The decline of the digital third space, with Ruby Justice Thelot

30:48Yeah, I don't think we were promised anything per se, in the same way that, you know, a person who moves to a city in the antiquity is not necessarily promised that the city is going to be there forever. You know, war, climate change or natural catastrophe can always strike. And, you know, this could happen to our own civilization. But there is this notion or this affordance of technology, which is, you know, keeping data, right? It's a form of memory or media storage. That's one of the fundamental things it does is it's a processor with a hard drive that brings us, I think, to a state where we are comfortable providing these platforms with our memories and with our thoughts.

31:29But unfortunately, what is evidenced by the examples that we described is that frequently those memories disappear either intentionally either by lack of care and if they're still there sometimes they're sort of hardly retrievable yeah and in the case of checkpoints technically nintendo issued like a dmca takedown right and like you could technically say oh youtube was trying to just comply with the copyright holders which is, you know, a good thing, I guess, for people creating IP on some level. Like, it's not always black and white, like why these changes are made or why things get deleted. But the problem is that there's no backup and that the stuff can just be entirely lost.

32:18Exactly right. So in this specific scenario, this wasn't YouTube being fickle with its data. Here it's a mix of copyright policy, the platforms on policies, which is to essentially delete the video once it is struck down with a DMCA request. And the poster or the account is not provided with a refractory time to go in and save the information or anything like that. It's kind of like, oh, you're gone, you're gone, right? And when I talk about lack of care is I don't think it ever crossed the mind of, or if it did, it sort of ranked low on the priority for the designer, product manager, person who made the deletion flow here to leave some time for the comments or for part of the metadata around the video to be saved.

33:10Even if the video can't be posted, there may be things around it that could have been preserved. Totally. And as you alluded to before, that introduces the other little reveal in the book, which is that the videos hadn't been lost, but not thanks to an institution, but thanks to one kind of semi-anonymous user of YouTube who was sort of hip to this problem. and happened to archive the video. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, and this is where I think the story becomes so interesting because the video is gone and I start snooping around to try to find it. And on Reddit, I find this user, Rebaid2001, who, for some mysterious reason, has both a copy of the video, which I think is possible if you like the song and you wanted to save it to play it on your iPod, right?

34:1310 years ago, makes sense. But in their archival process also ends up saving the entirety of the comments dated to a few months before the deletion. And I could have stopped there, but I was so piqued with curiosity that my next step was to sort of spend some more time researching the comments history, the video where the video was posted, which was on a private archive site called Hobune Stream. And I ended up reaching out to Rebain2001, who was the user, and interviewing her for the book. And so one of the texts you'll see in the book is this wonderful interview with this individual who, I kid you not, I think has more than a million YouTube videos saved.

34:58Not in a data center somewhere in Montana, but in their own homes. Has like a whole setup where they're able to save any single video they think has cultural significance to anyone. It's pretty astonishing, for sure. There was a part of the interview where you thank her profusely for doing this because, I don't know, it's just insane that this falls on individuals working in sort of just a private or nonprofit basis. Like you have archive.org, you know, like the Wayback Machine, etc., who are worrying about this when the big platforms with all the money aren't, essentially. Yeah. And, you know, you centralize the profit and the economic capture, of course, through these oligopolistic companies, but you decentralize the archival.

35:52The things that take time and make no money are decentralized when profit and economic capital are centralized in these platforms. So there's a big asymmetry here. Exactly. And I think this leads to something that Andrea wants to ask next, but it almost reminds me of like, I don't know, Like when I used to live in New York, and this is true to some degree in Philly too, but there would be these like cultural landmarks, like a restaurant, you know, or a bookstore or record store. And those places will turn over with the passage of time and gentrification. And sometimes like the government doesn't even want to, you know, memorialize them.

36:32The landlords might not even want to memorialize them because they want to sell the building. But it's like individuals from the neighborhood who care about the history who are doing this work often to, you know, memorialize and remind people of it. yeah exactly to your point Emily I mean one thing Ruby that your book got me thinking a lot about is the potential parallels between both the emergence and erasure of third spaces online and how that may or may not correlate to the decline of third spaces IRL that we're seeing as a result of gentrification or other forces I first started thinking about this like a year or ago when like the last like real like neighborhood corner bar standing in a certain part of LA's Echo Park neighborhood where all my friends and I congregated we had like met our partners and met our best friends there and so much had gone down and then it was like they just got kicked down and the place is demolished and that was sad really sad unto itself but we just kind of looked around and saw this neighborhood turning into empty lots and we're like where are we even supposed to go to like meet our neighbors or accidentally like bump into someone and have a life-changing conversation you know and that's obviously a wider spread phenomenon these days and i'm wondering if maybe why we're seeing this start to emerge online the way it is perhaps like either consciously or subconsciously like in response to that or like is that just the nature of third spaces like regardless of whether they're digital or irl or could one potentially be impacting the other now?

38:12So first of all, when we think about the disappearance of third spaces, I think another thinker we can pull in is Putnam and his book Bowling Alone, which also details the loss of some of these community spaces in America. Yes, I love that book. What's interesting is that this predates a lot of digital life. And so what we may be seeing is not necessarily an influence, but a repeat of that. So what do you have? You start with a city that is working somewhat organically. There is, of course, like it's a capitalist city, nonetheless, it's a town in America. So there is exchange, there's commerce, but the incentives are pretty much in line with the community's best interest, at least in my reading of what it was like in the 50s, 60s, 70s in America, right?

39:01Like peak baby boom time. What happens through the centralization of power that's happened in America, namely through the advent of these multinationals, is that the small shops and corner stores are replaced by what? By Walmarts, by Safeways, by Circle Ks, by whatever big conglomerate can sort of buy land cheaply in the town and push out a lot of the more local family-owned stores. They can cut costs, they have economies of scale, and the market favors them and not the local stores. And slowly but surely, as we follow the profit incentive, which is to sell these lots, sell these corner bars, I'm sure the family who owned the corner bar in Echo Park probably made a decent amount of money and then they were happy with taking that money and doing something else with it.

39:52But slowly, it chips away at the infrastructure for community in the locale. And what we're seeing in the online realm is that we start with this almost small town-like internet with a lot of separate spaces inhabited by different subcultures and groups and niches. And as these Walmart-like websites come along, where now instead of going to the butcher, the florist, the milk store, now you only go to Walmart. Now you used to go to your friend's blog, a page about sports, another page for news. Now, what do you do? You only go on Google. You only go on Facebook. I think what's very interesting here is the similarities in how these spaces that were once fragmented are being captured by these multinationals, by these, you know, megalithic companies who can offer all the different pieces that used to be done by specific community members, both in the physical as well as in the digital.

40:55And what this leads to essentially is the absence of true community or as Oldenburg would call it, civic engagement. And when you don't have civic engagement, you don't have camaraderie or partnership. All you have, I think, is a bunch of atoms colliding in digital spaces. And I think this explains the climate that we see in a lot of these quote unquote public squares. Yeah, this kind of brings me to the other piece you did that we want to talk about today, which is the article you wrote for a online community called Folklore. The piece is called The Balkanization and Babelification of the Internet, which you wrote with Ru Yi.

41:40And this is sort of more about what happens. It feels like it's jumping forward from the other piece. five, 10 years. And it's more about what happens when these equivalent of like big box superstar platforms have been ascendant for so long and have changed so much that they no longer feel conducive to community building at all anymore. And, you know, as we also sort of touched on in the episode with Taylor the other week, people start retreating away from them, gravitating away from the big box store and wanting the smaller scale artisanal experience, right? The group chat, the discord, the private communities.

42:31How do you define the balkanization of the internet? And then how do you define the babbification of the internet? Yeah, it's kind of strange how these were not intended to be connected. But in many ways, just from the description, I think to Andrea's question here, I see like a direct connection now. I hadn't put two and two together. But the balkanization is, I think, connected to this process that I've described here, namely that the internet was a set of bespoke niche communities whom one could access through either sort of word of mouth referral, being on the right email list. But there was no centralized directory of where to go to these places.

43:18You kind of have to be in the know. And what happens when we move from the commercial service model to the ISP or the internet service provider model is that we see this centralization happening. And so I started the essay with this quote from The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is a beloved Chinese epic, which is that kingdoms united, divided, kingdoms divided, unite. And the commercial services model are these sort of more insular, separated communities, which, you know, let's call them heterogeneous or they're not connected to one another. They're split off. And through the Internet Service Provider model, we get this centralization and we get everything to be put onto the same platforms.

44:01And what I call the botanization is the process through which these megalithic, big box online platforms are slowly fracturing into smaller insular communities once again. Because people long for the, I think you call it the artisanal field of the group chat or the bespoke curated articles that your friends could only give you. So that would be on the Discord or even like Folklore, which is a Telegram group where articles are presented and are curated because there's just so much information on these big box stores. And it's kind of like when you go to Walmart, you're like, what am I doing here?

44:39There's just so much stuff. And you just want something, just one thing. And it's curation. It's customization. It's the end of the age of Wumbo. I called it in my 2023 forecast. I called it the age of Wumbo, right? We're going back to mini and no more Wumbo. And the babbillification is the subsequent process, which was presented by Ruyi. And it's when you're in these insular communities, what do you do? You form specific languages. You form idiosyncratic visual references through memes, through shared posts, through just communication in your little island. And, you know, akin to the puffins studied by Darwin, being on an island creates unique traits that I think are here replicated in language.

45:30Now, the problem is that on the Internet, even when you're on your island, even when you're on your little insula, you go back to the public square and suddenly no one is speaking the same language. And we find ourselves in the paradigm and the conundrum that the humans in the biblical story are, where they are divided and confused by the multiplicity of languages being spoke. And I'm not talking about English versus Spanish versus Mandarin here. I'm talking about woke versus rationalist versus Tumblr language versus Facebook mom language. And all of these collide and create an impossibility for connection and communication because essentially there is no more cultural and linguistic common ground for us to explain our lived and shared experience.

46:21And so reality fractures into these separate digital volcanized nations. it's almost like a more extreme version of like the context collapse that we spoke of in terms of the big web 2 platforms in the 2010s i guess like maybe that was we were already sort of entering our own little echo chambers even on these platforms already because of how they were designed but now we're just like willfully retreating even further that way and i mean the echo chamber is so interesting to me because it's an attempt at protection essentially you You know, whichever side of the aisle you're on, being exposed to alt-right, dirtbag left, or whatever you want to call it, content on a 24-hour basis, it's just nerve-wracking.

47:06And so you create your little echo chamber, you mute people, you block people. And this echo chamber, as we've seen in the 2016 and 2020 election, is very dangerous because you never see conflicting opinions. And you're only in your soft-walled enclave, as I call it in the essay. Or if you do see conflicting opinions, it's quite hostile. Yeah, because it's only the most exaggerated, algorithmically boosted content that makes it through your echo chamber. Like the person that everybody I know is already, quote, tweeting and dunking on. Yeah. It's the person I'll see. Right. To what extent is this vulcanized state kind of a return to a much earlier version of the Internet?

47:46And also what makes it different from that time and maybe ultimately more isolating? So in form, it's very similar. The reason being that I talk about the commercial service model where, you know, if you had one of these commercial services, your quote unquote internet was different based on if you were on AOL or any of the other service providers. And similarly, if I now my internet is now sort of filtered through my Discord community based on if I'm in, you know, the Milady group or the Dirtback Left group or a right wing group, my understanding of the internet will be different. and my content will be filtered only through my new enclaves.

48:30Now, what's different here is that you don't stay in your enclave forever. What you'll do is you'll do trips to the public square in order to present ideas or to share specific things that you want to share. And this is where I think a lot of the challenges happen. And what didn't exist in the commercial service time was this public square where people would leave their enclave and come back and try to communicate with the other people from the different islands. And this is why, you know, places like Twitter, like Facebook are so highly contentious and so fraught with conflict because people don't understand each other.

49:07And that, I think, to me is the big difference from the model from the 90s and 80s that I've described in the piece. Because also back then you also had like, yeah, you didn't have this digital public square, obviously, in the same way you maybe had like a monocultural media. right at the time, mainstream media, but you didn't have these same opportunities for just clashing in the public space with other people. And reality was somewhat shared, namely, as you said, because of the monoculture. Hitler has this quote that says, media defines what really is. Media at the time was highly controlled.

49:45And so reality was defined by a set of conglomerates or channels or local news providers. But still, there is a shared understanding of reality in America. It started to fracture slightly. I think Adam Curtis talks about it in some of his work. But there was still a semblance of union of reality at that time. Now, you have the Balkanization. You're in your own digital island. You have the babbillification. You develop your own idiosyncratic digital language, and you tack onto that the algorithmic personalization of media, this creates a highly atomized individual who not only is atomized sort of, you know, physically in cities, as we've described with the decay of third spaces, not only atomized in their ability to communicate with people outside of their enclaves, but fundamentally, they are presented with a unique reality that is not necessarily shared with the rest of the nation.

50:44And that is extremely dangerous. Yeah, like what kind of culture or even sense of collective cultural memory does this sort of balkanized society produce? How is it different from maybe when we think of the culture of the 2010s? And it's hard to wrap your mind around, right? Because it's like even still hard for me to wrap my mind around the 2010s. That's another story. If you think of culture as a set of shared references. I don't want to be circular in my definition, but artifacts, works of art, norms, customs, language, right? All things that, depending on your school of sociology, you might come to define as culture.

51:28These things are becoming less and less common. The impact, to me at least, is that the main point of shared reality will be highly localized. I call this the hyperlocal stage of reality. Even if you live in New York, you might just be getting only K-pop content, only content from your post-Marxist vegan group or whatever. And I think we see this a lot in the work of Joshua Citarella with the flag. His flag work, I think, is quite good and evocative of this tendency. And so the only thing that will truly be shared is the physical neighborhood. And that's going to create some interesting reversals, I think, in the next couple of years where the things that I described as being in decadence, as described by Putnam and Oldenburg, might actually make a comeback.

52:21Because these will be the only places of common shared reality if people are able to afford owning these spaces and presenting them for people who are in their immediate vicinity. But this idea of a globalized community, like the global village, I think is doomed. And we've already heard it's nailed. Fascinating. So you mean we're going back to the local physical village? Yeah. And the hijinks that will ensue when after all of this we are realizing we are actually back together in space again? Yeah. I call this the hyper-local global skepticism age. I like that.

53:17So you've been teaching a class at NYU this semester and talking about sort of where the future of theater is going. I saw that you had your students read the techno optimist manifesto, which is a sort of controversial piece of, I guess, call it thought leadership by Mark Andreessen of the, you know, sort of famous venture capital firm, P16Z, Andreessen Horowitz. I just been meaning to ask you about it and like, what does it have in common with the other manifesto or manifestee you've been reading and teaching your kids in class? I know you've been having them read various manifestee. And what makes it stand out or feel like an expression of sort of this particular moment in the history of big tech?

54:10I think what's interesting to me is when we're studying technology, so I'm talking to a group of designers, engineers, AI researchers who are in graduate school and are probably going to go on to build really cool things at cool companies. the question that I want them to ask is, you know, why am I building that? And once I have the answer of why, I want to know what kind of world does this tool or product or feature exist in? What kind of world is it trying to bring about? And oftentimes the technology, we're not very prescriptive as to what is the world we're trying to create is. And that's where I think the manifesto comes and plays a very interesting role.

54:56The manifesto as a text does usually three things. First, it details a problem in the current society. Second, identifies an enemy who is responsible for that problem. And third, proposes a solution and tries to convince you to join the group or the individual in their idea of what the solution is. And part of that solution includes usually the personless version of a utopia. And so we've read everything from the Unabobber Manifesto, which was in like the first week of class, all the way to now spending a lot of time with things like the Xeno Feminist Manifesto by the Laboria Cubonics Collective, to the Cyborg Manifesto by Haraway.

55:38We spent a little bit of time with Mindy Su's Cyber Feminism Index, which has a lot of these foundational feminist texts as well. Hacker Manifesto by Mackenzie Warwick, The Situationist Manifesto. And I was probably stopping initially at the Zedofeminist and Mackenzie Warwick, which are quite contemporary. But when Mark published his, I was like, let's add that in there. Because I think it's interesting for us as technologists, as thinkers, to compare what an individual involved in the cutting edge of modern technology thinks the future should be. Because when a person tells you what their future is going to be, I think we should believe them.

56:18I think we should take them at their word. Because if they do have resolve and executive power, they will go on and build that world. So pay attention when they tell you what world they want to build. What was the basic argument, even setting aside that whole conundrum, what was its basic argument that it was making? So to sum it up, it starts with this problem. The problem is a lie. The lie is that technology is negative, a net negative for society. That's the lie that Andreessen sort of marks up as the problem with society is that we have been lied to and we believe that technology is negative.

56:57the people he sees as the enemies there's literally a section called the enemy are people who are into stagnation bureaucrats people who are into esg um you know trust and safety social responsibility tech ethics enemies and the world he's trying to build to complete is a world built on discovery exploration and industrialization he wants ambition abundance and adventure and that adventure is built on growth technology and optimism yeah totally it just stuck out to me because yeah like recently we had on brian merchant who just wrote a book about the history of the luddite movement and it was sort of making a case for not retreating to no technology but standing up against like technologies that have negative effects on workers, individual humans, and that the ethos of progress and growth at all costs is precisely the thing that is wrong with technology right now.

58:04And, you know, this is just one example, but his book is having a bit of a moment where people are sort of like talking about reviving the word Luddite as a positive word. So that's like something we've been paying attention to in our world, but then it felt really funny that here someone from one of the most significant venture capital firms fueling Silicon Valley comes out with almost what feels like a rebuttal to that, not his book per se, but that kind of growing mindset that feels resident. Yeah, it's very interesting. I'm sorry, Brian, but I think you're definitely in the camp of the enemies, for sure, right?

58:42If you're trying to stop the ball from rolling. That's definitely enemy territory for Andreessen, at least in his reading. I like to use with the students three markers on a spectrum. We have the reject. Reject is the position sort of embraced by Ted Kaczynski, right? It is the anti-technology position. I call this the Liz Lemon formulation. It's the shut it down, right? Then we have the embrace, which is the technology is sort of net good, a sort of soft embrace, which would lead to an adaptation for human needs. And this is usually the more like governmental policy aspect in a lot of forward or technology driven countries like Singapore or to some extent America.

59:30And then you have the Landian position, which is accelerate. And of course, Andreessen's by themselves sort of halfway in between acceleration and embrace of technology. Now, what does that tell us about the state of technology? I think it's highly notable that he mentions land in his piece, because the discipline of venture capital, as I understand it, actually relies a lot on hyperstition, which is a concept that we get from land. Hyperstition, of course, is the summoning of reality through its presentation as an idea. And capitalism, he sees as a high-prestitious agent that takes ideas and sort of brings them to fruition.

1:00:11And oftentimes, when you're pitching to a VC, you'll have a deck with an idea. Maybe you'll have a product, and they'll give you$2-3 million to go back to your house and make that idea come true. And I see a connection with their attempt at actually making the media business that if you're able to repeat something enough times, you could will it, you could word it, you could language it into existence, you can media it into existence. And that's very much, I think, their attempt of using the hyper-persistence nature of capital in order to, you know, prop up their investments. If we see that through hyper-persistence, we're able to get, you know, a Snyder's cut for Justice League.

1:00:54If we see that through hyper-persistence, were able to get this or that kind of technology, then why wouldn't it work for some company in your portfolio? So that to me is a very interesting intersection. My only worry is that when you are situated between embrace and accelerate in that spectrum, I described it to my friend, Santi Ruiz, who works at the Institute for Progress, as you are susceptible to being captured by dark elves or by dark forces, because at least in the Landian idea, techno-capital is not something that can be controlled. The techno-capital machine is beyond human control, and it's advancing and accelerating, not towards any kind of utopia, but towards the annihilation of capitalism itself and potentially towards the annihilation of man.

1:01:44And so to take that position is to take a staunchly anti-humanist position. Yeah, I'm not an expert on land at all, but I just got the sense that, Like, I don't even know if he knows that that is what he would be implying or something. And if he did, that's also kind of crazy. I'm I'm I'm my guess is that he's highly intelligent and he's read the books and he's choosing the specific idea because you don't have to believe, you know, you can take the accelerationism idea from land and not take everything that comes with it. But the issue and if you read the CCRU text, this is something that the left accelerationists try to do.

1:02:24Nick Schrinack, Alex Williams, people like Mark Fisher, they tried to take the acceleratious idea from land and adapt it. And they try to put the human subject at the center of the idea. But this time and time again fails. Arya Dean in her notes on black acceleration reminds us that the attempt of centering acceleration on the human is you're putting a mask on the villain and crossing your fingers in hopes that this still works. And so there's a bit of wishful thinking here that you get close enough to the forces of darkness. I like the idea of it being controlled by a dark elf. But unfortunately, I think that much like Wollum, you fall into the precipice and you can't really go back.

1:03:08Yeah, and I think it's just striking. You imagine when someone like Marc Andreessen puts out a statement like this, You know, all of the people who hope to get money from A16Z or other venture capital firms are going to be paying attention. Right. And there's a certain idea of like, oh, you want to like go where the wind is blowing that this influential person is telling you. But that just feels so out of step with where the public sentiment is about technology right now. Like it feels awful. Yeah. I think that's why he's published this. There is a growing anti-hypnology sentiment in America. In Europe, I think it's already kind of done.

1:03:48You know, like the GDPR and a lot of policy in Europe is sort of overtly trying to control the way that these people make their money, which is, you know, in unregulated markets, that's where you get the best upside and the best returns on your investments. That's why they're anti-regulation on AI and anti-regulation on a lot of data privacy stuff, because you get your best returns in unregulated markets. Now, that being said, we should always realize that a manifesto is a text that compels, and a text that presents a vision of the future, which should be appealing to the public. And in this scenario, Andreessen quite clearly demarks the future we will be in.

1:04:26Namely, we will have an abundance of intelligence, an abundance of energy, abundance, abundance, abundance, abundance, right? It's even one of the chapter names. And that is, I think, appealing to Americans because we love stuff. Now, I don't think this would play very well in Europe or in countries where there isn't this necessity for, you know, like infinite quantities of things. But in a culture hooked on increases on growth, I think this plays right into not necessarily the cultural understanding, which I think is right now we're like center and tire. I think in terms of technology, the country is pretty centrist, but it plays with this deeply American idea of wanting more stuff.

1:05:12And that's one thing that he promises as a part of this manifesto. We are also kind of conditioned to associate getting more stuff with this idea of growth, which is how even Biden talks about the economy. Things can't be that bad because the economy grew. So, you know, when individual Americans are like, wait, but my money isn't going very far and I have no, you know, social safety net. yeah so like on that note both of the pieces that we've been discussing feel like they're touching on things that are lost uh when we focus on progress and forward motion at all costs but what are some other values that we might need to factor in um that fans of like the techno optimist manifesto might be missing and ruby what would go in your technology manifesto Yeah, you have a little bit of a, I don't know if the balkanization, babbification piece was a manifesto, but you had a little manifesto energy towards the end.

1:06:17Rue and I talked about this for a while. It's like, what was the solution that we could come up with? And it's so funny because I was reading Legacy Russell last week. And Russell also mentions touch as being in her glitch feminism manifesto. She also mentions touch. And I thought that was very interesting. The truth is that what is lost, I think, in this focus on progress and forward motion, personally, I would rather forward motion than no motion. But I think the fans of the Techno Optimist Manifesto might actually like my ideas. because in a world of abundance, one thing that you may want to do is look back at your history.

1:07:01If you have time to speak to your parents, to go see your grandparents because you live in an abundant world, I think you turn inwards. And when you turn inwards, you look for yourself in your personal history. And because we live in 2023, where we spend from four to six hours online on average in America, well, your personal history is going to be digitalized. And so to advance as an individual in a world where techno capital is accelerating, one needs to know oneself. And that is only possible through the preservation of digital memory. Now, I think Land would disagree with this. Land, of course, is, I think, inherits some of his ideas from the Italian futurists who themselves were kind of like anti-museum, anti-history, and wanted to sort of break away from the old statues and build new things.

1:07:57So I don't know that hardcore accelerationists would agree with that. They'd be like, reinvent yourself. You're nothing. You don't exist. What is a human? It doesn't matter. and once you are in this abundant society, you get to know yourself. What's the next thing you want to do? To know the other and you'll soon realize that this technology you're building to connect with the world or tweet or whatever you want to do with this new technology you're going to build doesn't fill your need and doesn't fulfill your desire for connection with the other and you're right back at the conclusion of the volcanization and babelification paper which is that you'll want touch.

1:08:37You'll want connection. And so in spite of things being abundant and growth and technology or on Mars, whatever, I think you'll still want to hug a friend. And that's where I think my two ideas here could complement this techno-optimist utopia into one that remembers, right? One that is focused not only on progress and advancement, but also on memory. and not one that is focused on the abolition of man, but on the building of communities that are physically bound by touch. So the online as a way of reinforcing our relationships offline or help making it easier to connect offline. But not like Tinder.

1:09:23Like, that's not what you mean exactly. No, I mean, so by the way, one of the interesting things about the hyperlocal age is that Tinder doesn't work in the hyperlocal. Why? Because the hyperlocal is you're restricted physically by your locus, by your physical location. And so in my understanding or my sort of prediction of this future or of this new era rather, because I think it's going to swing back, it's a dialectic, this illusion of abundance of choice kind of goes away because that's based on a globalized understanding of choice. I can live anywhere, be with anyone, at any time. No, you're in this province, you're in the state, and this is where you are.

1:10:06So you better make the most out of it. Right. Like really reckoning with the could, like the endless hypothetical versus the is and the present. Yeah. I think one of the things that I'm very interested in, actually, in my own designs is the removal of choice, not in a sort of authoritarian way. But I think choice has been weaponized as a way to devalue the present. And a lot of what is done on the internet, on our platforms, is to present choice, present possibility. And what that does, because of course, we're just animals, is it devalues the present, devalues what you currently have in favor of a million coulds or a million potential possibilities, hypotheticals.

1:10:59And I want to avoid that as much as possible. To me, that's what is causing a lot of the mental health issues. It's like, I could be this person. I could look like that. I could live in that city. And I see this with my friends even who, I mean, this is a bi-coastal podcast in a way, but everyone's like, oh, should I move to this other city this year? And then it's like, oh, no, I want to move to. And it's everyone is trying to optimize for the best life possible. and flipping and flopping from one coast to the other, trying to have the best life possible when your best life is right now. It's just, it's wherever you are and wherever your friends and family are.

1:11:37So yeah, this desire for optimization, I think is highly toxic. And I think it's actually highly inherited from rational, techno-optimist thinking. To think that things get better all the time means that you should be getting better all the time. And that kind of means that you should upgrade all the different things in your life. So that is, I think techno optimism can work maybe for products. When you start to apply that abundance and growth for the individual, it can be kind of dangerous in that sense. I'll just say this. I've been trying to buy like a freaking tea kettle for two weeks. And every time, every time I go online, it's like there's just an endless number of teapots.

1:12:19And it's got me in this like existential paralysis because it's like, do I get an electric one, a gas one? What does that mean? What are my needs for heating up water when I make coffee in the morning? Do I want a gooseneck spout? Should I get one with a thermometer on it? I mean, it's like fucking crazy. And it's just to me, it's like such a microcosm of like everything we've been talking about. And I'm just paralyzed. I still don't have a teapot. I'm still using my broken teapot in the meantime. So there you go. I think we're all in that situation. for me I'll go on reviews I'll go on like Wirecutter and CNET and try to compare everything make sure I'm getting the best out of whatever I'd be interested in I'm starting a service that's just like you kind of outsource that to to me like you pay me a monkey retainer yeah and I just come in and I I Ruby I want this all right you get this one I don't like it I don't care that's that's the one you get we should start a service called just get this one i'll just i'll just simplify it one step further which is that more than any of that i just miss like i guess i still do this once in a while but the ritual used to just be you go out to the store the coffee shop and you see your local you know baristas and neighbors and you get a cup of tea oh by the way hyper local hyper local is um instead of going on on wire cutter because the new york times lies as we know, you just ask your neighbor and whatever they have, you get.

1:13:48Yes. Or whenever, you know, if you go to the store, the clerk will say, oh, I really like this one. I've been using this one. And that's the hyperlocal recommendation. Love it. Right. Yeah, exactly. All right, Ruby Tello, this has been extremely informative and fascinating. Thanks so much for coming on. And of course, where can people find your book? I think we'll put the pre-order link below right this, but I'm on the internet at being underscore on underscore line. So being online. Good handle. Great. We'll look out for that and we'll have all the info of where you can find it as well up on our sub stack.

1:14:29Ruby, thanks so much again. Thanks so much for having me.

1:14:41this episode of the culture journalist was produced and edited by emily friedlander and me andrea dominick our theme music is by mark donica to check out ruby's book and more of his work head to our sub stack that's the culture journalist dot sub stack dot com if you like what you're hearing? Leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or share us with friends to help support independent journalism.