibalized by corporations or politicians, though with 2.2 million users in the year 2000, he certainly had offers. I can’t imagine it’s profitable. I have a hard time believing it ever really was. Diaryland was the first networked blogging site. It started in 1999. Created by a Canadian kid because “I just like making little things.” Before Livejournal or MySpace or Facebook or any of them. just a guy making a thing that people liked and giving a shit about it.

All the rest are gone. Dismantled for parts and sold off with zero understanding that the only thing of any value the site ever offered was the community, its content, its connection, its possibilities, its knowledge. And that can’t be sold with the office space and the codebase. These sites exist because of what we do there. But at any moment they can be sold out from under us, to no benefit or profit to the workers—yes, workers, goddammit—who built it into something other than a dot com address and a dusty login screen, yet to the great benefit and profit of those who, more often than not, use the money to make it more difficult for people to connect to and accept each other positively in the future.

And because these rich men and their unconnected hearts trading our online homes back and forth don’t understand that, they inevitably fuck up the place so badly they have to sell it for pennies within a few years, so it was all for nothing but like four guys buying boats, and THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS EVER.

It just keeps happening.

Stop talking and start buying things.

I want to say that because I am an elder millennial, I am sanguine about it. The ebb and flow of the social media life cycle. The inevitability of exodus. The inexorable headlong entropic rush toward the heat-death of anything good on the internet. I want to say it’ll be okay if we all lose Twitter, we’ll make a new place like we always do. I want to be a nice zen Granny Minnesota for you, and tell you there are eyeshadow shades other than electric blue, the lightest color gets dusted gently across your browbone, and when you’re lonely, I’ll always be there on the other side of this screen. Nothing gold can stay, mono no aware, attachment is the beginning of suffering. Twas ever thus, and ever thus ‘twill be.

But I’m just so angry.

Twitter is bigger than the sites this usually happens to. Maybe the biggest yet—the internet is still young, after all. Its level of cultural penetration can barely be understood, and far outstrips the raw number of its users, its profit, its share price, its features. It took a lot to make it possible to treat Twitter like Livejournal.

And while Twitter hurts, I’m not sure anything will ever hurt as much as Livejournal did. It feels like no one even remembers anymore what happened to lovely, flawed, dog-eared, wacky old LJ in the twilight of the aughts and the dawn of the tens. Even though in this year of our lord 2022, when there are some pretty fucking good reasons to remember it, and learn its lessons.

At the time, like many of these strange movements to weaponize human connection, it was so hard to see the whole picture. But the long and short of it is: Russia killed Livejournal. The Russian government, using corporate entities. Before that government (not it alone, never alone, but in concert with the worst of many natures) helped to give us Trump and the reboot of fascism and deployed a hundred quiet tools to divert our friends and neighbors and relatives into a deep well of dark illogic, pain, hate, and violence, it took a silly little space where a bunch of nerds and writers and artists and fans made a digital home.

Because the other people who made Livejournal their home were Russian dissidents. Most of English-speaking Livejournal never even knew how heavily the site was used by Russophones, how active it was in organizing intellectual and real world resistance to Putin’s tightening power and repression of thought. It all happened in Cyrillic, and we were busy finding out what Buffy character we were, and Livejournal never really had the tools to connect large inter-communicating islands in the sea of its total userbase. You grew audiences through connections and meta-connections you already trusted. Most people just wrote about their day. American politics were discussed, but never a huge subsection of the discourse. There were very few “celebrities” beyond SFF writers and big name fans (because it took a lot of effort to make regular long-form posts. REALLY A LOT I CANNOT BELIEVE I USED TO WRITE PIECES LIKE THIS FOUR OR FIVE TIMES A WEEK JESUS EFF) and if something blew up, it usually did so by getting picked up by a more popular, outside site.

So that there was this massive portion of Livejournal all conducted in Russian was just…not widely known. Certainly not that Russian LJ was bigger than English LJ. Certainly not that it was being used to productively protest and agitate against a growing fascist government. Hell, back then, most regular people thought Putin was pretty okay. It was all just…taking place on the other side of a garden wall that no one thought was a wall.

So when Livejournal was sold, not to Viacom or Google, but to SixApart, a company no one had ever heard of, it was confusing. As was its refusal to develop anything like a usable mobile app. When fanfic communities started getting banned for gay content in the name of “protecting the children,” it was alarming and confusing. When it started going down regularly due to constant DDoS attacks, the new owner accused the community of trying to blackmail and destroy him for questioning what the hell was going to happen to all of us, when the Russian Prime Minister was commenting on fucking Livejournal, and when Russian users started put posts in English to let others know what was going on…we all just felt so helpless. It was sold to SUPMedia, a Russian company, and by 2016, had moved its servers to Russia and changed the entire site to conform with that good old very free and inclusive Russian law, but by that time, the community had long fled. Which was the point. Make it unusable and unreliable, bleed off the Westerners and the eye of Western media, and use the database to find and shut down dissenters.

And as hard as it was for us to lose that space where so many of us found family and work and connection, I cannot begin to imagine what those brave dissidents lost. What Russia lost. What they are still losing.

It was a small piece of what was to come. Like Gamergate and the Puppies, an experiment to practice taking apart a minor but culturally influential community and develop techniques to do it again, more efficiently, more quickly, with less attention. To lay out a reliable pathway to commit harm and lie about it for so long and in so many ways that by the time the truth is available, it doesn’t matter, because the harm is a foundational part of the system we’re living in. The harm is the new status quo.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

I can’t promise what’s happening with Twitter is just the public meltdown of a malignant narcissist. I can’t promise it’s not more practice. Twitter is much bigger, much more influential, and much more ingrained into the fabric of modern society than Livejournal ever was. It’s a big bite to swallow. But it’s happened before. We know governmental entities with vested interests in eliminating avenues of effective dissent and the dissemination of truth (Saudi Arabia, China, others) provided funding for Musk to complete his purchase when he couldn’t otherwise pull it off. We see him, barely months at the helm, take off any remaining mask of progressivism or moral purpose and speed-run a descent into radicalization while working day and night, not even to make money, but to change anything that might smack of mercy or kindness or acceptance of others. To welcome monsters and ban journalists. To get people who’ve managed not to fall into the right-wing oubliette to turn against Ukraine, turn against vaccines, turn against Jews, turn against LGBTQ+ community but especially gender-nonconforming human fucking beings, turn against fact-checking, turn against economic aid packages meant to benefit them and not him, turn against liberal democracy, turn against each other.

Yeah, Twitter was a mess. Sure. Any sufficiently large gathering of humans won’t always be a great time. But it wasn’t a hell

Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop talking to each other and start hurting each other.

Hurting each other is just ever so much more useful than talking and connecting. Leaving people alone doesn’t produce narcissistic supply. It doesn’t feed the need to control and force that some humans, it seems, have always been and always will be born with.

And look, I’m not going to sit here and go full anti-capitalist vision quest on you. I understand these sites aren’t free to run. Servers, bandwidth, coders, mods, everything costs. We all have to eat and the costs involved in the operation of these kinds of networks can get unreal and unwieldy. And until we achieve post-scarcity, all these things must be done by people who also need to eat and live. I surely don’t expect to be handed mature social networks all run by Andrews out of the good of their hearts and the pleasure of making little things.

And I also understand that we are the generation who has to go through this part of it. We’re the ones born in time to be forced to make the rules and defend them. To say hey maybe one guy shouldn’t be able to own the village square. Because it was never remotely possible before. It’s all new and we have to figure it out. To agitate and legislate and be constantly vigilant. Maybe it’ll all seem so obvious and settled in 50 years, but those are our 50 years and no one else is going to have to be the first to have these conversations and try to make policy out of them. That’s us, it’s our lot, and it sucks ass, but this technology is the singularity we geeks have been talking about, and it turns out it’s not just impossible to imagine life on the other side of it before it happens, but it’s really fucking hard to figure out life on the other side of it once you get there, too. This is our actual Oregon Trail. We have to walk it on foot. We have to be the ones who fuck up and we have to be the ones who fix it. We have to be the ones who learn the lessons the hard way and write it all down so someday people get to just hop in a plane and sleep for five hours rather than die in the snow wrapped around our shivering children, praying for a dawn that is far too distant to help us now.

And we’ve seen very clearly this year that even progress that seems obvious and settled 50 years down the track is always vulnerable to people who confuse the ignorance of their own childhoods with the absence of societal problems.

But ultimately, what happens to our places and what happens to liberal democratic culture is only somewhat about money. If you think that’s not true, that it’s only capitalism that curdles the milk, ask yourself whether you think, even with all the money in the world, you ever could pay Amy Coney Barrett or Marjorie Taylor Green or Lindsey Graham or Josh Hawley or Andrew Tate or Brett Kavanaugh or Jim Jordan enough to become a progressive feminist eco-warrior activist.

There isn’t enough money printed to change who they are. Elon Musk is (or was) the richest man on Earth. He’s losing money like a teenage nosebleed every time he goes further to the right. This is just the shape of his soul, it’s not a feint for profit. It’s not just about making enough money to keep the servers going and buy everyone in the office a house, it’s not even about making shareholders rich, it’s fundamentally about the yawning, salivating need to control and hurt. To express power not by what you can give, but by what you can take away. And deeper still, this strange compulsion of conservatism to force other humans to be just like you. To clone their particular set of neuroses and fears and revulsions and nostalgias and convictions and traumas so that they never have to experience anything but themselves, copied and pasted unto the end of time. A kind of viral solipsism that cannot bear the presence of anything other than its own undifferentiated self, propagating not by convincing or seduction or debate, but by the eradication of any other option.

And I’m so tired of it. I’m so tired of running from that Nothing, that creeping enforced sameness, that self-programming grey goo of empty fear of the Other. Running from oasis to oasis in a desert of uncaring where empathy never wets the sand.

I’m so tired of just harmlessly getting together with other weird geeks and going to what amounts to a digital pub after work and waking up one day to find every pint poisoned. Over and over again. Like the poison wants us specifically. Like it knows we will always make its favorite food: vulnerability, connection, difference. I’m so tired of lunch photos and fanfic and stupid jokes and keeping in touch with family across time zones and making friends and starting cottage industries and pursuing hobbies and meeting soulmates and expressing thoughts and creating identities and loving TV shows and reading books and getting to know a few of your heroes and raising kids and making bookshelves and knitting and painting and fixing sinks and first dates and homemade jam and, yes, figuring out what Buffy characters we are, listening and learning and hoping and just fucking talking to each other weaponized against us. Having our enthusiasm over the smallest joys of everyday life invaded by people who long ago forgot their value and turned into fodder for the death of thought, the burial of love.

These were our spaces, little people who just wanted to connect. And one by one, they get turned into battlefields where we have to fight just as hard to exist as we do in the real world. And every time a few more people you never thought the Absorbaloff of hatred and gleeful sadism would slurp up don’t come along to the next safe place, and start trying to take it away before anyone can get there.

How dare they? How dare they take everyday life and load it into a cannon just to fire it back in our faces?

One awful man should not be able to destroy something the world created together, for good or ill. No, we didn’t create the code or rent the offices, but without the words we put together in those little boxes, Twitter is and was nothing. Humanity made that place, and it is all our best and our worst. One unimaginably rich man should not be able to take away the livelihoods of millions of people just paying the fucking rent—and if I see one more smug post telling people to just delete it and they’ll be better off, I’m going to turn into a fucking dragon and burn this place to the ground.

Twitter is and was the home to so many small artists who clawed their way to an audience, who had the opportunity to be seen by the world without the intermediary of already-established success. It was precious and vital to making a living from art, and not just art but activism and craft industries and intellectual output that so many think should never make anyone’s living. And those people are going to lose so much because Elon Musk needed to drink from the attention fire hose. Those people are going to lose their audience and their opportunities, all for him. I’m going to lose so much. You have to be very famous to be safe from the effects of your biggest microphone being crammed up a rich white man’s ass and set to reverb. I am certainly not. Few of us are.

This man I was assured was going to save humanity for so many years is going to eradicate independent artists’ ability to feed ourselves and our families with our own labor. And if he ever notices, he’ll have a good laugh about it.

I’m just so angry.

I just like making little things.

I want to tell people about eyeshadow and loneliness and Minnesota and Prodigy and how good books can be and how to make cake and how to not despair. It’s all I’ve ever wanted, since a company first made me feel shame for not buying enough product to justify expressing love.

And we will. I’m sure. Somehow. We will find or make another place, eventually. It won’t be exactly the same. It never really is. But we’ll gather again, and they’ll burn it down again, and we’ll start over again. Some of us will lose everything in the cracks between safe spaces. Some of us won’t. It’s impossible to predict who will be who. We just keep trying. Keep trying not to let each other fall. I’m exhausted but that doesn’t mean I get to stop.

Doesn’t mean we get to stop.

Don’t ever stop talking to each other. It’s what the internet is really and truly for. Talk to each other and listen to each other. But don’t ever stop connecting. Be a prodigy of the new world. Stand up for the truth no matter how often they take our voices away and try to replace the idea of reality with fucking insane Lovecraftian shit. Don’t give up, don’t let them have this world. Love things. Love people. Love the small and the weird and the new.

Because that’s what fascists can’t do. They don’t love white people or straight people or silent women or binary enforced gender or forced birth or even really money. They want those things to be the only acceptable or even visible choices, but they don’t love them. They don’t even want to think about them. They want them to be automatically considered superior and universally mandated so they don’t have to think about them—or else what do you think the fury over other people wearing masks was ever about? The need to be right without thinking about it, and never have to see anything that wakens a spark of doubt in their own choices.

Obey, do not imagine, do not differ.

That’s nothing to do with love. Love is gentle, love is kind, remember? They need the attention being terrible brings them, but they don’t love it any more than a car loves gas. Sometimes I don’t even think they love themselves. Sometimes I’m pretty sure of it. They certainly never seem happy, even when they win. Musk doesn’t seem happy at all.

Geeks, though. Us weird geeks making communities in the ether? We love. We love so stupidly hard. We try to be happy. We get enthusiastic and devote ourselves to saving whales and trees and cancelled science fiction shows and each other. The energy we make in these spaces, the energy we make when we support and uplift and encourage and excite each other is something people like Musk can never understand or experience, which is why they keep smashing the windows in to try and get it, only to find the light they hungered for is already gone. Moved on, always a little beyond their reach.

Okay. I think I can do it now. I can be your kindly elder millennial Granny Minnesota. Your pal with a pen. I can see you as you are and love you sight unseen and be lonely with you on the other side of a strange and beautiful square of glowing plastic that contains nothing less than the future.

Because that’s what we have to do. Be each other’s pen pals. Talk. Share. Welcome. Care. And just keep moving. Stay nimble. Maybe we have to roll the internet back a little and go back to blogs and decentralized groups and techy fiddling and real-life conventions and idealists with servers in their closets. Back to Diaryland and Minnesota and grandiose usernames and thoughts that take ever so much more than 280 characters to express. That’s okay. We can do that. We know how. We’re actually really good at it. Love things and love each other. We’re good at that, too. Protect the vulnerable. Make little things. Wear electric blue eyeshadow. Take a picture of your breakfast. Overthink Twin Peaks. Get angry. Do revolutions. Find out what Buffy character you are. Don’t get cynical. Don’t lose joy. Be us. Because us is what keeps the light on when the night comes closing in. Us doesn’t have a web address. We are wherever we gather. Mastodon, Substack, Patreon, Dreamwidth, AO3, Tumblr, Discord, even the ruins of Twitter, even Facebook and Instagram and Tiktok, god help us all. Even Diaryland.

It doesn’t matter. They’re just names. It doesn’t matter who owns them. Because we own ourselves and our words and the minute the jackals arrive is the same minute we put down the first new chairs in the next oasis. We make our place when we’re together. We make our magic when we connect, typing hands to typing hands.

Hello, world. Come in from the cold. This will be a good place. For awhile. And then we’ll make another one.

Stop buying things and start talking to each other. They’ve always known that was how they lose.

And remember, the lightest shade goes over the browbone, as delicate as a new year.

243 Comments

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Cynthia White

Dec 23, 2022Liked by Catherynne M. Valente

I... this should be be printed on beautiful tie-dyed paper and made into paper airplanes and big origami flowers and spread around the world. Printed on t-shirts, painted on park benches, put on posters boards in cafeterias and etched in stone on large tablets in dry arid lands where the tablets won't decay. Yes, everything and all of what you said.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

That's such a beautiful image, thank you. I really didn't expect this kind of response at all, and I think the thing it says most starkly is how much we all hunger for kindness and community right now, maybe more than we have in a good while.

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Mark Mullen

Jun 25, 2023

This is a thing you can use for that.

https://www.rorshok.com/ourzines/

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Cynthia White

Jun 27, 2023

Thank you for this information. I love this idea, and will share with people who might be interested (when I have the energy).

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Melissa

Melissa’s Substack

Dec 22, 2022

"Twitter is and was the home to so many small artists who clawed their way to an audience, who had the opportunity to be seen by the world without the intermediary of already-established success."

This is where I finally started crying. I've been online for nearly as long as you (I'm a little older, but wasn't able to get online until about '96), and have been through so many lost communities. Hell, LJ was where I found you and your work. Twitter, though. Twitter was the one where I was finally able to start seriously thinking I could make it as an artist. Twitter is where I found a community of artists, writers, and other weird little creators. The art community in my physical area isn't particularly online and is pretty much impossible to get into (and weirdly insular about letting non-artists near their work) unless you've already been an established gallery artist for years. Twitter is what allowed me to find my people. Twitter is where people started finding me and *my* art. Losing it is breaking my heart, and I am so. damned. angry. that we keep having to pack up and start over again every few years. I'm tired of losing people, and I'm terrified that my fragile, infant art business won't be able to survive the loss of community and I'm so. damned. angry. about all of it.

Sorry for the rant. That line, in particular, resonated a lot.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 23, 2022Author

I'm really frightened, too. All the sites I mentioned are where I slowly built my career. Twitter is my main avenue for keeping it. I don't know what's going to happen and the unfairness of it rankles so hard. I'm sorry you're there, too. I hope it doesn't turn out the way we think. Big hug.

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Punk Bot

Dec 27, 2022

I'm wondering if all of the impacted artists and creative people who used Twitter to find their audience and who are now losing business because of this fascist dimwit would be able to put together some sort of class action lawsuit? I mean he's a billionaire with high powered lawyers, but maybe enough people working together can manage to do something.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

I think if he actually does manage to bring down the whole site, that could be possible. But as it stands right now (obligatory I Am Not a Lawyer) I think it would be very hard to prove audience-loss was directly because of Musk. Twitter doesn't have an exit-survey when you delete your account. And many will simply drift away without deleting, which leaves no trace at all.

On top of that...well, this very essay has shown me that despite the hemorrhaging, it IS still possible to gain followers and build on Twitter. This is the first time I HAVE gained instead of lost followers since his take over, and I deeply suspect the gain would have been in the thousands (based on other things of mine that have achieved this kind of reach in the past--and the audience increase on Substack in comparison) instead of the few hundreds if it had happened last year, but that's impossible to prove in any litigable way.

But if he takes the site down entirely, a lot of avenues of redress open up, especially when you consider that many, many towns and cities use Twitter as their primary emergency channel to communicate with citizens, etc.

Long before any of that happens, though, I suspect the EU and his flagrant violations of their laws will put the pain on, far worse than Tesla stock faceplanting.

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Heather Etchevers

Human in Science

Jan 17, 2023

As a voter in the E.U., I will do what I can to make this happen. I'm not optimistic about redress of any kind, in particular attaining site-building, paid or voluntary workers.

From across oceans, it may seem that the Union is unified, but from over here, it's clearly as fragmented as elsewhere. Only by luck and in a relative sense have things worked out so far that it looks preferable from afar. We are all learning that nothing is inevitable in social consensus.

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Lee Hulme (it/its)

Inklings from Lee K Hulme

Dec 22, 2022

Well damn, I just got a whole blast of your dragon fire and I love it. This is the right sort of rant - the one that actually means something, that comes from way deep down, that just needs to be screamed like a warrior's cry as she thunks her shield and sword and races into battle.

Phew. That's some energy.

I love connection, the internet has been such a wonderful place, even with all the assholes, and I've found wonder abd friendship and love and so much more here. And I've lost and moved on and lost again and moved on again. It's a bit like a real-life roguelite 😆

I loved this. Thank you.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 22, 2022Author

You're so very welcome.

And you know, just making this post, already, I've been engaging more and in more places online, in the ways I used to, than I have in a long while. It might take a little extra work, but no one can buy us.

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Marty Hale-Evans

Dec 23, 2022·edited Dec 23, 2022

I want to give you 50,000 standing ovations and hugs. I could barely read this from shouting YES so hard.

So few of us remember Prodigy, but let me tell you this: I was the community leader/lead moderator for the Homelife bulletin boards on Prodigy. I was a contractor that every day talked to those people yelling at each other about cars and recipes and abortion and shih tzus and everything else that mattered to them, and I (and my team) found and pulled down the people who tried to ruin it. I might well have been watching over you and that grandma. And I told the Prodigy management over and over that the community was the value. They wanted people to log in and look at news and stock market reports, but I kept telling them that people logged in to talk to each other. They never believed me. I was a veteran of online communities for several years by then, so I knew in my bones what that meant. They decided the way to monetize the BBs was to switch from a flat monthly subscription rate to an hourly rate, and it was pandemonium. Ironic now that no service is metered and the social media sites want nothing more than to get people connected to them as long as possible.

Anyway.... I hear you so hard, and you're right. As a nearly-40-year veteran who kind of considers her nationality to be "Internetian", I'm right there fighting with you on the side of love, the thing we do better than anybody.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

My god, thank you for your service, seriously. I can't imagine what it must have been like doing that jobs in the pre-wild west days of the internet. Prodigy could have been THE internet if they weren't so stupidly short-sighted.

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docmommaVA

Dec 24, 2022

I *met my husband* on a music board on Prodigy.... Thanks for this, Cat -- Steve Silberman shared this on Post, maybe you want to give it a try there. If you're up to potentially be disappointed one more time.

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Marty Hale-Evans

Dec 24, 2022

Represent - I met my husband a few years before that on BITNET Relay. 😄

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docmommaVA

Dec 24, 2022

Whenever I gave my son crap about spending too much time online, he rolled his eyes at me.... Couldn't argue.

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LunarLoony

Jun 19, 2023

I met my wife on deviantART. Slightly newer than Prodigy, but still!

Another site that's been burnt to a crisp.

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A K

Dec 23, 2022·edited Dec 28, 2022

Your article made me cry.

Here's one thing I remember about LJ that I will enthuse about to anyone who will listen: the LJ FriendFinder. It was a tool that would take your "interests" list -- which, you may recall, was just a list of things you typed out, separated by commas, that would link itself, hashtag-style, to other users who'd typed the same thing in their list -- and crank through all other users' interests, and spew out a list of LJ users you'd likely be friends with, ranked by the number of interests you had in common.... BUT (and here's the genius part), it was also *weighted* based on how rare a shared interest was. So if I typed in some super-obscure band, or some random phrase like "driving at night with the windows down," and someone else had the same thing, they'd appear at or nearer to the top of the FriendFinder list. So you could find a bunch of like-minded weirdos who enjoyed exactly the same oddball stuff you did.

Genius. And yep, I found friends. And kept them. Why the hell hasn't anyone else done this?

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 23, 2022Author

Oh man I forgot about that. It really was so good.

Meanwhile substack is just now considering whether to have "previous" and "next" entry buttons...

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Dave Hogg

Dec 23, 2022

LJ FriendFinder is how my wife found me. It was Labor Day weekend, she had just filed for divorce, and she was stuck in a tiny apartment with a 7-year-old who didn't understand why this was happening.

She just wanted to talk to an adult, and because I was a nerd who also lived in the greater Detroit area, I popped up as one of the top suggestions. She messaged me via AIM, we had a rom-com full of missed connections, and finally started talking. That was 20 years ago, and we've been married for the last 15 of them.

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A K

Dec 28, 2022

Dave! This story is amazing and makes my cranky old heart happy. You Found Your Friend! You should write it all out, I'd read the longer version. Wishing you both a lifetime of health and happiness together.

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Dave Hogg

Dec 28, 2022

Since I wrote that comment, I have started writing the entire story. Thus far, I've gotten through the crazy missed connections and the nine months we put off meeting each other - my last line is "That's when she saw me. She screamed and ran." 😂

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A K

Dec 31, 2022

CANNOT WAIT for you to hit us with a url for that!

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Patrice Fitzgerald

Feb 12, 2023

I'm an experienced self-publisher (and publisher of others) for more than a decade. If/when you get that story to book-length, be in touch and I'll walk you through how to get it in print and in ebook form. P.S. Several of my real-life and online writer friends came from Prodigy circa 1994... they still have an FB group and keep in touch after all these years. We called ourselves the "Housewife Writers." Not all of us were wives, house or otherwise, not all of us were women, and not all of us were writers, but most.

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𝕄𝕒𝕥𝕥 𝔾. 𝕃𝕖𝕘𝕖𝕣 🎨🎶🚀

My Two Cents

May 7, 2023

Can you perchance help me? I've got a couple books I'm working on...

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Patrice Fitzgerald

May 7, 2023

Hi Matt: You can find me on Facebook. Is that a place you have an account?

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𝕄𝕒𝕥𝕥 𝔾. 𝕃𝕖𝕘𝕖𝕣 🎨🎶🚀

My Two Cents

May 7, 2023

Yes, as Matt G. Leger. Feel free to message me.

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Rob T.

Dec 22, 2022

What you said here resonates with me so much. I was a Prodigy kid too (well, a Prodigy 20-something anyway), and have felt the loss of web-based communities a time or several myself. (For me, the big one was IMDb's user forums, which in retrospect were probably doomed after Amazon bought the IMDb.) More feelings stirred up here than I can easily express...but one thing for sure, I'm nominating your essay for a "related work" Hugo.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 22, 2022Author

Oh my god, thank you, that's really too kind. I just...I guess I had a lot to say.

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Dave Hogg

Dec 23, 2022

"but one thing for sure, I'm nominating your essay for a "related work" Hugo."

You won't be the only one.

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Patrice Fitzgerald

Feb 12, 2023

They'll enjoy the Puppies ref! ;-)

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Susan Mazur-Stommen

Dec 22, 2022Liked by Catherynne M. Valente

This might be the best thing I've ever read

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 22, 2022Author

Aw. geez, thanks. Just a lot of pent-up mad. Trying to do something with it, like Mr. Rogers taught us.

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dw

Jun 19, 2023

I just read this in the shadow of reddit now being destroyed, and I feel this exact rage, and thankfully have also realized that we will create our place again. I am still in the fury stage, but reading this right now is incredible, because it really puts it in perspective. This has always happened, and we just keep pushing on. Than you for writing this and sharing it.

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Bill Blondeau

Dec 27, 2022Liked by Catherynne M. Valente

"Don’t lose joy. Be us. Because us is what keeps the light on when the night comes closing in. Us doesn’t have a web address. We are wherever we gather. Mastodon, Substack, Patreon, Dreamwidth, AO3, Tumblr, Discord, even the ruins of Twitter, even Facebook and Instagram and Tiktok, god help us all. Even Diaryland.

It doesn’t matter. They’re just names. It doesn’t matter who owns them. Because we own ourselves and our words and the minute the jackals arrive is the same minute we put down the first new chairs in the next oasis. We make our place when we’re together. We make our magic when we connect, typing hands to typing hands.

Hello, world. Come in from the cold. This will be a good place. For awhile. And then we’ll make another one."

This is beautifully said, Cat.

And, reading it, I found myself realizing, "She's describing SURFING."

Not web surfing, but the real thing: paddling out, waiting on the board for a long time for a wave that you can catch... and more often than not wiping out. Paddling out again. And again.

I was never any good at surfing (I was decent at the "wiping out" part), but I did enough to understand the shape of it.

We tend to think of online communities as being analogous to real-world homes and villages, with the aspiration to permanence that that implies. I humbly submit that the rhythm and structure of finding an online community and living in it is really much more like catching waves, and working hard to stay on the board for as long as you can. No wave is permanent, but the urge to look for the next one is overwhelming.

Because the ecstasy of riding a wave when you do catch it is worth all of the work and waiting and disappointment.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

Well, you got me back, that idea of surfing the wave and waiting for the next made me tear up. Damn you, Bill!

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Kevin, your genial host

Get Off My Lawn Podcast

Dec 23, 2022Liked by Catherynne M. Valente

Not to turn it all on its ear, but you should see the history of Russia’s social media sometime. VKontakte (or VK) as the Facebook of Russia... huge active user base... open and free... until the owner was forced to sell it to the Russian government. That led to Russians seeking western social media (LJ and Facebook being two examples), hoping to avoid their government taking over their conversation again. Instead, their government just restricted access until it became too frustrating for the Russian people to bother.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

Christ, that's depressing.

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Majd Al-Shihabi

Dec 23, 2022Liked by Catherynne M. Valente

Thank you for this <3

I am reminded by this favourite quote of mine, by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, that gets quoted by the Black Socialists of America often.

"Beneath the governmental machinery, in the shadow of political institutions, out of the sight of statemen and priests, society is producing its own organism, slowly and silently; and constructing a new order, the expression of its vitality and autonomy." (1851)

This is not just about the Internet. It's about our right to self determination that is continuously at threat. Yet we find ways to escape through the cracks that don't fit into their plans, the standards that they are trying to fit us into. We escape, we queer things and cover it with rainbows and flowers and glitter. We hide in safe spaces so that we can emerge in public and maintain some sanity.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

And it's important to remember that we have ALWAYS been here. Like feminists and BIPOC activists and LGBTQ+ folk, it must be constantly recalled that we have a tradition as long as humanity, that we do NOT have to start over from scratch every generation, that we have always existed.

In any historical period or place you care to point to, there have been free thinkers and iconoclastic intellectuals and societal outliers that formed communities based on something beyond might makes right and wealth makes more right. From Socrates' corrupted Athenian youth to the radical nunneries of medieval France to the academics of golden age Islamic culture to the salons of the Enlightenment and forward and back and between. We are as much creators of this world as the elite who believe they alone own it, and that will never, ever change. Even past the apocalypse, there will be roving gangs of bookish nerds hiding among the warlords and reading by firelight.

Our fire is the glow of a screen right now, but, to quote a great 20th century thinker, it was always burning since the world's been turning.

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Amanda

Dec 22, 2022Liked by Catherynne M. Valente

Thank you Cat, I needed to read this today

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

You're so very welcome, Amanda.

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Kat Kourbeti

Honest to Blog

Dec 22, 2022Liked by Catherynne M. Valente

This made me laugh and cry on a plane across the Atlantic. I've tried to put my feelings about all this on paper (or, well, Substack) but in trying to mitigate the severity of my feelings, lest I drown in them, the result was predictably a bit detached. This was catharsis embodied, and I'm really grateful you shared your thoughts and your heart on the issue. See you around cons and the internet, and thanks for the eyeshadow advice. 💙

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

Oh I stopped trying to mitigate my mad long ago. It only serves others, never myself. Thank you for reading and feeling with me.

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Elizabeth Tai

Tai Tales - Chinese Malaysian c…

Dec 23, 2022

I've been feeling this fury and frustration building up in me about social media, Google whatnot for years now. This year it reached boiling point, and you describe my anger perfectly! Pretty tired of losing my communities over and over and over again. Not only this but being pushed around by algorithms that want you to behave or write a certain way. Each time Google pushes it's new SEO update I want to scream, "Enough, shut the eff up!"

Like you I was born in the 70s, so I saw the transition to the Internet age. The early years was so exciting. I built my first website in 1999 on Geocities. The comment threads were my social media. Then corporations took over the Internet, and I went from owner to vassal.

I'm pretty done with this paradigm.

Thanks for writing this piece.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

Most welcome.

I vividly remember working on the design for my geocities site for hours and hours in my university computer lab, making it all look as classical greek as graphics then could, being so excited to aesthetically arrange a place that was truly mine, when in the real world I could barely afford a fucking milk crate to sit on in my apartment. This stuff matters, it's always mattered.

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Andrea Tenzin Cannady

Dec 28, 2022

Oh geocities... ❤️I loved the little worlds there.. makes me think of Lambda moo text based worlds, too. I spent so much time creating a little Anne Rice-inspired geocities front porch with bougainvillea in the garden district...

Yes, the connecting has always been what mattered, where it began, where we go back to.

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Priya

Dec 23, 2022Liked by Catherynne M. Valente

First time diving into your substack, and at the risk of leaning too far in to silver linings, I had forgotten how much I love your (non-novel) long form. You’re one of the first artists I truly discovered online, and to think of that opportunity being lost for so many artists and fans alike hurts my heart. Communities will find a way through times of change, but thank you for highlighting the core of what gets lost over and over again while not giving in to the kind of fatalism that causes one to go numb.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

I've been doing it on Patreon for a good bit, but usually I try to be more organized there--I think I forgot how much I enjoy a healthy scream on the internet. Thank you for following me here, and really it does my hart good to think I was one of anyone's first online artists.

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Andrea Tenzin Cannady

Dec 26, 2022Liked by Catherynne M. Valente

Oh my, I feel you. I'm a 1971 solid Gen Xer, and remember my old prodigy I. D. (Mkmm33c) under my dad's account because I was a poor college kid. My 1991 boyfriend and I used up the free messages, so we'd post in code on the bulletin boards about what was going on that day.... Like when he was ranting about his stepmother not letting him wash his jeans at home, we turned it into a public post about the hardcore band "April's Laundry" that was "just insane, and have you heard the latest one, 'Hot Food Breaks the Fridge? ' "

Of course, as a daughter of a weird Navy guy who had Arpanet, I had been on the Internet since around 1981. I remember logging in with a telnet i.d. (and pretending to be 18 with) to chatter with some nice guy named "Psiman".

And so on... What were we saying?

Yeah.

I've always loved the connection potential online.

You inspired me to go back to my own Diaryland page, and I smiled, seeing it's all there, "underneath my eyelid," or whatever it is. I posted begging for peace on 9/11.

This is too long. But I hear you.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

Hot Food Breaks the Fridge sounds like a fucking BANGER, I love it.

And I love love love, and have always loved, that little piece of the joy of these communities: that our private jokes so specifically tied to our personal lives can become universal and shared among others who never knew the origin but still laughed along. Now I know about April's Laundry, and I'll remember it for a long while yet. Someone only last week referenced a filk I did of Baby Got Back about the weird Victorian TB wasting waif aesthetic called Baby Got Hack. In 2005. Someone I've never met in person remembers that dumb inside joke after 17 years, when even I had mostly forgotten it.

How can you EVER put a price on that?

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Andrea Tenzin Cannady

Dec 28, 2022

Aside... Totally misread that later sentence as "someone I never met in prison," and now I'm so intrigued by all the people you DID meet in the big house.

Nevermind, carry on, carry on.

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Adam K

Dec 24, 2022Liked by Catherynne M. Valente

I found you on Twitter, years ago, during the whole Bill Maher comic book thing.

And here we go again, on to the next online place. But I'm glad you're still out there and that I can still find you.

This is magnificent.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

It will never cease to amaze me that THAT brought so many people into my world. I was just pissed off and wrote it on my phone in the bathtub like five (figurative) minutes after giving birth. And yet it's continually made connections over the years. Shows how truly wrong he was.

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Dave Hogg

Dec 23, 2022

"And while Twitter hurts, I’m not sure anything will ever hurt as much as Livejournal did."

For the record, this is where I started crying.

During Labor Day weekend 2002, I made two new LJ friends - Angie and Kate. Sixteen years later, Kate sat at Henry Ford Hospital and held my hand while Angie, my wife of 11 years, underwent kidney-transplant surgery. Her donor - the woman who literally gave us a piece of herself to save Angie's life - was Kate's best friend in high school.

If LJ had only existed for those four days, it would have been the most important website in my life. It didn't. There were so many other people who changed my life. In 2022, long after LJ exploded and Russian hackers destroyed my account - I lost all of it - I'm still constantly saying "I love you" to people I either met on LJ or through the various online incarnations of Callahans. That's where a bunch of us decided to start using LJ to keep in touch.

I found fandom on LJ, which changed my life in another million ways. I discovered you on LJ, and it was another LJ friend who said "we're hosting a concert at our co-housing complex, and I really think you'll like the performer." The concert started at 8:00 and I've been madly, deeply in love with s00j since about 8:01. She kept mentioning this magical person named Cat, and she had already moved onto the fire-spinning part of the show before I realized she meant you.

I wrote long essays about my favorite authors and musicians, and they kept showing up at ConFusion and Penguicon knowing who I was. Scalzi and Scott & Justine and you...

LJ was the only thing that kept me going during those horrible three months in 2005 when my Dad checked into the hospital with gallstones and was told he'd be in the hospital for 48 hours. He died in the third hospital of the journey, without ever coming home. Months later, completely unable to scroll back through my old entries, I went through and changed the date on every post about Dad to 2100. They would always be there, but I wouldn't have to relive them every time I wanted to see what I had written about anything else. But they aren't there, and neither is anything else. All those essays, all my stupid Leather Chicken stories, the post from 4 am on the night of the Malice At The Palace, when I finally got home and realized I couldn't sleep until I had told someone the story.

I'm still heartbroken and furious about losing that. At least I have my Twitter archive, but they can't capture the feeling of seeing that Debbie Gibson and Alyssa Milano were following me or that Mark Fucking Hamill had retweeted me or that Donald Trump and Piers Morgan had blocked me.

It took me years to find all of those people on LJ. It's taken me 15 years to build up my Twitter audience, and I'm insanely proud that 12.3K people follow me there.

But I'm 53. I don't have another 15 years to do this again.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

Yeah. All this is the cold, hard part. And I'm not sure anything will ever capture the mingling of the elite and the rest of us that Twitter provides--which is of course, why many elites hate it, others are obsessed, and Musk had to have it.

I'm glad to have met you, too.

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RouletteGirl

Dec 23, 2022Liked by Catherynne M. Valente

This made me miss LJ all over again, which I've been doing a lot since Twitter started going down in flames. And I've been sad, but your anger has also made me angry, because you're right. Goddamnit, we may not have written the code but we're the ones who made the space what it is, and screw him for taking it from us.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

One thing that's occurred to me over the course of All This is that, ironically, given the predations of the stock market, being a publicly-traded company offers some level of protection against this kind of theft of community. Twitter itself added some poison pill protections to avoid specifically Musk effecting a hostile takeover by simply buying more than half the available shares, which is why he had to go this route. But he really did have to be the richest man on the planet AND move heaven and hell (pretty literally in the case of MBS and Putin) to make it happen. Even so it nearly didn't. If he'd been just a little less of a fucking idiot and not BAFFLINGLY waived due diligence in the acquisition contract, he'd probably have pulled right out.

And it's very likely going to cost him at least one other company, if not all of them. Musk was and is leveraged to the hilt, all based on his TSLA shares as collateral. And Tesla may well fall beneath $100 a share by New Year. This has cost him BILLIONS more than the sale price, and all the other vultures are seeing him take that hit.

It seems unlikely that any other company with the reach of Twitter would be acquirable by this very odd method, or cost comparatively little enough to be within reach even of someone like him. If not for the inflated Tesla stock price, he likely wouldn't have been able to even consider doing it, given the inability to do a traditional hostile takeover. (Which means that the geek community is sadly partially responsible for its own demise--we gassed this guy up and defended him for years. That price is in large part due to a very geeky support base. In many ways, geeks made him. I shouldn't say we though as I hated him from the start.)

And a publicly-traded company is beholden to shareholders and the market in a way private companies are not. Which is why no Trump corporation has ever been interested in an IPO. You lose control that way.

Ugh this is turning into another essay! Maybe it should be.

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RouletteGirl

Dec 30, 2022

I think you raise a great point! His hubris (or maybe his plan to pump and dump Twitter stock) has cost him a lot more than just the price of the company. And you're right that we as a community did our fair share to mythologize him. I remember hearing about the Boring Company and thinking that was so cool - until it was unveiled and it really was just a stupid tunnel for cars. That, and his harassment of the cave divers in Thailand, made me realize that he's really just an asshole who hasn't been told no enough in his life. At least now he's getting that experience.

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Rebecca O'Neill

Dec 23, 2022

I can't see my screen. I'm not crying YOU'RE CRYING.

Signed,

GenX

You have no idea HOW OLD this is.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

I see you, time-sibling!

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Jean Vengua

Eulipion Outpost

Dec 23, 2022Liked by Catherynne M. Valente

Wow. I can feel the heat. I'm also an internet crone; started out with Prodigy, went with Geocities, LiveJournal, all of it. I'm on Mastodon, but watching with trepidation as the Twitter stampede makes its way in, bringing with them a whole lotta dysfunctional behavior from years of being habituated to polarizing the news to bring the numbers in. Hoping they don't destroy Mastodon. But as you say -- we have to make it world we want. I won't say anymore because you said it all.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

Certainly Mastdon is having its eternal September moment. But I think its internal culture and tech curve will prevent it from ever becoming truly mainstream in the way Twitter was--which may or may not be a good thing.

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Elizabeth Tai

Tai Tales - Chinese Malaysian c…

Dec 23, 2022

Oof, I feel you with dysfunctional. I had a few heated exchanges with these Twitter refugees, who spray contempt first before even talking to me about what I posted. I just told them this is not Twitter, and then hit mute and block

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Jean Vengua

Eulipion Outpost

Dec 23, 2022

Yes. I just learned to use the content filter in Mastodon -- yay!

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Elizabeth Tai

Tai Tales - Chinese Malaysian c…

Dec 23, 2022

They are pretty awesome! I entered my chosen keywords yesterday. Should've done it earlier. I find Mastodon pretty supportive of writers too.

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Vince Scafaria

Vince’s Substack

Dec 24, 2022Liked by Catherynne M. Valente

This might be the best essay on the Internet. Thank you for sharing this. Thank you for sharing our rage. May I also ask, would you please reach out if you like the idea of a *non-profit* that works to web across social network silos, that empowers each individual without needing some Zuck or Musk running it? A way to help more Andrew types to prosper? We started a non-profit at positivesum dot net (has 40 second video) and are building our first product offering. I’d love to connect with you and other like-minded people. Have a wonderful holiday. Thanks again for the terrific essay.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

Sure, I'd be interested in hearing more.

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Sam Chupp

A Heart like a Hearth

Dec 23, 2022

*warms his hands by the light of your wonderful fire* Thank you for your ferocity. And you are so, so right.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

Most, most welcome, Sam.

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Bruce Cohen

Dec 23, 2022

Oh, Preach, Sister! That anger may stir a few people off their asses and onto doing some of things that will make this mess less exhausting. I’m an old, born right at after WWII, marched for peace and freedom, on the internet first in 1982 when it was Usenet with maybe 300 sites, and most of the traffic coming from the ARPANet mirror. Nothing there that you haven’t written down, just a couple of generations of tech earlier.

I got into tech with a long term goal: when the hardware got small enough and powerful enough make aids for disabled people. Things like navigation for Downs Syndrome people who get lost, environment detection for blind people, usw. And we’re seeing things like that now, but mostly they depend on large corporations to decide they want them. And a little late for me to be involved in developing them as I’m disabled and retired. But I’m really happy that those things are happening.

See in each generation we get to deal with whatever mess our parents and grandparents left us. I just try to help clean up my generation’s mess, since I know most of my cohort isn’t going to. Good luck to all you younger people, it looks to me like you just might have what it takes to leave things better than you found them.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

I hope you're right, Bruce. And thank you for fighting the good fight for so long. This perspective is fascinating to me.

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Andrea Tenzin Cannady

Dec 28, 2022

I still sing "dear Theodosia" to my now nine -year old because of you, Cat. Did I ever mention that? You mentioned singing it to your little, and so I looked it up. Fell in love with it. Sang it almost every night, for years. We finally saw Hamilton 2 months ago, and still love that song, and I still hope that we make the world right for our littles, and maybe we can be done with the bleeding and fighting now.

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Ian Tuck

Dec 28, 2022

I was very surprised by how choked up I became while reading this. I was born in 1967, and wrote my first program in 1978 on a TRS 80 sitting in a Radio Shack, where they were happy to let a poor little kid type and re-type the code for "Eliza" on their store demo until he learned to save to a cassette tape.

In the early 80s when I was 14/15 I discovered Compuserve and their chat rooms. While they were less moderated than it sounds like Prodigy was, reading your piece made me realize how formative those years were for me. I struck up conversations with mostly adults from around the world on the strength of my writing, and found a home for my version of weirdness at the time: programming on still relatively nascent home computers, Dungeons and Dragons, Science Fiction/Fantasy and comic books.

Fidonet, Usenet, IRC, hell even Gopher. We've always been creating community, searching for, and finding, our people.

I was relatively late to Twitter, but in the few years that I've been active on it I've learned so much from the communities that have sprung up there on the backs, as always, of creators generously sharing their passion, and joy, and pain, and their own particular strain of weird. Black Twitter, trans twitter, #MeToo, the live-tweeting of the Hugos and all the historical baggage there, all of these were opportunities to be better, to recognize fellow travellers, to practice empathy. As I saw on twitter the other day: if we're at war with the "woke mind-virus", then I'm fighting on the side of the virus.

But I digress. I just wanted to say thank you for writing this piece. I was so moved by it I read it out loud to my wife, who has almost no experience with online community, and wept openly at several parts to the point that I had to stop for minutes at a time to collect myself. You articulated some of the ways that I see the world, and see myself, that helped her understand some things about me that she never had. You're a rare talent, Cat. Wishing you all the best for 2023 and beyond, wherever our communities may be.

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Frankie

Frankie’s Substack

Dec 24, 2022

I'm a techie oldster, and first started in online communities on FidoNet in the 80's, and I've been thru many of the same disappointments.

Reading your rant took me back & reminded me LiveJournal was once my life, the place I met at least two lovers, the place we first experimented with cross-country, multi-media, live role-playing, and a place which has never really been replaced in my life, despite Dreamwidth trying to carry on the flag, and Facebook, in the end, providing better tools.

Most of my socializing is now on specific Discord servers, but I'm more of a digital hermit, with the pandemic shutting down the desire for physical meetings, and far too many ex-friends continuing to use Facebook, something I dropped many years ago.

Twitter I have remained on, merely because it is has been a better real-time international news service than any of the broadcast networks, the protests in Iran, the war in Ukraine, all better covered by an amalgam of tweeters than by the BBC, Al Jazeera, or CNN, all of those sources having become even more politicized. So far it is still performing adequately in this regard, but I'm sure it will degrade.

Sorry for the wall of text, without any real content except me reminiscing and describing my take on things, but I think you may have triggered my old LJ self, who used to just hold forth on whatever subject came to mind!

Also, it's Christmas Eve and I've finished my prep for the family day tomorrow, and I had nothing else to do when I sat down to read this, after following Cory's link here.

These days I usually write tweets and then delete them, because I can't be bothered dealing with the inevitable responses :)

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

When the original post was as long as mine was, there can be no judgment for walls of text in the comments. Remembering the past is as important as making the future, and I'm fascinated by all the different generational perspectives people have been offering.

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Heather Etchevers

Human in Science

Jan 17, 2023

I was waiting for someone to mention Fidonet; thanks! Dialing into local BBS's and being a very young female on there in the 1980s were the initiation to a sort of sense of what Prodigy was to our OP. Revelation that the human-created world was very large but also had lots of chapels where one could be contemplative with like-minded people. I was a pet, and people only started hitting on me sexually online later, in college. I relished the attention, initially, even with the confusion and the ickiness that it ultimately inspired. At least handles were easily used, even expected.

USENET online games involving rapidly moving chat threads taught us how to type quickly and well, and a few other skills. I felt powerful for being a rare computer room user after hours, and successfully using JANET to both navigate to a MUD in Warwick (http://www.cheeseplant.org/~daniel/pages/cph.html) and to send e-mails to my friends back in the U.S.

All this migration over the years has taught me how true Catherynne's post is, and how important it is to bear witness often and widely.

Some people are finding echoes of this sense of community on https://www.inaturalist.org/, I feel compelled to add (though not to make the effort of so doing in html).

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Noelle

Dec 24, 2022

Thank you for this. It reminded me of some of my favorite speeches from Le Guin about making art that makes me people think, which capitalism loathes, because then we stop buying things. What you’re saying matters and I’m grateful for the art you put into the world! And hello from a fellow SFF writer a little south of you in Tacoma :)

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

That is a very high honor, to be compared to her.

I no longer live in Seattle, but my family does. :)

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EmberLeo

Dec 23, 2022

So much of this is exactly my own experience, it's exhausting and painful and ecstatic and joyous to read. Thank you. -E-

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

Most welcome, Ember.

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Mark Fitzpatrick

Mark’s Substack

Dec 23, 2022

Goddes this essay is wonderful. I managed to avoid all of those early social media, though I'm the same age (1978 baby!). Instead I was a very early adopter of email (1994), and then just did FB and nothing else. Not because I didn't want to: I avoided Twitter for the same reason I avoid heroin; I know I would have loved it *too* much... But now... Something new is needed. I've been blogging, but no one reads it really. Substack maybe? I've signed up for several people's work, but your essay is the one that's made me actually get a log in... And could writing be far behind? And also, I knew your name, through some mutual friends and fans, but hadn't read your fiction... And I'm about to plunge into that with great gusto. Like many others, the last few years my attention span for reading has been terrible. But it's coming back. Could sharing long-form writing be far behind?

Thank you for the inspiration and the desperate love in this post.

Really fucking here for it.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 23, 2022Author

Returning to longform blogging being a Thing would be a very beautiful and strange result of all this. I hope you like the books when you get to them. I certainly think Twitter damaged all our abilities to concentrate on long work.

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Mark Fitzpatrick

Mark’s Substack

Dec 23, 2022

No more sound bites! No more hot takes! I want BANQUETS! I want marinated, slow-roasted reflections! I want an all-day feast of elaborate, exquisite gourmet ponderings!

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blatanville

Dec 28, 2022

just a reminder to you all: Be nice to bears.

#IYKYK

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

Bears are best.

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Mika Bianca

Dec 23, 2022

How do you create such beauty out of rage? Your writing again and again puts into words what only exists in me as unnamed feelings, wobbly, ill-shaped, ever-changing emotions and thoughts. It helps see things clearly and cope with the hurt! Thank you, as always, for sharing your work!

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

The only way I've ever known to actually get through anger is to make art out of it. Or at least a long-winded rant. Thank you for reading it, Mika.

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C.A. Petrov (she/her)

Dec 23, 2022

I first met you on LJ, and you helped make LJ a great place. My first online community was, oddly enough, Nerve in its early days with its chatrooms. And yes, we talked about sex a lot, but that wasn't all we talked about. I chatted with a blacksmith in Germany, an amazing lady entrepreneur in Florida, and a firefighter in NYC, among others. Some great people blogged there too. I miss people I've left behind in every social media site I've left. I have a hard time nurturing those relationships to transition to something that can survive outside of them.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 23, 2022Author

I honestly learned to type--and type fast--on the collegeclub chatrooms (and I looked up what happened to that pre-Facebook site as part of writing this article and wow, what a doozy). People were WRONG. I had to TELL THEM. And the chat moved too fast to type slow. Yeah some of it was gross and weird, but mostly it was all college kids flexing their brains. I grew up a lot there.

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Gittaca

Dec 23, 2022

Thank you so much for sharing your insights :-) Reminded me to re-read https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths again after many years.

> Mops are fans, but not rabid fans like the fanatics. They show up to have a good time, and contribute as little as they reasonably can in exchange.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

Lurkers make the internet go round. Truly.

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Strange Potato

Dec 23, 2022

This was so beautiful and so powerful. Thank you so much for this. You really honed in here on exactly why this twitter thing is so painful. I teared up reading this. thank you

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

You're very welcome, Adil.

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Erin Fulmer

Dec 23, 2022

This is everything. I am of the same generation (in my tiny hometown, it was Earthlink) and have been through this too many times. I miss LJ terribly and would happily go back to learning html just to change the color of my blog theme in a heartbeat if it meant I could get it back…but there will always be new ways to talk to each other.

Thank you for this clear-eyed story of the history of online communities and the message of hope you come to in the end.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 23, 2022Author

Remember how many sheer hours we put into making 100x100 LJ icons? And somehow it did feel like that mattered.

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Erin Fulmer

Dec 23, 2022Liked by Catherynne M. Valente

Yes! Icon making and sharing was such a joyful part of those communities. Not for clout or for followers but just to contribute, gifts freely given. I miss it so much!

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Pedro Galvan

Dec 22, 2022

Don't have much else to add, just wanted to thank you for putting into words the thoughts and feelings that many of us share. Hugs.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

Hugs back atcha, Pedro.

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Twiller

Dec 22, 2022

I am also one of those cuspy 1979 kids, and thank you so much for putting into words what I’ve been feeling. I have a Twitter shaped hole in my heart now to go with the LiveJournal shaped hole in my heart, and some days mourning the connections that I’ve lost over the years gets to be too much.

Like you, I’ve tried to embrace the Mr Rogers ethos, especially as I have become a dad, but it’s not always easy to set down the blistering anger at how the spaces we carved out got ruined by people who crave control that will never be enough to fill whatever void is inside them.

But thank you for reminding me that I’m not alone in all of this.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 23, 2022Author

Never alone.

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Robin Brenizer

Dec 22, 2022·edited Dec 22, 2022

Great piece. Love your writing. I don’t have a lot of patience to read anymore and I think Twitter has something to do with that. I’m curious how many people think that maybe a place like twitter encourages the brain to engage in opining more than understanding and deeper analysis. Maybe making us search for our preferred narratives more than solutions. Engaging in discussion that enrages so often us must change our brains. I can’t really look at twitter now. It’s like watching a friend become a flesh eating zombie. We have to spend as much time being stewards of our communities as we are also content creators. Especially when we have these dark lords move on us like bitches. 😂

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 23, 2022Author

I have a hard time looking at it as well. I think the advent of long twitter threads shows that a lot of people do long for deeper thought, and if not given the right tools, will make it happen with the wrong ones.

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David McCloskey

Dec 22, 2022

This. This is so clear to me, over decades of joining and growing communities and their joy, then suffering when they crash and burn. Again and again. It gets emotionally exhausting. You lose track of people you grew to love and respect, even if some of them were pixels on a screen (and some of them you meet in person and it's a beautiful thing).

I feel like each time this happens, the energy level I have to find and join and open up becomes less. Especially now that there are so many disparate places where everyone is being exiled to... they are no longer on one single, cohesive community.

But searching out other like minded geeks is in my nature, so eventually I'll start the process all over again. The joy of it is needed in this tire fire of a world we live in.

I'm sad and angry and frustrated... but maybe a bit hopeful.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 22, 2022Author

It's so hard and so exhausting. I swear to god if I never have to fill out another fucking new profile it'll be too soon. I hate what we lose, I hate what we forget. I hate that there still isn't really a Twitter alternative for us to fully transplant to (Mastodon seems determined not to be it and I haven't even looked at Hive, the name choice alone...) even though it really seems like there could be and should be. But we have to try. We can't just abandon this amazing tool to the fucking Horde, or the smooth purchasing process all the big boys seem to want--no humans required, just credit cards.

I still want to be human, god dammit.

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Jon H.

Jan 27, 2023·edited Jan 27, 2023

Thank you so much for articulating so much of what I've been feeling the past several years. It honestly felt like a breath of fresh air! But I did have one question for you:

Born in 1979, why do you consider yourself an "Oregon trail Xennial" or even--gasp--an "elder Millennial"? I thought someone like you would be late-Gen-X.

As someone turning 40 next month, I've wholeheartedly embraced that label for myself (not that you can't, I'm just curious!). Not having the Internet until I was 14 (with AOL 3.0) and considering myself too old for certain late-90s touchstones, among other philosophical differences, I feel like I have very little in common with true-Millennials. I looked up to those a few years older than me (like you! And also those dot-com pioneers that built Web 1.0) and wished I could be like them when I grew up.

Well, I must say I look up to people like you & your wise perspective more than ever now!

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Chris S.

Jan 26, 2023

To find so much of my frustration so perfectly articulated is a rare treat. Thank you. My lazy ass can now just link to this whenever I start to rant about how the internet got stolen from us.

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Kristy

Jan 4, 2023

I am a couple years older than you but/and have spent almost my whole life and career online, doing social media before it had a name, working with bloggers to help them get paid for their storytelling work when that was still unheard of and no one had digital cameras. The company I eventually founded was nearly acquired by Six Apart yeeeeeears ago (dodged that bullet).

I saved up money to buy myself a good modem so I could telnet into my university's server over Christmas break after my first semester away at school. Note: my only goal was to talk to boys, and old school '90s IMing is the only reason I can type fast.

All of this is to say I have experienced all of this, cycled through it with you, still depend on this for my livelihood (though not as a creator myself). I joined Twitter in early 2007 and was just lifetime-banned for defending my trans kid. I am as viciously angry at all this -- and in particular that dickless, feckless, monster manchild currently at the twitter helm -- as you are.

And we should definitely be besties. Thank you so much for your words.

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CruzMom

Dec 30, 2022

Gen X/Millenial-cusp Oregon girl here, as well. The love and support of strangers on the internet have saved me at crucial parts of my life (and I hope I have done the same for others), so I understood everything you are saying about the love. However, I didn’t fully comprehend the potential financial loss that thousands (or 10’s of thousands, 100’s of thousands, etc.) are reeling from. Thank you for the reminder of what is really at stake here. Beautifully said. 💙

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cushla paice

Dec 24, 2022

wow. this is my introduction to your writing and i love the energy and magic in your invitation to make online connecting places. you have had quite a trip through places. i am just beginning, being an older generation, 63yrs in a couple of days, resisted all new tech as it came around, jeventually giving in. but still turn my cellphone off because i dont want to be "available" any time, and still dont have many facebook friends because i dont like the idea of choosing to "reject" or "accept" people. but i am enjoying substack for some excellent reading. the ones that make connections. thank you for yours.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

That will happen when the real world isn't all that into you ;) Always looking for a place to matter, which is, in the end, what we all want. Even Musk.

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Punk Bot

Dec 23, 2022

Thank you for this. You've expressed something that's been on my mind for years.

Not a day goes by that I don't miss Livejournal. I moved to Dreamwidth in early 2017 (after having set up a backup account there in 2009 after all of the strikethrough/boldthrough crap went down on LJ) when the LJ servers went to Russia. But it never had the traffic that LJ did, and I hate to admit that I got addicted to the dopamine skinner box that Twitter and Tumblr and other "fast social media" sites provided sometime in the early 2010s.

Like many others, I've currently relocated to Mastodon and am getting used to the new process and having to figure out where all of the people I used to follow on Twitter ended up.

To me, Mastodon feels like a fleet of lifeboat-spaceships all blasting off from a dying planet. Each server or instance is like its own separate ship, but we're reaching out and finding each other again via radio signal.

I wonder if these instance-ships are going to be our new home, The United "Fediverse," or if this is just a temporary stop and there's another planet that we'll all eventually end up on.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

That separation does worry me, though. We ARE more separated on Mastodon, by design. I wonder what the downstream effects of that will be. UI choices always have far outsized effects on a site's culture, most of which are not obvious at the outset.

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Teri Aitch

F**k. F*fty.

Dec 22, 2022

I've been Talix18 since AOL - on MySpace, FARK, LJ, Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat...

Reading you and Mills and others who've spent decades reaching out makes me feel unqualified to populate any acreage here. I've also made some of my best friends online and still feel compelled to show up and make noise - just in case someone is still looking for me.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 22, 2022Author

No such thing as unqualified, reaching out is reaching out, and it's always better to than not.

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Thomas Derenthal

Jun 28, 2023

Now, having said that, I'm debating with myself how large a body part I would cut off if I could instantly be able to write like this.

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Thomas Derenthal

Jun 28, 2023

Somewhere in the early 70s I discovered Jimi Hendrix. In 1982 I heard Stevie Ray Vaughn for the first time. Reading this person for the first time reminds me of those experiences. I want to read this person. I want to hear everything this person has to say.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Jun 29, 2023Author

Oh Jesus I think that’s one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said about my writing. Thank you.

I do write books, too. :)

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alexis

Jun 19, 2023

This was so beautifully written. I've grown up in a corporate social media hellscape and the vision you took the time to gift me is something I've never really had from the internet and something that's really precious. I really just want to give you a hug 🥹

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Alexander

Jun 13, 2023

It's not just Musk or Saudi Arabia or China or a few awful people doing this crap. Trump received the most votes of any sitting president ever... in the middle of a pandemic and without universal health care. The "jackals" are right there in your family. Ask someone about taxes and you'll hear what they really think about kindness.

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thechadwick

Jun 12, 2023

Thank you. Sincerely.

It is cold solace, that the warmest feelings I've had (about the systematic and clumsy strangling of every online community I've loved since the IRC-days) is being able to share in my grief with an anonymous fellow traveler. I didn't need eye-shadow advice as a teenage elder-millennial, but I did need a friend—like all of us do. Thank you for so elegantly putting pen to the sense of loss I've felt about losing my home so many times.

"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders"... Think of England and carry on I suppose.

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TK Eldridge

Letters from Elder Ridge

Jan 29, 2023

Brilliant.

I -still- have friends in RL that I made on LiveJournal. There were some golden years there. And I'll be a Granny Minnesota, too. It's a good thing to be.

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Tammi Labrecque

Jan 29, 2023

This is the first post I've ever read from you, and I subscribed for a year. I first got on the internet in 1998, a SAH single mom desperate for connection. Like you, I found it in so many communities, all centered around different things as my interests shifted and changed, and as websites and platforms rose and fell. I still have several friends from my earliest days, and a handful have stuck around from each era — fans of this band, fans of that show, former coworkers, old loves — and we keep migrating from platform to platform, trying to dodge the bullets of commoditization and keep our bonds tight. It's exhausting, and it feels ultimately hopeless. Thank you for writing this.

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Casey Ydenberg

Jan 25, 2023

Your point about any social network having value only because of users' (free) contribution reminds a bit of Jaron Lanier's point about Google Translate: it exists only because it uses (mountains and mountains) of data from real human translators.

Big Tech wants to pretend it can literally replace humans, but even the most sophisticated AI depends on eating billions of peoples' decidedly non-artificial intelligence. Social networks think they own your art merely because they are the platform on which that art is transmitted. GitHub wants to own programmers' (freely given, open source) code to create a bot to replace programmers.

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Egypt Urnash

Jan 22, 2023

God it feels so good to see someone who is not me mention LJ. My whole social circle was on LJ and then Brad got sick of running it and sold it to 6a and everyone started moving to G+ at first and then they decided they only wanted real names (because *shut up and buy things*) and everyone ended up on fucking Twitter cramming their thoughts into the Procrustean bed of 140 fucking characters.

I run a Mastodon with a high character limit mostly because I remember LJ and maybe sometime I should really look into shifting it to something even more longpost-oriented. I’m busy trying to get big art projects done though.

Enjoy Substack while it lasts, eventually the same cycle will happen. And eventually the Fediverse will probably be embraced-and-extended-and-extinguished the same way places like Facebook used to provide an RSS feed, too.

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Hebby

Jan 18, 2023

This was a beautiful read. Thank you. I remember what happened to LiveJournal. It was devastating. I miss communities. Too many communities are ripped to shreds if it's thought someone has misstepped. It's horrible. It's not love.

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PeeDee ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Jan 10, 2023

Thanks; I needed that. After 40 years of internet evolution/devolution, during most of which I had a Forrest Gump like role, I need to see hope. I need to feel promise. I need to believe in resilience. My elderly aunt challenged me a few days ago - "Tell us something good about the world." I told her of a feeling that there are connections being made - below the surface of the fake news, out of the glare of media and politics, outside the purely commercial - like the mycelia that connects a whole forest without any outward sign. We are knitting into a single, but diverse, humanity. I hope. I pray.

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Melissa J Peltier

Jan 2, 2023

Beautifully & brilliantly written.

What’s going on at Twitter is, as you surmised, a form of asymmetric information warfare against democracy. And the better angels of human nature.

Fascism doesn’t work without widespread hate, fear, anger, mistrust & suspicion. Widespread selfishness, cynicism, nihilism & apathy.

Elon & his totalitarian friends need to create more of it to win.

We need to fight back, much harder.

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Kevin Johnston

Dec 31, 2022

This says so much in a fairly short piece. I've been online since I bought a Web-TV unit in 1998. That service and its users were laughed at and mocked just as much as AOL users were. But it changed my life, forever. I met my late wife in a chat room that Microsoft had paid for Web-TV users to be able to access. That was in 1999.

I've seen site after site go down for good or become a sad shell of its former self. The only truly good ones with a real sense of community I still visit every day are Pajiba (where I found a link to this article) and the Steve Hoffman forums.

The latter is primarily about music, film, television and audio equipment, but the off-topic forum

sees a lot of action every day. I've been a member there for ten years and I've been reading Pajiba pretty much ever since it first came online, a long time ago.

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Gwyneth

Dec 31, 2022

Reading this post made me feel the most seen by someone online that I’ve experienced in decades. I was born the same year as you, and experienced an arc not dissimilar to this one. I’ve been feeling quite cynical (understandably) about what it means to be online, and the purpose of the internet in general. Thank you for dusting off my battered heart and handing her some hope. I appreciate you.

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Andrea

Dec 28, 2022

This sounds very similar to the forces that tore apart the Catster community. (Now defunct.) I met so many wonderful friends there!

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beatnikqueen

Dec 27, 2022

as an autistic millenial, I felt this exact same thing. I used ICQ to talk with random people. I had a Geocities page. Webrings. I was an editor for DMOZ. I scouuured So You Wanna pages to learn how to be a writer or any other stuff. I loved Orkut and the non-english-centric mess it turned into. I even met someone who would - 15y later - turn out to be a true soulmate.

It's exhausting though. Seeing it all be picked and broken apart like a shiny glossy bug I liked but people find gross.

I'm tired. I'm still on Twitter. I do enter any and every place I find, mostly to see who's there. Sometimes the BUY THINGS is so on your face (looking at you, Post) I immediately leave. Sometimes, something looks fun enough to keep the app or the bookmark (Koo).

Oh well.

Thank you for the reminder. The real gem was always us.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

THE TREASURE WAS THE FRIENDS WE MADE ALONG THE WAY.

But actually, unironically.

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beatnikqueen

Dec 28, 2022

Yes, actually!!

And I miss sparkly mouse pointers.

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Stuff by Bez

Dec 27, 2022

I am scared too.

I built an audience on Twitter. There's no way I can get thousands of folk to follow me onto another platform.

And it's not just about having that audience - as you so eloquently write, it is about the human community.

But each breakdown is different. Musk doesn't want to drive people away, I don't think. It's just been... problematic recently.

As an aside, the comments about LJ reminded me of this old comic (the last one of which struck a chord as a small act of defiance) that is still available to read:

https://frankthecomic.livejournal.com/

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

He absolutely does drive people away. And makes deleting Twitter something useful as a political statement--by people whose politics I profoundly agree with! That's part of what makes it so fucking hard. But if we abandon it, then the worst people in the world get to hold and weaponize yet another massive piece of cultural infrastructure, and, my own interests aside, how can that be better?

And you're right, every breakdown is different--one of the major differentiating factors of this one is that the obvious replacement is not already up and running. When LJ started circling the drain, Twitter was already going strong, and we all kind of organically bled over into it, able to take a lot, but of course never all, of our audiences.

And while Mastodon has been going for many years, I get the feeling it does not WANT to become the replacement for Twitter. It wants to be the kind of community I'm talking about, but understands that the level of mainstream acceptance Twitter has would likely poison the site's very intentional geeky, techy, inward-facing culture. I don't know that it can be and I don't think it wants to be the new Twitter. Hive and the others don't even have the reach of Mastodon. Maybe something new will come, but it had better hurry, the window of EVERYONE looking for a place to land is closing.

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Amy

Dec 27, 2022

Thank you so much for this marvelous and nostalgic essay. As you've recently noted, it has indeed gone viral – deservedly. Back in the day we'd give courtesy heads-up to authors when we linked to their work... and I guess this is that notice. In my tiny corner of the blogoverse Iast week I shared your brilliant piece: https://lovelyangel.dreamwidth.org/4203709.html

(Dreamwidth is tiny compared to LiveJournal, and it certainly doesn't carry the high energy and connectivity of LJ in its prime – but it's refreshingly peaceful there.)

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

Thank you so much for sharing it, Amy.

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mile42

mile42’s Substack

Mar 2

Adding a vote for Dreamwidth. Moved there from LJ during the exodus of my Russian friends. And hello from a fellow Gen-Xer! I think the one thing that definitely unites us is, we never forgot a central truth: Corporations screw up EVERYTHING, unless you hit them very hard with several sticks at once. https://garote.dreamwidth.org/323303.html

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eg

Dec 26, 2022

Why do you think that these online communities would be exempt from all of the horrors that human communities have always faced?

That’s just not possible, since the former are simply reflections of the latter.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

I don't--the horrors these communities face are pretty uniquely tied to the advent of digital culture and the internet singularity. It may have ben possible for a lord to *buy* a community of individuals exchanging information in the past, but mostly, if they didn't like that sort of thing, they mostly just killed us. There were no consequences for that, and it happened a LOT. They certainly didn't buy communities of artists and thinkers in order to keep them going and extract money from their connections with people outside that community, not even in the storied patronage system of the renaissance or the kept bards of the medieval world. You just paid those people to keep the art coming, you didn't try to own their letter-writing and take percentages of every word they spoke. That kind of distributed intellectual system was barely imaginable in the slow age of communication, and before individual consumers had any particular buying power at all. There are analogues, but it's not the same.

As far as exempt, no, of course nothing is. But that's why you defend these places, so that they can survive.

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eg

Dec 28, 2022

A gracious answer. I suppose the closest historical in-person analogue I can think of to the current exploitation model you describe is when the conquerors enslaved the conquered, rather than just killing them and taking the stuff that was left lying about.

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Michael Spencer

AI Supremacy

Dec 26, 2022

Wah, this is like an Op-Ed that I might have read on Medium in 2014. The internet has certainly changed, mostly for the worse. At least we aren't consumer 4.5 hours of TikTok a week - things could be even worse.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

I certainly like TikTok well enough sometimes. But it is an engine for just terrible things more often than that. Vine was always the better beast.

The thing is, I will never be a great creator of TikToks, because I DON'T WANT TO HAVE TO BE ON CAMERA TO TALK TO PEOPLE. I don't want to have to be fully made up, have good lighting equipment, be on top of new editing software, find musical backing tracks, enunciate and give good line deliveries, and look as young and thin and femme as possible just to avoid being abused for random shitposting. That's just like the real world, and I got online to avoid being judged physically just to earn the right to speak! Fuck that, I'm a writer, I do words.

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Andrea Tenzin Cannady

Dec 28, 2022

Echo that. I avoid tik tok completely and I can't even articulate why, but you just came a lot closer above.

I don't want to be on camera. I like the written word. I don't like the attention grabbiness of video. Boo.

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Jon H.

Jan 27, 2023

Yeah, my own perfectionist nature prevents me from posting too much content online--probably to my own detriment...

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Crunchysteve

Dec 24, 2022

The feels! I was never that welded to Twitter, but I shut down and destroyed my account at "facey" this year, largely because I'm tired of having my reactions and attention monetised and I won't be anybody's data-slave. The solution, not that I have enough of the skills to make it, is an app that has no server, only connects (encrypted) to those you exchange an auth token with, then you set your post level (much like facey's system) and your app, asks "my" app for updates, while "my" app asks yours for updates. You stop liking "me", you cancel "my" auth token. Pretty much how a front door and "peephole" works, only using peer to peer connections. We only let those we trust in through our front door, and we don't rely on giant corporations to open our door for us. We can give a trustee a key, and we can change the lock. That's the social network app that needs to be written. A true network, and the way the internet was supposed to be used, peer-to-peer, not client-server.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

I wonder if that's the next step.

I'm technically on Facebook but I don't engage much. Especially since crossposting was made impossible. I'm not about to either manually post all my tweets/etc to FB or go posting a totally unique content stream there, especially after 2016. But it remains where my (and most people's) non-techy family are, and where people from school days more often go looking for us. Facebook always wanted to be so much more, but its main value is what it always was, neo-Friendster.

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scribble

Jan 29, 2023

I feel like there are a few projects trying that approach right now, or something close. Maybe look into Nostr?

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Crunchysteve

Feb 7, 2023

Not peer to peer, more like Mastodon, but it is nice to know better coders (ie, real coders, not hacks like me) are working on this. Regarding "the elephant site", The weird thing for me, as a former, 15 year Facebook user, was how it was like a facebook I just couldn't get into. It's surprising how, when you go to a non-algorithmic medium, it actually takes a will to engage, well, for me it did. Part of this effect was down to none of my long time facey friends being there, but there were so many more of a "my kind of people" people thare, and I still couldn't get interested.

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Jens Alfke

Changing Channels

Dec 24, 2022

It sounds to me like you’re implying SixApart somehow had sinister motives or was connected to the Russian takeover of LJ. It wasn’t. It was the company formed by the couple who created MovableType, one of the earliest pieces of blogging software (which like LJ dates from 1999.)

At the time it seemed like a great fit for LJ. The problem was they fell into the trap of “Second System Syndrome”, the decision to put all their work into building a new system from scratch instead of improving the old one. I kind of get it because LJ was by all accounts a ramshackle pile of Perl scripts and its user interface was clumsy and butt-ugly. But it was where the people were. So when they opened up the new system (called Vox IIRC) no one moved over to it because no one was there. So we were just stuck with the limping-along LJ.

It wasn’t anyone being evil, just naive business strategy and a poor understanding of the dynamics of social software.

As for Twitter … I can’t empathize. I’ve hated that piece of shit since the day it was born as a tool to mass-text people. I hated how it clung to the stupid limits of SMS long after they ceased to be relevant. I hated how it sucked all my friends away from LJ. I hated how it turned everything into shallow one-liners and rants because there wasn’t room to be expressive. I hated how people came to care more about their personal branding than friendship. I hated how making everything public and letting anyone talk to anyone inevitably created a death ray for trolls and haters to use on anyone who got in their way. I hated how it became a soapbox for the most repellent right-wing slugs.

So right now I am so very, very full of schadenfreude at how it’s “all falling to bits, gloriously”, to quote John Lyndon. Burn, baby, burn.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

What I recall were a lot of people really having no idea who SixApart was, others trying to explain, the very first tentative encroachments on certain fanfic communities happening under 6. I didn't say they were necessarily the bad guys, just that most users didn't know who they were, and ultimately, they were the ones who sold to the Russian media company that followed, though I'm not aware of the particular machinations involving that deal, and wikipedia's timeline didn't illuminate anything.

It's surprisingly hard to find unbiased reporting of the demise of these sites--the end of collegeclub probably deserves an essay all its own, and there is *aggressively* little information remaining about it, despite it having been huge in its day, and more or less Facebook before Facebook.

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Bill Hooker

Dec 27, 2022

Thanks for pointing out that we did know who Six Apart were, and they weren't the bad guys. That was my only quibble with this otherwise wonderful essay!

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Morgan Lockhart

Morgan Writes

Dec 23, 2022

I had a similar journey through the digital world (though I'm four years younger and so was only on prodigy for less than a year before changing to AOL) and this all hits so hard. It's impossible not to look at Twitter and the parallel conversations about AI Art and look at how very easily, and how very likely, it is that it will all go deeply, deeply wrong and that the effect will likely at best be cultural stagnation and further digital isolation, and at worst something far more authoritarian.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

I keep coming back to thinking: surely they're not so fucking stupid that they don't realize they still need people with incomes to buy things to keep it all going, right?

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Grace

Filming in Grayscale

Feb 18

I used to have a sort of "Penpal" on Yahoo messenger. She was like an older sister to me. She was in high school, 2 years older than me and lived somewhere in Southern Luzon in the Philippines. She was my Grandma Minnesota.

Your writing stirred up a lot of memories in me, especially back when I was active in fandom as a writer.

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Morgan Dawn

Aug 13, 2023

Speaking of creating and sharing - here is a wonderful tool , open source with privacy controls https://freedombox.org/

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Alex Savard

Alex’s Substack

Aug 5, 2023

This was an amazing read. Thank you for writing this.

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Dave

Aug 2, 2023

I'd be interested to read a second draft of this, without so many lazy accusations of fascism which can more accurately be referred to as market forces in these instants. I do share the sentiment though. It's why I'm here after googling "Why has the internet become so shit?" in a moment of rage. I honestly don't think right or left is very relevant here though, it's just powerful manipulative humans enshrining their control over absolutely everything, all while keeping us distracted in the left vs right, men vs women, islam vs the west, etc arguments as they keep looting us. It's easy to see such authoritarian power has been veiled in "left" politics in the past too, and now it's veiled in "right" politics. The truth is such power is neither right nor left. It's just power.

I will say one thing for Musk though, while acknowledging my eyes widened at your mention of his purchase being funded by China and Saudi which does deeply concern me; we face an unfortunate choice, and we must remember that on this page of the unfortunate game we are trapped in, these are the only two choices:

1) Let anyone say anything

2) Let the same corporate power you are railing against - not nice friendly Amnesty workers or hippies who work at animal rescue shelters - decide who gets to say what

Personally, I find it naive to think that 2) wouldn't lead to complete tyranny - your article kind of outlines how to some extent it already has, pre-Musk takeover. Yet I acknowledge that now Twitter does show a lot of hateful nonsense. But here's one thing I hope I'm right about, yet could be wrong. I see all sorts of climate change denial posts and anti vaxx posts all being piled on and countered. Sometimes with hysterical rudeness - never a good idea if one wants to be effective, but often in a way that leaves people espousing those views with strong counter arguments that make some of them think or even change their minds. Such ideas have been growing unchallenged in the darkest corners of the internet, and just think how much Trump and his followers have been immune to any criticism on truth social for this past few years. Could this be a blessing in disguise? Time will tell. In the meantime, we can still simply click on the following tab instead of the for you tab, and curate twitter to only see what we want to see. Its the for you tab where, if you make the mistake of interacting with such posts, you will be flooded with controversial rubbish.

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Scott F.

Jul 21, 2023·edited Jul 21, 2023

I'm coming to this way late, but damn- this is that good old-school web flavor. Thank you for writing it all out, Cat.

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Steve Smith

Night After Night

Jul 13, 2023

The newest post sent me back to this one… and this one made me laugh and cry and angry and subscribe.

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Anon

Jul 7, 2023

Poignant moments mixed with a delightfully blind narcissism to the tune of "I am Correct, therefore those who disagree are Wrong." The LiveJournal segment was particularly touching, and as someone who was only on the surface level of many of these internet communities and still felt hurt from their rupture and collapse, it's fascinating to see the view from deeper inside. But WOW, is this really what internet authors think of themselves? That they and their pals are the masters of what Love is and is not, because they enjoy creating in the way that's most visible to the people like them? That everyone who disagrees with their plans to bring about the Utopian vision of the world is fascist, and motivated by the desire to hurt? Scary to think about.

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neotalk

Jul 2, 2023

It gets worse. Look up the rise and fall of the Chautauqua movement from the turn of the century to the 1920's. (Spoiler: community-organized lecture events, similar to TEDx events, became organized by commercial lecture tour outfits who did whatever it took to get more people to buy tickets, rather than to encourage ongoing education.)

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Greg Brophy

Greg Brophy Photography's Subst…

Jun 22, 2023

Great article. I agree and one that you missed was Flickr. For many artists, the discussion boards contained so much information. Now it is a shell of what it was. I am only on Facebook for the alternative process photography groups where people selflessly share their knowledge. Some of us even still use email list. Then there is groups.Jo that some people switched to when they were tired of companies like google shutting down their servers.

I have also signed up to Substack to start writing, but at the same time I realized that I have a website and can easily write there and never be censored. Why send traffic to these companies. It’s easier now more than ever to create a great site with no coding experience. I have been pushing other artist who are tired of losing their content they created to big companies who shut down the services after the buy them. If the content lives on my site and always will, it just adding links to what ever crappy service comes next.

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Gaëtan

Jun 16, 2023

I subscribed just to say that the is the most amazing rant I've ever read. I was born in 1988 and although I've missed the start of the internet, as a huge geek this was a godsend for me when I finally got there in 2000. I've been through a lot of communities since.

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Jenn

Jun 15, 2023

You just described my experience. Thank you!

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Seakingsoyuz

Jun 11, 2023

Feedback from someone on Reddit in response to me linking this in a discussion about that site's current crisis: "That was possibly the best write up I've ever read. And I mean that."

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phoenixx

May 4, 2023·edited May 4, 2023

This is everything I feel. Thank you for sharing this.

I found my first community at Sailormoon.org, talking with a bunch of other nerds about an anime. I was young and impressionable and... nothing shitty happened. The community was safe. There was no darkness, there were no old dudes trying to get me to meet them at the mall. It was just... nice.

I just got an email congratulating me on having LJ for 20 years. Twenty freaking years! I rarely update anymore, but I can't bear to delete 20 years of memories and comments from friends. Oh the things we found dramatic back then. Occasionally I still log in, maybe once a year, to see if any of my friends posted. It's mostly a graveyard now, no friends post regularly anymore, but I see their quirky screennames in the Friend List and try to remember what emo band lyric they were referencing. How did I ever find the time to write a whole ass essay multiple times a week, when these days the most writing I ever do is only for code documentation.

I wish there was a place for us Olds. But I realize we *are* in the same place, it just looks different. VERY different. I hope new generations can find happy and safe communities, places where they don't have to mute their voices for fear of outing themselves as a woman and getting told to go make a sandwich, places where they can make friends with kind grandmas who are actual kind grandmas, places that don't fuel teenage depression, anxiety and low self worth.

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LemonsParty

May 4, 2023

This is beautiful, thank you for writing and sharing it.

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Jerry Kindall

Apr 15, 2023·edited Apr 15, 2023

Twitter was always owned by people who wanted to make money from it. One way to turn a profit on a site like that is to get a bunch of users and then sell the site for enough money to retire on. After that it will likely go to shit as the increasingly desperate new owners try to figure out how to get the site to earn back what they paid for it. And that's the good timeline. The bad timeline is, as you say, someone buying it with the intention of using it to sow discord as a means of power and control. The only question is, having seen what happened to LJ and a bunch of other social sites, how did anyone who used Twitter imagine it was ever truly theirs?

Your conclusion is 100% spot on, though. People will find ways to connect even through a medium that is terrible for it. Prodigy was a prime example: an objectively awful user experience that was extremely popular because it let you connect at all. (Didn't matter that the bear danced poorly; it was a miracle it danced at all.) It's annoying to have to find another place to call your online home every couple of years, but at least it's possible. For now, anyway. Let's keep doing that.

At least there's still MetaFilter, which has had a change of ownership since it was founded in 1999, but not a change of heart. Still accepting new members for a token one-time fee, still trying to practice self-moderation, still begging members for money to keep going, still succeeding in getting those funds... still MetaFiltering. Good on 'em.

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Steven

Mar 28, 2023

Ignoring Elon, this is such a beautiful encapsulation of the phenomenon I've been part of as well. I was a '76 baby, and really miss the days of Diaryland and LJ. Thank you so much for writing this - I'll be sharing.

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Steven

Mar 28, 2023

The saddest and most frustrating thing about Elon Musk is that for all his supposed world-reshaping he claimed he was going to do, it a) always required massive subsidising that he rarely talked about but lobbied sooooo hard to get and b) he would only do if *he could control it*. Having worked in a sector Tesla has a significant role in, they were never about growing the overall pie, just growing their slice of it and shanking others they deemed a strong competitor however they could.

He told us who he was. Not through what he said or what he did, but how he did it.

Tesla has no PR team - not because he wanted to control costs, but because his ego demanded that HE be the message and the messenger.

If he cared so much about the technologies they sell, they'd be a part of every advocacy group trying to elevate solar and storage and electric vehicles - but they as a company are usually the lone wolf, focused on advancing technology in ways only they can serve and sell.

So the fact that this rancid egotist has done what he has done to Twitter is disappointing, horrifying, exhausting... but unfortunately not surprising.

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Jeff Bryan

Mar 2, 2023

Prodigy was hugely important for me! I participated in "underground" boards created by sharing a password for one of a household's six accounts. We would communicate by sending emails to bogus addresses, causing them to bounce, and everyone could read the text of the bounced email. This kept conversations private and closed while getting around the 30-emails-per-month limit. The boards included Dragonlance and comic-book fandom, and we (teenagers around the country) worked together to put out a few issues of a fanzine using this method (and snail mail, because you couldn't send images files or even text files). I was 13 and super-validated by these older teenagers who thought my writing (basically comic book stories) was great. They were the only people interested in reading it, lol.

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Jamie

Feb 20, 2023

I have no real comment on the contents other than to echo mostly agreement.

What I do want to say is that I love that pic you're using for your profile now. The lighting, the lense flare through the middle, the oddly sepia seeming tone of it. It's fantastic shot that works because of what would normally be thought of as flaws coming together in a really amazing way. Much like those communities of yore you mention.

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Kevin Francis

Kevin’s Newsletter

Feb 14, 2023

This is such an amazing read! Thank you for putting words to all the feelings that I couldn't. I'm thankful that Cory Doctorow mentioned you and now I can follow you!

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Cellar

Feb 14, 2023

Welp, you certainly have all the answers. And you're reallly really angry. Add more "really" to taste.

I think not all your answers are right. But you could try and put your money where your mouth is. Start a garbagetown site, where people can so everything you want them to be able to. It doesn't have to be difficult. I'm old enough that I know how to write a site without wordpress, and by and large, it's less resource-intensive and even less complex. Meaning you can serve more people with less hardware. You can certainly still use a HTML4-and-CSS-only site and use the lack of feeping creatures as a "charming" selling point. But you have to surmount the learning curve first.

And... don't sell. Just don't sell out. Make money to cover the costs, keep headcount down, add the things needed to support the community while the money stretches, and then stop. See how that goes. I think there's a lesson in there, and it would surprise me it had anything to do with "right wing" and whatnot.

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Fred

Feb 8, 2023

A little late to the party but just want to show my appreciation as an indie creative.

Cory Doctorow writes about the mechanisms that ruin the platforms we use, you articulate perfectly how it makes us feel. Thank you.

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Casey Roberson

Exhausto’s Substack

Feb 7, 2023

Catherynne, thank you for writing this. Thank you for writing long, and writing angry. Thank you for blending the personal and large-scale, because that's how life works.

I'm angry, too, and I wrote a piece about buying things killing academic conversation.

https://medium.com/@jimmyjone/a-whispered-letter-to-my-young-librarian-wizards-and-witches-in-response-to-the-september-2022-95bf2420ec28

It takes a different shape in my world. But the next efforts toward changing how peer review works could very easily go the same way as all conversation communities. It's getting me thinking about what would be necessary guardrails to keep academic conversation from getting any shittier.

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JJ Toner

JJ’s Substack

Feb 4, 2023

I tried to create an account on Diaryland. Failed. Couldn't log in. And couldn't get any help from the site. Any ideas?

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JJ Toner

JJ’s Substack

Feb 4, 2023

I tried to create an account on Diaryland. Failed. Couldn't log in. And couldn't get any help from the site. Any ideas?

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Ingrid Catywhumpus

Jan 31, 2023

Thank you for your anger. Sometimes my fury is the only thing that keeps me going. Spite, as they say, is a hell of a motivator.

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Sam Matey

The Weekly Anthropocene

Jan 31, 2023

Wow. That is...astonishingly eloquent and true. Thank you for writing this.

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Justin Hanagan

Stay Grounded

Jan 28, 2023

I think it needs to be pointed out that all of the spaces being lamented here, specifically Twitter, are, and have always been, for-profit corporations. Their purpose is to make money. If they don't make money, they die. It should really be no surprise that they don't care. They are not town squares, they are shopping malls.

I am not trying to victim blame here, and I feel truly sorry for all the people who tried to build community inside a digital shopping mall only to have it rug-pulled. But I also get it- if you grew up in suburbia, the mall is the only place that resembles a town square. But it is not a town square. It's simply not built for that.

Musk's changes to Twitter make it worse. But it was awful under Jack Dorsey too. Musk brought Nazis back after a short ban. But the Nazis had been there for years before without getting banned. And many were just... never banned and still aren't. It's not in Twitters' interests to ban Nazis because they generate engagement. Promoting a free exchange of ideas is not what Twitter was built to do.

Anyway, this is a fantastic piece and I appreciate you writing it. If you want a dose of optimism, remember that we have options now. Open source software like Mastodon lets anyone with a little gumption build the specific social media site they want, and you're not trapped to one space. There will be no "next Twitter" because we don't need there to be.

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Cynthia

Jan 27, 2023

This article is Soooo good! You have captured the value, the very soul of an internet uncomprised platform. It’s your favorite bookseller, your favorite aunt, your favorite teacher, author, artist, scientist, human, all wrapped up and available 24/7 through people you’ve probably never even met in real life. Losing a beloved platform is like grieving many deaths simultaneously. 💙

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Cynthia

Jan 27, 2023

Make that “uncompromised platform”

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A Sheingold

Jan 24, 2023

I hate that this made me cry.

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Gabe

Gabe’s Substack

Jan 24, 2023

I met my first longterm girlfriend on Tumblr. We lived in different provinces and moved to another one together. Now we've broken up, but we're the best of friends.

I never would have had that without Tumblr.

Thank you for writing this Catherynne.

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Nico Versluys

The many worlds of Nico Versluy…

Jan 18, 2023

Beautiful, incredible writing. An article filled with love and truth and light and the simple, seeet joy of connection. Thank you so much Cat.

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Zachary Drake

Jan 7, 2023

Thanks for writing this.

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Alex Alvarova

Alex’s Newsletter

Jan 6, 2023

Bravo. Just bravo. This is no article, it´s a manifesto. Damned good.

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S. OC

Jan 2, 2023

A long long time ago you wrote a book and published it online in little sections and we paid what we could so we could keep reading it. Every time I see your name I think. "I helped. I knew she was worth supporting back when." We will keep reaching out and helping as best we can, wherever we can.

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Stefan

Jan 1, 2023

Struggled to read the last few paragraphs because I was in tears. I still am. You have written something powerful here. Thank you.

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Dan Sanders

Dec 28, 2022

That was stunning. I just shared your link on FB, and struggled to narrow down which bits to quote to entice my friends to read it.

Count me as an instant subscriber.

Thank you.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

Thank YOU, Dan!

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Edward Bornstein

Dec 27, 2022

"Prodigy was upset that people were, by and large, using the free communication service they tossed on there just to have more content and not their weird Random Garbage You Don’t Need Storefront."

Umm, it wasn't free, there was an hourly charge. Like Compuserve in the same period you could easily spend hundreds of dollars a month on Prodigy hourly charges.

That Prodigy got stroppy that people weren't buying enough stuff I don't doubt, but nothing was free.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022·edited Dec 28, 2022Author

I worded that poorly--the communications features were not, at first, specifically monetized. Of course access to the internet through Prodigy itself was, and quite expensively so in those days (which as a 12 year old I clearly wasn't footing myself) but it didn't cost anything EXTRA to use the social portions of the site/network.

And as Marty points out, once they did start charging extra for that specific service, it all came crashing down.

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Edward Bornstein

Dec 27, 2022

(Marty Hale-Evans says above that it was initially a flat rate subscription and they changed to hourly rates later.)

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Ajay Bhandari

Dec 26, 2022

Thanks for writing this, a great thought provoking read and very timely to make some new year resolutions :-)

I have been on internet since 1996 from the days of bb's, dial up connections and ICQ. I think both the value of a social network and the culture are emergent properties that arise out of interactions between the community members, the internal & external environment and most importantly the diversity in the network. Though, most of us have seen the cyclical nature of these platforms over the years, but the drive towards monoculture (in thought, action etc.) is what scares me most in this latest transition phase we are. An irrevocably lose the diversity would be hard to replace and may have a long lasting effect on emergent culture & values for years to come. The fight is on.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

It's so funny, because I distinctly remember, in the mid/late-00s, people pretty intensely bemoaning the /loss/ of monoculture. The "water cooler" and other ways in which "everyone" (of course never everyone) could be watching or reading or hearing or experiencing culture at the same time, in the same way, and having those touchstones in common without having to reach too far for them. We see now how homogenizing that can be, and how many more people can make a living as culture creators and commentators when the grip of monoculture is lessened and there's room to breathe in the niches, but very recently people were pretty upset about the idea.

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Meredith Lewis

Methods and Madness

Dec 26, 2022

Wow.

Thank you.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

So welcome, Meredith.

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Ted Anderson

Dec 26, 2022·edited Dec 26, 2022

Wow, this is a great Xmas gift. So many powerful, penetrating thoughts serialized into sentences. Thank you!

(edit)

I've read a lot of science fiction about the singularity, but few tackle what it must be like to live through it. Your paragraph on that was so eye opening.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

I've been yelling about how we already did the singularity for SO long, it's nice to have a response other than a withering stare!

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John V

Dec 25, 2022

As a 1978 baby with a tech industry dad and other family members who were early internet-savvy, it was called Virtual CB on Prodigy, at least it was until we ditched Prodigy for one reason or another, later to try AOL...wasn't there a cute nickname for the day they unleashed usenet access to AOL users? Ah, memories.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

The Eternal September, I believe...

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Fern

Dec 24, 2022

Oh, my beloved Prodigy! I remember it well. And I remember when they decided we all should be shopping not talking. And how they made it 'pay per post' for a while. It had been grand and glorious for us 'off brand religions', we were finally able to find each other.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

You know, I deliberately didn't go and look up the Prodigy timeline in preparation for this post. I felt like my memory and recollection of how it went was the important thing to communicate, rather than a wikipedia entry on the history of a company. And you and a few others have replied with your much stronger information--which feels rather vindicating as I appear to have remembered it just about exactly right, down to the year they started charging those fees. Thank you for corroborating my misty memory!

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Graham Porter

Graham’s Newsletter

Dec 24, 2022

Brilliant.

Thanks for writing it.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

Thanks for reading it, Graham.

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Kay Ohtie

Dec 24, 2022

I can't put into words how heavily this resonates, and especially about how fascists don't LOVE the thing they do. It explains so much, so succinctly.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

Thanks for that, I felt like I started to get a bit far afield into another essay at that point, but that somehow for me it did connect. I'm glad it did for you too, and maybe that other one needs to be written as well.

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Alexander Kurz

Dec 24, 2022

Thanks for the article. You really make it vivid that there is a deep contradiction between the internet of commerce and the internet of the people.

It looks like we lost the internet of the people to the internet of commerce. And I think you are right, we need start building again.

I believe it can be done, technology was never as widely available as it is now. But it will be hard. The problem is not only technology, but also human. As you say, the human problems were there right from the start. But what tilted the balance and killed the people's internet was corporate power and advertising.

For a starter, two basic problems need to be solved: How to finance social media without advertising and how to make social networks robust against corporate takeover.

The move of millions from Twitter to Mastodon means that there is a lot of excitement and experimentation right now in order to find answers to these questions ...

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

I think part of it was also that letting big networks handle the connection was just so much easier. It was a fuck of a lot of hard work the old way. We got suckered into the ease of it all, the automation, the slick "on rails" of these mega-sites. It's why Mastodon is frustrating a lot of people--it's not a full rollback, but you're expected to figure things out yourself in a way no one's asked us to in a bit.

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Alexander Kurz

Dec 29, 2022

I agree that it was hard work back then. But in the 1990ies, we had not yet figured out how to build good software (reliable, nice UX, ...). There has been tremendous progress on this front (not least due to Big Tech, credit where credit is due).

While the so-called web3 looks in many ways like a repeat of the 90ies (technology with a huge potential for decentralization taken over by a handful of big corporations), there are also new possibilities.

For example, using Mastodon, in my experience, is not harder now than using Twitter. What is hard is to create and run your own Mastodon instance. This still needs a lot of improvement (which will be coming soon). But think about it. How hard was it to create Twitter. How much easier is it today to create your own Mastodon instance. Personally, I am very excited about the possibilities of today ...

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Malorie Nilson

Chaise Longue

Dec 24, 2022

Yes to all of this. I had been a part of some online aspaces before LiveJournal, but LJ was really where I found community. It is where I found you and would feel like it was possible to write my silly little words and see them grow. Twitter has been my home for 14 years (even while I was building another space on Tumblr), and somehow my connections there over the years have grown to surpass the LJ days. I hadn’t really realized it amidst all of the, “oh it’s just Twitter.” Like so many, I am where I am today specifically because of that online space. Thank you for finding your way to kindly elder millennial Granny Minnesota--it is comforting amidst the unknowns.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

It's really just so fucking heartening how many people have popped up to say they've known me since the LJ days as a result of this essay. WE DID NOT LOSE EACH OTHER. So many of us are still here, same as we ever were.

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Gary Bunker

Dec 24, 2022

Gotta appreciate love for Livejournal. Thank you for this essay.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

So welcome, Gary.

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Claudia Tiefisher

Claudia’s Newsletter

Dec 23, 2022

Fantastic article. Thank you so much for writing it. I'm recently on Substack and loving sharing my views with the world. Have you read "Stolen Focus" by Johann Hari? I highly recommend it. There were moments in your article that I was reminded of some of the things he raises in his book.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

I haven't! Book or article?

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Claudia Tiefisher

Claudia’s Newsletter

Dec 28, 2022

Book. This is the link to the book:

https://stolenfocusbook.com

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Bill Maxwell

Dec 23, 2022

An absolute treasure of an article. Thanks for reminding a Gen X author where his queer, geeky, feet should be planted.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

Infinitely welcome, Bill.

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Sarah

Dec 23, 2022

This is so excellent and perfect and amazing. It's the first thing of yours I've ever read, but it won't be the last! Thank you for a splash of hope and realness, on a day I've otherwise been sad about how ChatGPT is going to ruin writing, and techbros are everywhere, blah blah.... this is a great antidote to all that mishegoss. XO

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

Ugh, the AI encroachment on artistic work is an ulcer all its own. It's horrifying.

I hope you like the other things when you get to them! Team Human (mostly)!

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bakery

the bakery

Dec 23, 2022

everything you said has been bubbling up on its own within me for my entire life. i reached my boiling point this year and i’ve upended my social life and been searching and creating and connecting for months now to build a community founded on everything one should be. I resonate so deeply with this post and I appreciate everything you’ve said. Thanks for always fighting the good fight. I hope we all can share a utopian social space online sooner than we think we will be able to. xoxo

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

I really, really hope so too.

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Soon

Dec 23, 2022

Oh so you *do* know that Dreamwidth and AO3 exist.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

I do, but they are not the same for many, many reasons. I absolutely value and respect them, but no two social media sites ever occupy quite the same range of possible uses.

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Joshua Kronengold

Dec 23, 2022

I had companies showing up on campus to offer me a credit card in 1991, when I started college--and before that my parents had had credit cards until my mom gave hers up to curb her consumerism. People did sign a lot of checks in the early 90s, but they often had credit cards too.

But having lived through much of this except Diaryland because I never noticed it, and CERTAINLY Livejournal, everything there is absolutely true.

Federated services (like Mastodon, like Diaspora badly) are an attempt to counter that "millionairre buys the town square" effect. It might work. It might fall down and get replaced by a more well thought attempt, and that might happen again and again until something sticks, because we DO have federated services that work, email and usenet (however much that was destroyed by neglect and expensive server needs and anti-piracy, it still exists and is still federated). Because as long as someone can own the town square, there will be an incentive to make an offer, and sometimes that offer will be too good to pass up, because the people who build town squares have dreams and often investors and need to eat too.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

There's no use pretending it isn't a really tough problem--if it weren't, we'd probably be past it right now. But it doesn't feel like the right solution is just to let it happen. That's never gone well, pretty much ever. Doesn't mean I have a solution, though, I surely wish I did.

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Joshua Kronengold

Feb 17, 2023

It's never letting it happen. It probably is trying to come up with solutions that don't put all conversation in one place that investors or a private owner owns.

Usenet was Good at not being owned by anyone, even with it having organization and moderators and literal cancel-wars between spammers and moderators. But it just doesn't scale to an interent that Everyone Uses (honestly it didn't scale well to being a usenet everyone used in the early 90s; I routinely got driven away from groups because even with killfiles, they were just too damned big). We need things that put arbitrary barriers between conversations, otherwise the deluge is unreadable. And that was before Usenet got used enough for warez that governments started targeting it.

But that said, what Usenet had was a standardized protocol which prevented people's messages being at the mercy of any provider and that let everyone use different clients customized to their needs--and that's valuable even with "every site manages a giant store and forward database" being an awful way to handle messaging. I'm not super happy with the federated systems we have. ActivityPub seems to rely on point to point connections for everything rather than having hubs, and still has a single site being your database of record and everything falls down if it goes down.

We can't give up. But if we keep trying, I have hope we'll eventually find a solution that lasts ...maybe not forever, but longer. Lots of technical solutions are trash. But some are not, and the ones that stick last much longer. I am HOPEFUL that email still works, and has been iterated, improved, even, by stuff like DKIM that make it harder to fake mail and easier to trust that it came from where it says it did. I just don't know when the roller coaster will end.

Also, you'r a godamned hero for answering all these messages.

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Temppa

Dec 23, 2022

Wtf

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

*shrug* Had some things to say.

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Arne Babenhauserheide

Dec 23, 2022

Thank you!

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

you're welcome, Arne! I love your name!

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Arne Babenhauserheide

Feb 17, 2023

Thanks ☺

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Rabbit

Dec 22, 2022

I mostly played Abel Adventures and read The Secret Garden on Prodigy.

One Post Wonder remains a sweet little secret.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 23, 2022Author

I have an account there but havent posted in years. For me it was TOO private, I wasn't really ever able to go outside the group of RL friends with whom I signed up.

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Rich Browner

Dec 22, 2022

Thank you for the time and heartfelt zeal I feel here in this piece. Glad to be aboard. Let’s keep on keeping on.

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

You got it, Rich. :)

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RemovedDec 27, 2022

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

I'm just removing this as an accidental double post, having replied to the first one. :)

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Catherynne M. Valente

Dec 28, 2022Author

Yay for posting on Diaryland! Maybe I should go retrieve my account, too...

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The Limits of Compassion

So you've opened your heart to radical empathy and recognized the deep, sacred humanity in every living being you connect with online...but what about THAT fucking guy?

CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE

JAN 2, 2023

∙ PAID

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One of the things I want to do with the paid tier of this Substack is essays like this one. Essays I could put up openly, full of thoughts I completely and fervently stand by and would have no issue proudly attaching my name to. Essays that, were they to go viral or achieve any sort of popularity, would attract whining, shrieking nonsense from every fucking moldy gutter of the internet, taking up my time and energy and VERY CONSTANTLY TESTED PATIENCE to wade through with a normal, healthy blood pressure.

Things I want to say and find important, but honestly? I just don’t want to fucking hear it from the real and actual people I’m talking about, who’ve developed the nasty narcissist’s habit of actually responding to low-traffic commentary about their cultural malfeasance because it’s all a fun game to them and the prize is feeling talked about. That, or sending their drooling shitbat-horde to harass anyone who dares to breathe maybe you are being a bit of an asshole right now what with your hating everyone and calling for a lot of groups’ deaths could you possibly not we are all very tired and busy thank you.

I just don’t always want to play goalie against the shitbat team.

But if you’ve paid to be part of this little “newsletter,” (and oh my god, thank you, hi, I remain amazed anyone did) I figure you’re more or less okay, and probably at least 30-40% on my team, so you’re probably not going to tell Ben Shapiro I’m about to call him a shitbat (which I am). Possibly more importantly, I’m willing to take the bet that you’re really unlikely to start frothing at the comment section about how I myself am the shitbat, and also glue, such that foul calumny bounces off them and sticks to me and also vaccines are made of billions of tiny demons which can mysteriously be defeated with the power of refreshing peppermint essential oil.

So I’m going to get into something that troubles me pretty often, and I’m trusting you all to come along for the ride.