Time to do some housekeeping.
There have been several posts where I said something like “I’ll elaborate on this next time,” and then punched out a few paragraphs for an intended follow-up before moving on to something else and forgetting about it. The number of drafts displayed on my dashboard is at—jesus, sixteen? How did this happen?
Guess the only way to get rid of them is to finish them.
In a piece about the the centralizing/decentralizing and implosive/explosive aspects of mass media formats, I mentioned something about having more to say about the effects of overcrowding on the culture of the web. Let’s revisit that.
Let’s also take another look at Mitch Kapor’s Foreword to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (Extended) Guide to the Internet, published circa 1993. Bolds are mine:
Some systems use cultural norms, rather than software, to deal with flame wars. These online communities have developed practices which rely more on a shared, internalized sense of appropriate behavior than on censorship, for instance. The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) is a relatively small online conferencing system based in the San Francisco Bay area. On the WELL, individuals who get into a fight are encouraged to move the discussion out of the public conference and into e-mail. The encouragement is provided not only by the host of the conference, but also by the users. It is part of the culture, not part of the technology.
WELL hosts are volunteers who facilitate the discussion of a particular subject. While they have the power to censor individual postings, the power is very rarely used and only as a last resort, as it has been found that dispute resolution by talking it out among the parties is a superior method of problem solving in the long run.
It is not an accident that the WELL has a uniquely high quality of conversation. Nor is it coincidental that it developed as a small and originally isolated community (now on the Net) which gave it a chance to develop its own norms or that key management of the system came from "The Farm," a large, successful commune of the 1960's and 1970's led by Stephen Gaskin.
We still know very little about the facilitation of online conversations. It is a subject well worth further formal study and experimentation.
Hmmm.
Around 2010 or 2011, about five years before I moved to Philadelphia, my friend Jason introduced me to a drum circle that convened on Tuesday nights in Fairmount Park. To get there you’d find a parking space by the river after 10:00 PM, and cross a grassy lawn where you’d hear a rhythmic thumping up in the trees. After climbing a couple flights of stone stairs to reach the top of an embankment formed by the ruined foundation of an old waterworks, you’d follow the drumbeat through the gloom and arrive at a clearing with a semicircle of people sitting around a campfire and slapping drums, and other folks dancing and chilling.
The vibe was just lovely.
The thing was technically illegal because nobody ever got a permit and Fairmount Park closes after sunset. As far as I know it was never advertised anywhere, but drew a crowd nevertheless.
I don’t recall how many sporadic visits I paid the drum circle between 2011 and 2013. Four? Six? At any rate, on each occasion it was impossible not to notice how much bigger it had gotten since I last stopped by.
As it grew, the behavior of its attendees got harder to regulate. Early on, it was reasonable to expect that all of three dozen hippie types in their twenties and thirties convening to jam would clean up after themselves. When there were eighty or a hundred people showing up because they’d heard about it from a coworker’s friend’s roommate, litter became a problem. Jason tells me he’d sometimes stay until the wee hours of the night with some of the core members of the group, picking up freshly laid rubbish out of the dirt and leaves. I recall that a list of rules written on a sign started appearing, and an early arrival hung trash bags from low branches to encourage proper waste disposal—though not nearly enough visitors could be arsed to deposit their empty cans, plastic bottles, cigarette butts, and blunt wrappers in them.
I’m not sure how big the drum circle got before the cops busted it, but the outcome was only to be expected.1 And by the time it reached critical mass after accruing crowds of adventurous students, underaged binge drinkers, and sketchy sorts who were possibly homeless and definitely doing hard drugs, it wasn’t really the same party it had been before. Its culture had changed. The old norms were impossible to enforce and preserve.
Whenever it first appeared, that ineffectual ledger of explicit DON’T rules marked a kind of demographic point of no return for the gathering. It indicated that there were now people who needed to be told what the members of original crew implicitly expected of each other. Any process of “integration” entails a minority adjusting to the social mores and values of a majority, and in this case the new arrivals rapidly came to outnumber the oldheads—on whom the onus fell to adjust or to leave.
****
This is a lot like what happened on the internet, and I like to overrate my own cleverness for calling it the Normie Invasion. For one thing, it is kind of a dick thing to say. Everyone who refers to members of a disproportionately massive outgroup as “normies” used to be a normie themselves, after all—before they were initiated into whatever subculture whose members are supposedly disqualified from normiehood.
Secondly, my perspective as an older Millennial is skewed. Someone in my age bracket who got online in the mid-1990s is apt to correlate the inflection point in the web’s demographic and cultural transformation with the launch of the prototypical social media platform MySpace in 2003. To my reckoning, that was when the early norms regarding anonymity and the procedures of acculturation through a special interest community (read: a message board full of eccentric nerds) began to change.
But an elder Gen Xer who’d been on Usenet since the 1980s would scoff at a pup like me saying I was there, I knew the early internet. For him or her, the harbinger of the Normie Invasion was the launch of America Online in 1991, and the terminal spoiling of the party came with the “Eternal September” of 1993.
One Soren Bjornstad summarizes the Eternal September:
For those who are too young or weren’t using the Internet at the time – a category which includes me – here’s the Internet mythology to which I’m referring. Usenet was a distributed system for newsgroups, the precursor to Internet forums. (Is, I guess: it still exists, it just isn’t culturally important anymore.) In 1993, a large portion of Usenet newsgroup users, like Internet users in general, came from universities. Every September, a bunch of freshmen would show up and start exploring the network, having no idea what they were doing. They would violate all the social norms of Usenet. Many of them didn’t even want what the community offered (although they didn’t know it yet). With some effort on the part of existing members, after a few weeks, the people who didn’t fit in would leave and the people who did would figure out how to behave, and Usenet would go back to being its cozy self for another year. Everyone learned to brace themselves for September, and the world was great.
In September 1993, AOL started offering access to Usenet through their standard online services package. The potential audience of Usenet became massively larger overnight, now including new and inexperienced users from all walks of life across the country, and the seasonality ended, because even once the current AOL users were integrated – difficult enough by itself – people could join AOL at any time of year, and it was the nineties, so people were doing that in droves. Thus was born the Eternal September, or the September that never ended. September became the normal state of Usenet. The community was permanently changed, and veterans spent the next years talking knowingly and sometimes longingly about the prelapsarian Usenet. The previous social norms of the community were overwhelmed and largely disappeared, many of the existing core group were alienated, it become impossible to know a significant proportion of the people participating in many groups that had previously been human-scaled, the same questions came up over and over again, people were more likely to be rude or post without having anything meaningful to contribute, and so on.
Wherever the line of no return was actually crossed, the impossibility of initiation amidst such a sustained and massive influx of new users obliterated the “shared, internalized sense of appropriate behavior” of which Kapor so glowingly wrote. The Anglophonic internet undoubtedly grew more diverse—but it became a politicized, polarized, and reactive place where the appearance of understanding and consensus was often the result of a likeminded group being sufficiently numerous, motivated, and institutionally positioned to impose its values, police its turf, and purge undesirables.
We’ve already looked at a special case of this in the videogamer milieu, which was one of the earliest “communities” to take root in cyberspace (for what I hope are obvious reasons). If one were to conduct an exhaustive survey the most popular video game publications (judged in terms of circulation—sales for magazines, page views for blogs and websites) between, say, 1990 and 2015, one would find a tremendous shift in terms of tone, subject matter, and the profile of the audience the authors imagine they’re speaking and relating to. Reading between the lines, we can understand why the axe-grinding Gamergate obsessives and conventionally attractive female enthusiasts (“CAFEs?”) on the KotakuInAction subreddit reserve a malediction for their skeptics and enemies: may your hobby go mainstream.
It might be sensible to consider the cultural shifts of Eternal September or Web 2.0 in terms of an accounting correction in the books of an emergent technosocial paradigm. During the early years of the World Wide Web, an undeveloped but functional new communication medium offered a refuge and an abstract gathering place for people bummed out by the lack of options for community and participation in civil society. (Remember that civic groups, social clubs, and church attendance had all been on the wane through the second half of the twentieth century; perhaps also recall how lonely adolescence can feel, and consider the general sense of placelessness and isolation that invests life in the typical American suburb.) For the early netizen, a small internet community could be their place where everybody knew their name, a virtual fraternity or Elks Club with built-in norms that helped to minimize the friction caused by differences of opinion, and informal but effective means of inducting new arrivals and maintaining the quality of the conversations.
But the technical dimensions of the web were from the beginning those of a mass medium. The masses just hadn’t arrived at it yet.
The early netizens were very much like some of the turn-of-the-century automobile owners who invested in a newfangled horseless carriage to escape the commotion of the city or town by taking weekend excursions on a bucolic country road. Very probably the earliest of the early adopters didn’t recognize how the internal logic of the automobile and the scope of its potential uses would not only shape its further evolution, but the country’s social and physical landscapes.
First those bucolic country roads outside the cities became crowded with Sunday drivers.2 In the second half of the twentieth century, they ceased to be country roads. After the population’s proportion of car-owners exceeded a critical threshold, the infrastructure and customs of society were compelled to change around the new technology, to accommodate it, to maximize the intensity and scale of its application, and demolish all but the most minimal requirements for membership in the “automotive culture.” Going anywhere in the United States’ suburbs, and in many of its cities, entails spending a lot of time sitting in traffic. Everyone in a megalopolis of mass mobility moves a lot more slowly than they’d like because the scale of operation routinely exceeds what the infrastructure’s developers assumed.
Between 1994 and 2004, the percentage of the United States population with internet access went up by something like 1300 percent. Facebook didn’t merely drive the trend; like the Interstate Highway System, it was a response to a technological and cultural shift that was already ongoing. The major social platforms that emerged in the mid-aughts upsized, accelerated, and corporatized the internet’s abstract architecture to better serve a burgeoning online population which, by and large, liked using AOL Instant Messenger, enjoyed funny Flash animations, and maybe read a few blogs, but lacked the temperament to integrate to message board culture, didn’t have the patience to figure out how to make a personal website, and felt that authoring a prefab blog on LiveJournal or Xanga seemed like a whole lot of work. They might have been online, but they were left out.
The social platforms’ functionality and formats made gatekeeping impracticable, if not impossible, and tended to boost and reward crass exhibitionists, combative drama queens, officious political polemicists, and moral panic-mongers.3 The culture that emerged was unlike and incompatible with those of the small (or at least smaller) community spaces that anteceded it, and which it absolutely overwhelmed by dint of its sheer mass. Web 2.0 eclipsed, outpaced, and made nearly all of these spaces irrelevant, and they gradually died off as the persons who maintained them, bankrolled them, and formed the vital cores of their userbases moved on with their lives—and followed everyone else in their exodus to Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, and Gawker Media comments sections.
I don’t suppose it needs to be said, but our politics were destroyed in the process, too—much in the same way the exponential and reckless upscaling of automobile culture led to the ruination of the landscape and the spoiling of urban pedestrianism.
****
As long as we’re here—let’s take a quick glance at The Farm—the “large, successful commune” Kapor lauds as an exemplary culture of conflict resolution (in yet another telling expression of the potent hybridization of hippie-dippie social libertarianism and charismatic entrepreneurial capitalism endemic to Silicon Valley).
How did The Farm play out after its founding in 1971?
Well—in 2017, one Melvyn Stiriss, a founding “Farmie,” published a short article titled “Why the Farm Collective Failed.”4
Evidently Kapor wasn’t telling his readers everything.
To rush to the end of a long story made short: The Farm’s membership peaked at around 1600 in the 1970s. In 1983 it underwent a process called “The Changeover.” The Farm’s “council of elders” was retired and replaced by a Board of Directors, its founder and guru Stephen Gaskin was barred from making financial decisions, on-site enterprises were privatized, and members were required to pay dues and spend their own income to sustain themselves. By the middle of the decade, The Farm’s population had contracted to less than 300, and has apparently held steady in the low 200s for some time now.5 That’s to say The Farm still exists today—but it’s more of a co-op than a commune, and definitely not the psychedelic parallel society Gaskin envisioned when he and his flock of devotees left California in a motor caravan.
In a 1985 interview, eight ex-Farmies share valuable lessons they learned from their time on The Farm (you can’t take acid forever, you can’t just keep taking it forever), and spend some time reflecting on the problems of culture and capacity:
John: We used up a big chunk of some people's inheritances just buying and running the place. That embittered those people, because if they were going to put in money they could have used to fix themselves up, they wanted at least to see some permanent changes made. But usually we would get to a financially desperate time and their inheritance or trust fund would mature, and we'd eat it. We'd go and buy food and it'd be gone. $60,000–$100,000 was shot. And we had all these plans— we're going to fix the roads, we're going to fix the school, we're going to build a community center, we're going to . . . But those projects never really got funded unless they were like the bumps in the roads, which were cost efficient to fix because vehicle repair costs were so high.
Kevin [interviewer]: Well, I don't understand, if everyone was working so hard how come you didn't have a road and whatnot?
Matthew: Everyone wasn't working so hard. Only a couple hundred or so were really earning money. There were 1,500 people there at one point, about half of them children.
Daniel: There were always only 40 or so guys who were supporting the Farm in terms of cash, but we were still getting more single mothers, still more psychotics; and those same people, who once were supporting maybe 600 people, five years later were supporting 1,500 people.
Further:
John: We weren't really building a community like we should with proper sanitation, housing, a good school and the kind of things that we needed, but we were taking on all these welfare cases. Stephen would talk on Sunday morning about how you can't close your heart, don't get square, because with the good karma, doing good deeds, it'll balance out and blah blah blah. But it didn't really work that way.
Walter: We overloaded ourselves and took on more than we could handle as a result of Stephen's pep talks. You'd look at all the stuff that was wrong and you'd think, "If we just hang on, this is all going to get fixed. We can't quit now. We've already put eight years into this."
Susan: Stephen would tell us, "You can't close your heart or you're not being sufficiently spiritual." Our hearts weren't closed; we were just overcrowded and didn't have enough to eat.
Ex-Farmie Matthew suggests one of the fatal problems of The Farm’s utopian experiment had literally to do with gatekeeping:
Because we had the temerity to think of ourselves as a microcosm of the entire planet, we believed we should allow anyone with a belly button to come in and live on the Farm. But if I were going to do a Farm, I would be selective. I would only let a certain few people in. I would restrict the number of Looney Tunes to about zero. People I was comfortable with sharing my mind intimately, I'd let in. People who wanted to come in and share my mind intimately that I wasn't comfortable with, I would run from, rather than let them come live with me. And I think that was a central problem that we had, that the gate in a way had low standards for what it would accept. In a spirit of compassion, the Farm in its youthful arrogance tried to do too much by trying to take on too broad a spectrum of people.
When Kapor cited The Farm as a success story, he was almost certainly talking about it in its healthier (but no longer nearly so radically welcoming) post-Changeover state.
The way in which Discord has come so strongly into favor lately suggests to me that there’s a desire for something a lot like The Changeover in cyberspace—even if that means an internet where more and more of the windows are shaded and the front doors more often locked.
Actually—the drum circle is decades old, and has been through this cycle multiple times. Successive core groups of dedicated hippies [re]launch it, after which it grows popular by word-of-mouth, attracts an increasingly unsavory crowd, and then shrinks or disappears for a while after the inevitable crackdown. Jason tells me he was around for multiple busts, and personally attributes the meteoric growth during my time there to a particular group of teens and twentysomethings from Delaware County who piggybacked on a coworker he brought over one evening.
Evidently it’s got a private Facebook group that sees occasional activity, and someone on the Philadelphia subreddit said it was sporadically happening as recently as 2020. For the last two years the location has been on my bike route to work, and on a few warm evenings when I was out late I paused and strained my ears to listen for a drumbeat. Nothing.
Sometime between 1915 and 1945 (I tried to pin down the date, I really did), humorist Robert Benchley wrote:
When the automobile came in it looked as if the Sunday afternoon problem was solved. You could climb in at the back door of the old steamer and puff out into the country, where at least you couldn't hear people playing "Narcissus" on the piano several houses away. (People several houses away are always playing "Narcissus" on the piano on Sunday afternoons. If there is one sound that is typical of Sunday afternoon, it is that of a piano being played several houses away.) It is true, of course, that even out in the country, miles away from everything, you could always tell that it was Sunday afternoon by the strange behavior of the birds, but you could at least pick out an open field and turn somersaults (first taking the small change out of your pockets), or you could run head-on into a large oak, causing insensibility. At least, you could in the early days of automobiling.
But, as soon as everybody got automobiles, the first thing they did naturally was to try to run away from Sunday afternoon, with the result that every country road within a hundred miles of any city has now taken the place of the old-time county fair, without the pleasure of the cattle and the jam exhibits. Today the only difference between Sunday afternoon in the city and Sunday afternoon in the country is that, in the country, you don't know the people who are on your lap.
Notice also the lines about people playing the piano. This was before the record player made the piano a showy, superfluous decoration in most twentieth-century households that had one.
I strongly suspect that denizens of old-style message boards, then and now, enjoyed and still enjoy heaping scorn on crass exhibitionists, combative drama queens, officious political polemicists, and moral panic-mongers—both in their midsts and out elsewhere—because each type of specimen behaves in ways antithetical to the overarching ethos of the web’s foundational culture.
Notice that it was published on The Farm’s website.
This 2013 article suggests it was closer to 150 members at that time.
I was trying to verbalize this initiation process and unspoken rules of fandom that were stampeded over, this explains it perfectly.
Humans' balance is a negative feedback loop that destroys itself to maybe rebuild, maybe splinter and reproduce, or maybe extinction.