Humanity will always be all of those things; hippos, gazelles, cheetahs, warthogs, Elon Musk

Sunday column

Certain things you learn about as a kid can be especially surprising and pleasing.

The Honesty Box was one of those things.

I have a loose memory of rolling up to some gate outside some orchard and Mum or Dad explaining there’s no one here but we can just choose the fruit we want and leave the money for them in this honesty box.

What was the pleasing surprise? Possibly it was the notion of a shop being always open; possibly it was that such faith existed in the world; that people will trust you to be fair; that people will, when no-one is looking, do the right thing. 

Life would then go on to show me otherwise. But from time to time I would feel that warm glow again.

The early Internet had it, a bit. In 1994 I got myself an internet connection and made my way into a new and exciting world full of surprise and delight and squawking modem sounds. 

Wired magazine was my guide: the hope and promise of information being shared freely; collaboration; innovation. You would find like-minded people online, you would explore exciting possibilities. Oh, there was music in the cafés at night and revolution in the air.

Well, a bit. So much seemed possible, and it would all be built upon a platform of openness and sharing and trust and doing the right thing when no one is looking. Or, possibly, a libertarian free-for-all where information is free, ergo a shitload of other free stuff will also follow.

It was a high-minded brave new world; it rotted away to something else.

Then he started into dealing with slaves
And something inside of him died
She had to sell everything she owned
And froze up inside

The carnival grew larger.  All aspects of humanity made its way to the watering hole ; the venal, the deluded, the sneaky, the bitter, the treacherous, the deranged.

Of course they did. Humanity will always be all of those things; hippos, gazelles, cheetahs, warthogs, Elon Musk.

Twitter’s trajectory mirrors the internet: so much promise, then messy ghastly evolution into something else. I already bailed on it once, about four years ago, driven off by thickening clouds of enmity. But then a few months later, I got a cold, and on my sick bed I looked in on it and just like that I was back. Although second time around I was less vituperative, engaging less readily. There seemed no longer much point, slim prospects for good faith engagement.

Twitter was constructed on top of an honesty box. But once a certain kind of person clocked that you would not be held to account in the usual way for being an asshole; that hate and aggression would not only go unchallenged but actually give you validation; well, she was all on for young and old as we like to say in the sports bar.

So much angry assertion and calculated hurt and ad hominem derision. Why would you want to waste your time responding to people so ghastly you would never want them inside your house? The block button became my friend. I posted less and less. For the past two years I have used it chiefly to advertise each new edition of More Than A Feilding and acquire intel for said newsletter.

I had sort of assumed no alternative. But there is always something. This vast online network offers so very many other ways to acquire knowledge and insight; to share experiences and fears and joy and delight; to test our understandings. And all of it can be done in a gentle way if you wish. So why stand in a sewer and fight off muggers?

This fresh realisation has come to me on my sick bed because — surprise! — I've been blessed with the Paxlovid Covid Rebound this weekend.

Hooray, etc, but also: hooray for the two new possibilities I have lighted on in a Covid haze.

One is Mastodon, the other is Substack.

Mastodon.nz , I've found to my very pleasant surprise, is what its designer calls social media done differently. A protocol not under control of any single company, but governed by the group you choose to belong to. Think of it as a nation linked by many roads but your particular group can be a town or a village or a city with its own particular rules. You get to choose one that suits your personal preference. The mastodon.nz code of conduct is great. A simple way to put it would be you don't get to act like a Cameron Slater, and that's the kind of place I like to live.

And the other town I am very much enjoying living in is this one, this little community of More Than A Feilding readers. I genuinely appreciate and admire the accumulated wealth of knowledge and accomplishment you collectively represent, truly, and I'm very mindful that I've barely skimmed the surface of what could be shared.

My aim is to follow more of the stories you’ve alerted me to, and also to collect your own. So many to be told.

And alongside that I’d like to make use of the newly-launched Substack chat feature for a particular purpose: to gather and explore fresh thinking, amazing stories, informed explanations of complex issues, all the things that social media has been very good at producing but also very good at submerging beneath a torrent of hate. Why get it from Twitter when you can draw in so much from your own town?

I have every confidence we can use the internet to make a better internet.