Conversation

if i’ve learned one thing from the last few days it’s that public twitter actually has nowhere near enough bandwidth to sustain the raw amount of conversation that should be happening

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Hek (

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@hekatonsure

Mar 7

Weird dynamic of parasocially learning about people deeply through huge backlog of output but narrow bandwidth in specific conversations on the TL...

QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

@QiaochuYuan

Mar 7

i bet there's a borges short story here. like what if there was a guy who wrote infinitely many tweets and another guy who read them all

"The Circular Ruins" is basically this but: Guy1 who starts tweeting by imagining a guy2. He tweets to this audience of one, faster and faster accelerating, continuing to define a guy in his head. Naturally, infinitely defining a guy simply creates said guy so guy1 leaves out...

a core feature of guy2 that would be the final Piece to bring him into existence. guy3 reads every tweet, parasocially becoming familiar through raw exposure with the guy2 that guy1 is imagining. He begins to become more and more like what he imagines guy2 to be:

never is guy2 explicitly defined yet guy3 begins to match the hypothetical guy2. His clothes, his hair, his lifestyle, his philosophy. Guy1 continues to tweet frantically into the void, becoming more and more intimately connected with guy2! Guy2 fills a Role for him as a...

brother, a mentor, a advisor. Guy3 strives harder in response to this, his body getting taller and leaner, his eyes changing color, his voice growing deeper. Guy1 continues to methodically define guy2 only in such a way as to make his infinite tweet storm never instantiate him...