A Year of New Avenues

The good stuff is always lonely in the beginning. Nothing meaningful will get made if its potential makers all wimp out too soon, because they get scared by the sparse crowd, the empty room.

I am thinking specifically of experimentation around “ways of relating online”. I’ve used that phrase before, and I acknowledge it might be a bit obscure … but, for me, it captures the rich overlap of publishing and networking, media and conviviality. It’s this domain that was so decisively captured in the 2010s, and it’s this domain that is newly

I want to insist on an amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet. At last, in 2023, I want to tell the tech CEOs and venture capitalists: pipe down. Buzz off. Go fave each other’s tweets.

It is 2003 again. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram haven’t been invented yet … except, it’s also 2023, and they have, so you can learn from their rise and ruin.

Either way, this is a big deal. Publishing on the internet is a solved problem; finding each other on the internet, in a way that’s healthy and sustainable … that’s the piece that has never quite fallen into place.

How might you help people find new things on the internet? How might you give new things on the internet a meaningful audition, without turning it all into a game that can (and will) be hacked and mastered?