Reddit started out as a successor to Digg. Digg doesn’t really exist anymore. But Digg was a successor to Slashdot, which almost let anyone submit stories to it but not quite, and had an elaborate, almost byzantine system for ranking and evaluating comments left on those stories. These were the early days of the Internet. People were trying to figure out how they could find the good shit. “The good shit,” back then, mostly consisted of articles about technology and occasionally politics.

“Technology and occasionally politics” was Reddit’s bread-and-butter too, when it started out. Reddit’s big appeal was that it was notably simpler than Digg, whose appeal had been that it was notably simpler than Slashdot. The simplicity drew a larger crowd, but it also sped up how quickly people could speed through links that had been submitted to it. They were farms, not only for submission, but for consumption. And the more people consumed on it, the more streamlined the system for voting on things needed to be. The more quickly you could process information, the more effective the system was at “aggregating” submissions, and evaluating which of them would be the most popular to the broadest demographic of people.

Subreddits—the division of the site into multiple topical publications—were introduced when it became obvious that technology and politics were slowly losing popularity. They simply couldn’t compete with the instantaneous appeal of cats.

Try and write an essay so gripping and beloved that more people will read it than will look at a picture of a cat. It’s like asking someone to bake a five-pound meatloaf so delicious that people will consume it more quickly than they can pop a Pringle into their mouths. It can’t be done. It’s a category error: don’t be cynical and assume that the problem is anti-intellectualism, because it’s not. The problem is that you should not compare cats and technological essays—or, if you do, you shouldn’t make “speed with which one decides they like this” your sole evaluative measure.

Once upon a time, Tumblr had a “front page”. I was 18 at the time. I was particularly proud of myself one week, when I managed to hit it twice in a row.

The second time, I hit it immediately after I’d shared a link to the game Passage, by Jason Rohrer. If you’ve never played Passage, the gist of it is this: it takes five minutes to play and it can break your heart. Especially if you, like me, were 18 and brooding when you played it.

My heartfelt recommendation of Passage was not what made it to the “top” of Tumblr. (Which wasn’t really a “top” so much as it was a curated editorial selection.) What made it was a Photoshop of a camera lens turned into a coffee mug. At the time, “cameras and coffee” could more-or-less sum up the enthusiasms of Tumblr’s audience.

Because I was 18, I posted a grumpy little thing like: “Ugh! I shared this thing that could change your life with you, and I shared a doofy little coffee mug that I didn’t even make, and all of you decided to pay attention to that one instead.”

And, because the Internet was a smaller place in 2008, Tumblr’s co-creator saw my post, and responded to it directly. In public. I have the honor of having my name attached to a famous and brilliant tech guy’s blog, on which he says something along the lines of “Listen here, you snide little shit…”

What he said, in short, was that he was looking at the Internet, completely for fun, and he saw a picture of a thing that he liked. He also saw a link to a game with a tiny essay attached that more-or-less said Prepare for this to ruin your mood!!!! He decided, for some strange reason, not to ruin his own mood. It was as simple as that.

My takeaway, of course, was not that there were logical reasons for Tumblr to gravitate towards twee imagery, bad haiku, and photos of hot people. It was that Tumblr’s staff were all culture-ruining idiots who were out to destroy every noble way of life.

And really, who’s to say I wasn’t right.

Reddit’s most popular exhibitionist sub-site, /r/GoneWild, is a place dedicated to people posting nude pictures of themselves.

By “people”, of course, I largely mean women.

/r/GoneWild is exceedingly popular, because body parts are almost as easy to enjoy as kittens are. This is the same reason why, for a long time, porn sites had more sophisticated online video-watching mechanisms than Google did: they drew unimaginably huge audiences, and those audiences were looking for something so unsophisticated that these people really did have to compete on quality of service. 

However, /r/GoneWild didn’t entirely take over Reddit, because Reddit allows for many different strains of easily-digestible content. In its long and storied history, it has also enabled easy purveyors of such lowbrow enthusiasms as libertarianism, sexism, child porn, creepy photos of unsuspecting women, racism, podcasts, and GamerGate. It has also served, thanks to its novel choice to let users vote on comments as well as content, to mass-distribute easily-learned opinions, some of which manage to be very long and completely facile. In a sense, it’s a marvelous experiment whose goal, unintentionally, has been to find all the types of content so pre-digested that they come in slurry form.

It didn’t mean to be this. It just wanted to be simpler than Digg, which wanted to be simpler than Slashdot. Everything else just followed from that.

It’s all so obvious you barely have to think about it.

Tech entrepreneurs are obsessed with UX, which stands for “user experience.” On some level, UX means: “What is it like to use this product?” On another level, it means: “How can we steer our users towards doing all the things we want them to do?”

How do we keep them addicted to scrolling? How do we keep them addicted to notifications?

Most importantly, how do we keep them addicted to giving us content? Because without them giving us things, without them making things for us, there will be nothing to scroll through, nothing to interact with, nothing to let other users give those users notifications with.

I forget if it was Tumblr, Twitter, or Facebook that introduced the first “like”. The “like” was like the vote on Reddit, except that it meant nothing. I recall that, before it, Tumblr only had the reblog, which let you share content on your blog… but they felt it made interacting with things feel like too much of a decision. “Liking” things barely felt like a choice.

Liking also solved the other big question that people had, because it meant that your content was ranked. Ranked on Reddit meant determining what millions of people saw as “important”. Ranked on Tumblr or Facebook meant getting shown the most popular things that your friends shared, and then the most popular things that they collectively liked. Once again, simplicity rose to the surface… only this time, the message was: Your friends are better than you. Your friends are more interesting than you. Your friends are more beautiful than you. Your friends are having a better time. Your friends are living a better life.

If nobody reacted to you on Facebook, how did you even know you were there? Clearly all that was left was to respond with content of your own. Content that proved you were smart, you were funny, you were attractive, you were fucking, you were enjoying life.

If you did well, the real reward wasn’t your own sense of validation. It was that you could make your other friends feel like shit. And those friends would respond, those friends would fight back, those friends would try to outdo you in every way, shape, and form, just to wipe that stupid fucking smile off your face.

It is possible that, at this point, people started to resent each other a little bit.

Studies have, in fact, shown this to be the case.

It is also possible that, around here, people started to feel increasingly lonely, increasingly pathetic, increasingly worthless, increasingly distant from everybody else in their lives.

Studies have also conclusively proven this to be true.

It’s possible that this loneliness gave people room for more resentment. That this loneliness left people feeling devoid of any identity, any hope, any semblance of future, any semblance of happiness. That these people started grasping at anything that felt like community—and that the communities that spoke to them the most were the ones that spoke about their desperation, their sense of isolation, their growing resentment towards anyone who seemed happy or fulfilled. 

You would not believe the studies that they have for this one.

What is certain is that all these patterns, the loneliness, the resentment, the self-hatred and the hatred for others both, generates tremendous content for every platform that welcomes it in. 

You don’t need studies for that one. Just look at the IPOs.

In 2010, a beautiful new phone-only social network debuted. Its functionality was simple, even poetic: you could take photos of your life, apply romantic and sensual filters to them, and share them with your friends. You’d also get a stream of imagery, completely wordless, documenting moments in the lives of friends or strangers.

At first, you couldn’t upload photos—you had to take them with this app’s camera. You also couldn’t like people’s pictures. You just looked at them, and let them scroll by. 

Photos of nature. Photos of food. Photos of beautiful places. Photos of loved ones. Photos of children. Photos of cats.

In 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram for a literal billion dollars.

At some point in the last decade, Instagram became associated with “influencers,” people whose curated lives were almost performance art, curated glossy market-friendly versions of “best lives” nobody could reasonably expect, funded by millions of dollars for some reason. 

As of 2021, it has been reported that factions of yoga teachers on Instagram are spreading stories about pedophile slave rings to their followers. There could be no other end.

Dopamine. Doomscrolling. “Drumpf.” Outrage. Cancel culture. 

The scientific explanations conceal more than they explain. You can name the mechanics that enable this behavior all you want, but “proving” the behavior suggests that what matters here is the behavior, the tendency, the fact that human beings are capable of making unhealthy choices or developing psychological addictions without chemical aid.

What really matters isn’t: “Why are we like this?”

What matters isn’t even: “Why is this happening?”

What matters is: “What could be happening instead?”

At some point, Google—the original data-driven tech company—calculated that, for every third of a second it takes for your web page to load, you lose something like half of your prospective audience.

It doesn’t seem like a third of a second ought to matter that much, but apparently it does. 

Similarly, so many users are allergic to scrolling that, the second something loads outside of their browser window—anything beyond the size of your screen—something like 90% of people simply don’t bother going down. (I’m making these numbers up, by the way, but they’re inspired by real numbers that say more-or-less the same thing.) 

Hence this obsession with optimization: strip down, streamline, cut out everything but what’s most efficient. Let the community decide what “most efficient” looks like. Why not trust them to find the lowest common denominator on their own?

It’s very interesting, then, that there’s an entire phenomenon of things which take off because they’re not simple. Because, on some level, they’re messy, intricate, and complicated.

The TV show Supernatural comes to mind. Or the runaway bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which is seven hundred pages long. The game Dwarf Fortress. The BTS fandom, though many fandoms qualify. Eve Online. TvTropes. Minecraft. Homestuck.

If half of these are games, it’s partly that games thrive on the stuff that social media tries to excise. On social media, you’re the game. In games, a part of the delight involves slowly coming to understand a complexity, finding joy in how things work, learning how to navigate and manipulate systems, coming to an understanding of something that, at first, completely puzzled you.

For instance… puzzles.

Or take this 18-minute speedrun of a video game from 1998, which is so popular that, even after it was taken down, multiple people posted multiple videos of it, some of which still have millions of views apiece. Because, to millions of people, the process of understanding how to play a game in bizarre, enigmatic ways is so fascinating that seeing someone play one for eighteen minutes is absolutely riveting.

The pinnacle of this might be the “half A press” video, the name of which is so obscure that the obscurity is part of the fascination, then part of the joy. Four million views dedicated to a 25-minute video of a man explaining that, in one video game (1996), if you hold a button without letting go of it, you can let go of it later, in a way that means… 

Well, millions of people wanted to know what that means.

Minecraft is perhaps the prototypical example of this: it’s a game whose core mechanic was barely even explained for years, so that if you loaded it up you wouldn’t have the slightest idea of what to do. This didn’t stop fans: they made wikis, and those wikis became books, and all of this became a community, and that community began throwing conferences where thousands of people traveled around the world to attend, all bonding over a game whose graphic art is so simplistic that literal children can exactly replicate it, should they so desire (and they do). 

Minecraft alone, Minecraft the singular game, is itself a multi-billion dollar industry. (Microsoft bought it in 2014 for more than twice what Facebook paid for Instagram.) And it’s not the only one by any means. 

When Minecraft’s creator began voicing angry, bitter comments, ones that expressed hate towards women and gay people and nonwhite people and tunneled deep into conspiracy theory, the people who played his games just shrugged and cast him out. His name was removed from his own game. A joke went around that a Japanese cartoon character had created Minecraft to begin with. 

Communities rooted in play and joy are less susceptible to the overall bitterness and resentment that the Internet’s most popular sites foster. To the extent that they do overlap, it’s often fueled by the same old social media mechanics. In a sense, there are two kinds of digital community, and their purposes are completely at odds with one another. When they intersect—and they intersect a lot—there is strife. They are not strictly defined by political creed or ideology. Rather, they are defined by the means by which they interact, and by the things they come together over.

The question, then, might be: why does the one form of community tolerate existing on the other’s territory?

Or it might be: what would it look like if the ways we socialized looked more like the ways that we played games together?

Or it might just be: why do any of us put up with this, when we know exactly what it does to us?

One answer might be: because we don’t know how to make a better thing.

Another might be: because we still don’t quite know what to imagine.

And another is less an answer than a despair: a despair that maybe this is just what society is like now, maybe this is what society has always been like, maybe we were only ever angry and lonely and bitter and hurtful and all these sites have only revealed us to be what we always were, albeit for an unfathomable profit.

We are so lead-poisoned that we look out at our lead-poisoned society and we say: Maybe this was always us.

We are convinced, not loudly but quietly, not by someone else but by a voice within ourselves, that happiness was the fluke, and misery was the guarantee. We are convinced that heaven was the lie, hell was the hidden truth, and even purgatory was little more than a polite deception.

We all just wanted to look at some fucking kittens.

Ten years ago, almost to the month, I started work on a yearslong thesis project. That project revolved around a game.

The game in question was not popular. It was unfathomable to me that it would ever become popular. The thought that, ten years later, someone would release a video about it—a two-hour-long video—and get millions of views for it… well, that was a little too forward-thinking for me to grasp. It was unpopular because it was complicated, and now it is popular because it was complicated, and in all honesty, those two hours didn’t remotely do it justice.

In this game, an architect has built a marvelous hall of mirrors. It projects light so beautifully, so wondrously, that to live within it, you would be convinced that you were living in another world. In fact, you become convinced that you are living in a world of your own imagining, a world that’s been projected for everyone else to live in too. 

This wondrous building has become an eternal playground for children. Beyond it, the world has been hit by a monstrous plague. People are dying by the thousands every day. And there is a sense that this plague is a manifestation of something truer about the world: that it’s the world that’s gotten sick, and that the plague is just the price we pay for it, and that this dazzling world of lights might just have been what made us all sick.

For the record, this game was released in 2005.

At some point, after an absolutely wearying series of experiences, you confront the architect who built this horrific wonder. You confront him about his creation, his masterpiece, this thing that may just destroy the world. 

And instead of showing the slightest bit of remorse for what he’s done, he flies into a rant.

The problem, he seethes, is children. Children and adults who think like children. Children who see this minor miracle, this utopian dream, this opportunity to make anything happen… and get lost in the crudest and most vulgar and most self-serving games. Children who think the point of this thing was to look away from the world. And adults who want to use it to realize a vision all their own, but whose vision of what the world could be is just a re-enactment of all the things that made the world so shitty to begin with.

This, the man insists, was a tool for artists. A tool for poets. A tool for dreamers who might dare to dream of better world. And instead, we did this with it.

So saying, he spits the question back in your face. What are you doing with this? What have you come up with? Are you really willing to just idly play through a game, reading its dialogue, following its script, waiting for it to reveal some answer to you that ends the story and lets you go home happy? The answer is staring right at you. It’s not the game: it’s the thing that let somebody else dream up the game.

He is, to be clear, kind of a douche. In a special Russian sort of way.

In a speech this game’s creator gave, which I was fortunate enough to get to translate, about the potential for games to transform society, an audience member stood up and said: What you’re doing here is dangerous. It could sicken people. It could make them worse. What are you doing, releasing something like this, when you might be doing society serious harm?

What he missed, of course, was that he was asking the wrong person that. The danger wasn’t this game. It was that so, so many things are this game. So many things mold us and change us without even realizing it. So many experiences cramp and distort the soul.

The response this man was given was exceedingly polite. But you can almost hear the exasperation in the lecturer’s voice. Here he is, trying to answer that very question, and the one person being confronted over all this is the one person who looked at all the other people doing this and said: You terrible fucking children.

What if there was more to life, and more to community, than kittens?

And what if that “more” was something other than white supremacy and such?

Communities are not conscious. People are not usually that conscious. Consciousness, as a uniquely human gift, is less a guarantee than it is a potential. It is hard to develop that kind of awareness. Harder still to build a community that collectively fosters that awareness for itself.

But here’s the thing: people can’t do it alone. You can’t just put a bunch of people in a room and call it a community. Community needs structure. Community needs ritual. Community needs to develop patterns of behavior. And those patterns can be taught, person to person, or they can be encoded in some manner, but this is the scaffolding that gives a community its collective soul. Refuse to build that scaffolding, and you are responsible for the deformed soul that emerges.

You are what you do. So how do you build a community? You encourage its actions. You give it things to do that are, themselves, your dream of what togetherness ought to look like. Because you can’t build “towards” something by doing the same damn thing over and over again. The thing you’re doing is the thing you are. If you aren’t living out your utopia right here and right now, the utopia will never come. Right here is all we have.

I can’t say for sure how people would act in a perfect world, but everything I’ve ever seen suggests that it would have to be a place, not only of love, but of joy. A place of empathy, but also a place of fun. A place where delight and whim go hand-in-hand with encouragement, and where that encouragement is towards our better selves, away from our miseries and resentments, and from those behaviors of ours which serve to inflict loneliness back upon us as a consequence.

Hence the epigraph which I originally intended to open my thesis with, though that thesis never quite got finished, and morphed into such a strange, amorphous beast that at some point I found myself looking for communities dedicated to strange and communal definitions of “play”, communities poised somewhere between utopia and dystopia, trapped in a strange purgatorial state without any active efforts being made to pull them out, ideally ones so obsessed with kittens (and/or similar lowest common denominators) that you could disguise most anything significant you wanted to say by, perhaps, embedding it in a long essay about technology:

Anyway, I’ll be announcing something semi-soonish.