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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