#social-panopticon #community-dynamics #social-dynamics #search #cohost-repost
2023-07-04

because I've been seeing a lot of community and factional strife that keeps coming down to either people being genuinely misread/misunderstood/bad-pattern-false-positive, or from there being a trusted person in the web who spreads misinfo, knowingly or not.

but there's no like, "how do we actually patch this" that seems to be pointed to.

and i certainly don't have the cycles, or words, to write one atm.

but it does feel important at some point, especially as we go to build new communities as the old anchor spaces go under.

especially since this feels like I'm describing at least one instance in 90% of the spaces I've been in.

some recent stuff has me actively thinking about it, but I've been trying to describe the phenomenon for a good six years.

and a big part of it is that the only enforcement mechanism that actually works online is surveillance panopticon, even if people don't realize that's what they're doing by having full history text search and using it. Some things just need to fade away eventually. Especially when so many people change completely on a 2-3 year cycle usually. That's how learning works. And progress.

as a society it feels like we've forgotten how to forget.

especially when things said in the past online in public tend to have a context rooted in the zeitgeist that only makes sense when you read it within that.