Back to the (Internet) Future

[ResidentialBusiness]

On Saturday, the Washington Nationals baseball team played their first spring training game of the season. I was listening to the radio call in the background as I went about my day. I also, however, kept an eye on a community blog called Talk Nats.

The site moderators had posted an article about today’s game. As play unfolded, a group of Nationals fans gathered in the comment threads to discuss the unfolding action.

Much of the discussion focused on specific plays.

“Nasty from Ferrer,” noted a commenter, soon after one of the team’s best relief pitchers, Jose Ferrer, struck out two batters.

“Looks like we took the Ferreri [sic] out of the garage,” someone else replied.

There were also jokes, such as when, early in the game, someone deadpanned: “Anyone who K’s [strikes out] is cut.” As well as more general discussion of the season ahead.

If you followed the thread long enough, it became clear that many of the commenters know each other, while others were meeting for the first time. As the game wrapped up, someone mentions that they’re listening from a part of Canada that recently received three feet of snow. Another commentator replied by recalling a trip they took to that same area: “It was amazing.”

Ultimately, over 540 comments were left over the duration of an otherwise uneventful, early season exhibition match.

I first wrote about Talk Nats in a 2023 article for The New Yorker, titled “We Don’t Need Another Twitter.” In that piece, I was responding specifically to the launch of Meta’s Threads platform, but I had a more general point as well: perhaps it had been a mistake to try to organize the internet’s activity around a small number of massive, privately-controlled platforms, used by hundreds of millions of users all at once.

“Forcing millions of people into the same shared conversation is unnatural, requiring aggressive curation that in turn leads to the type of supercharged engagement that seems to leave everyone upset and exhausted,” I wrote. “Aggregation as a goal in this context survives…for the simple reason that it’s lucrative.”

Boutique sites like Talk Nats, by contrast, offer something closer to the original vision for the internet, which was more focused on connection and discovery; a place where a baseball fan from Canada could spend an afternoon delighting with a few dozen of his likeminded brethren about a lazy afternoon baseball game in Florida.

This is the internet as a source of joy. And it’s the opposite of the giddy paranoia or coldly-optimized numbness delivered on massive platforms like X or TikTok.

I was thinking about that New Yorker piece today as I was following the game on Talk Nats. Those ideas, it occurred to me, are even more true right now than they were when I first published them.

“I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us,” wrote John Perry Barlow in his seminal 1996 document, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.”

In the thirty years that passed, we have allowed exactly this type of soul-deadening tyranny to take hold of cyberspace — an unavoidable consequence of consolidating this once distributed and quirky medium into a small number of massive platforms.

I really enjoyed my time today on Talk Nats. I didn’t come away angry or depressed, and was more uplifted than brought down. Maybe it’s time to declare independence once again.

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In other news…

–> For another take on this same topic, see River Page’s recent Free Press essay, “The Online Right is Building a Monster,” which does a good job of detailing the unsavory dynamics that can arise on massive internet platforms. (His critiques of both the online right and online left hit home in this one.) The solution to the woes Page documents? Stop using these services!

–> In the audio world, on Episode 341 of my podcast, released earlier this morning, I extract a lesson about the importance (and difficulty) of fighting overload in our digital world.

–> Meanwhile, as long as we’re discussing meaningful online spaces, I’ll point your attention over to The Growth Equation, where my friends Steve and Brad have posted another one of their (rightfully) famed manifestos: “How to Save Youth Sports.” [ read | subscribe ]

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