I can’t shake the feeling that we’re witnessing the end of a weird, brief, anomalous social media” era that will be like the Wild West: just 10-15 years long but powerfully shaping the historical imagination. Culture Wars as future frontier mythologies (like cowboys vs Indians)
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The famous trolls and shitposters will be remembered like the famous gunslingers. Platform admins as famous lawmen.
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In the Wild West the post-civil war completion of railroad closed the frontier, ended Long Drive, etc. Deadwood (HBO) is set a decade later in mining at the tail end of closing. I used to think 90s internet mapped to Wild West but that was more like Lewis&Clark/fur trade era.
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The railroads+telegraph were at once unprecedented concentrators of capital and decentralizers of everything else: populations, industries, organizations, supply chains, urban development.
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Did he? I’d like a reference please... I’m actually using that exact argument for a thing I’m working on, that atemporality is a transient condition.
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I’ve read that one before but I read it as “10y so far” I think hmm 🤔
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It’s just the first wave of these services also echoing the end of Old media’s control over content so it is loud. The next versions will be much more civilized.
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Yes sort of. The chaos dynamics that govern current social media are just a transition phase. However, I think that we may very well be transitioning into a cellular or balkanized structure, that is not singular consensus reality.
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People are going to have to deal w/ VUCA no matter what, but perhaps not at all scales and across all topics. In any case, the good ol days of the evening broadcast are gone. Reverberations of the Trump fracture in American consensus will be felt for a generation. (Thanks Roger)
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Thanks for articulating this. Feel the same here. But what might happen next, scares me.



