I love all of the comments in this thread so far, and have other thoughts to bounce off the group, but off all of the comments so far this one is quite thought provoking.
I mean, I don’t thing it’s framed in a way that’s particularly supportive. It kind of conveys that I’m wasting my life by thinking deeply about how other people connect over the internet. What’s wrong with that? If Biella Coleman and Xeni Jardin can live that life, so can I.
In order to follow the honorable Chesterfield’s suggestion, I would need to see BB as a singular thing. Is it a blog? a multi-author-blog? a zine? a collective? a conspiracy? a directory of wonderful things? a news site? journalism? what kind of journalism (tech, news, games, civil liberties, magic tricks), a place to rick-roll the audience? Is it a place to reflect upon the intersection between technology and culture? Is it a place to organize collective action against governments behaving badly?
I don’t see BB as any one thing, I see hundreds, or thousands of ways to describe it. I mean, just look at it. So I don’t know if there’s any singular right way to act on the BBS: “click on the heard button and get on with your life” is an invalid instruction and does’t compute.
Indeed, the BBS and BB aren’t even the same site anymore. The BBS is the latest experiment in a line of BB conducting cultural experiments (including non-experiments).
And the BBS certainly isn’t any one thing. It’s door games and drinking buddies and flame wars and social justice all the way down, and that’s before getting into any of the shenanigans that @OtherMichael pulls on a regular basis.
Yet, admidst the anarchy of the infinity of combinations of how and why people use the informational tools made and shared here, there are threads that tie the topics and the people together. Security. Privacy. Trust. Liberty. Mercy. Consent. Inclusion. Science. It’s why many of us love libraries and hackers and the EFF and the ACLU and TOR. Ideas wants to be free, and not just free beer or libre software but also ideas want the freedom to associate with any and all other ideas they happen to have affinity for.
I’ve been meditating upon this. I don’t have it all clear in my head, so I don’t expect it to come through with clarity. But I want to share this because I think other fellow travelers might also want to play with the fungal experiment that is our culture.
“Be Cool.” is great, no doubt. But I think there’s a lot that goes into being “cool” and I’m trying to unpack it. And I’m not trying to unpack it all now, which is why I put it under the fuzzy and dizzy label of “mutant values.” Just looking for the next level of instruction that informs “coolness.”
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I’m off to another busy day at the grind.
