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A friend of mine, shibao, recently put out “a final call for lifeboats”, a piece in equal parts polemic and elegy¹. I wanted to collect my thoughts and respond in order because it seemed like a call for some sort of consensus, some sort of direction amongst us, instead of remaining separate, inert. I think there is a longing for a prior unity, a coming-apart, at the heart of this piece; I also think that the same longing is shared by others in my life who have had their communities erode and fade away.

And where is the flame?

Allow me to summarise her concerns:

She says that we have been carried by “flames” in periods across history where genuine energy forments real, passionate communities of people, whether it’s salons or coffee shops of the Enlightenment period — and we are at the tail end of one, one that has lasted from mechanical tabulators through personal computers and open source, ending at the institutionalisation of megacorporations.

We are now in a much more reactive posture, salvaging dying embers in nostalgic recreations or otherwise trying to find some new hearth for the flame to begin again, but it isn’t working. And now all that awaits us is a mass degradation, and she doesn’t know what will come next, but the only recourse is for weirdos to carry the flame in isolated communities (in a sort of retrotech Benedict option) and wait for a chance to return the flame.

Another echo

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s called “a final call” — this is not a new message. Reading it I was reminded of The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, a 2019 blog post² that we circulated at Tlon as a confirmation of our mission — after all, Urbit was about salvaging the good parts of the internet and resisting clearnet incentives by making a network of caves. A personal cloud computer where people could poke each other’s ports like it’s 1992. If anything was intended to help weirdos build their own techno-utopian world…

2019 feels so long ago now. In 2019 I remember seeing “Cave Twitter,” the accelerationists and speculative futurists, the outbreak of “new institutions” as a movement — all slowly go quiet. It was novel and foolish to go off and form a Pleroma instance. Our relationship with control systems were becoming turbulent, but not intolerable; it felt as though something new had to be born, but nothing was emerging; cryptocurrencies and DAOs didn’t form into lasting counter-societies funded on circular economies (or mutual aid, etc). We were perhaps too comfortable to actually birth a secret society.

I think shibao and I are surrounded by plenty of like-minded people as well. My friend Bob attributes technological decline to the market saturation of smartphones in 2016. The Hundred Rabbits’ emphasis on collapse goes without saying. I think we are capable of describing malaise and failure — plenty predates our own efforts — whether we reflect on Occupy Wall Street or watch Adam Curtis documentaries — to articulate that there is no future, or at least, that there is no glorious IGY utopia in sight.

What is to be done?

Your ethics will define your praxis. Is it to withdraw, to salvage what you can, to choose some sort of affirmation … ?³

In the past few years my own nostalgia has gotten the better of me. I tried to recreate prior technological relationships by restoring old habits, trying to mimic the pensive “return to the pond” by making paralogue; my friend Merilynn has pulled away from platforms by founding the Milkmedicine Network. I gave up my smartphone for a keitai, then compromised on a mini-sized one without attention drains; my friends have all variously fallen back to older models or flip phones.

And I’d say the average person is also less “online” qua posting, but more visual; my own experience in public has given me far more exposure to Instagram than I ever remember seeing a decade ago, but the idea that “people are watching too much video” is itself sort of a nostalgic problem, like a kind of catalytic television structure. I know that Facebook retains some use because of its emphasis on groups — remember Facebook groups? — as a Schelling point for the average in-person community to congregate.

I regard my experimentation as a failure; I think I was asking the wrong question.⁴ Paralogue is very quiet; what I found was that forums stress people out — they like consuming it, but they find it draining to actually post on. When they do post, it’s high-effort, long-form.

I think for forums, it’s fundamentally a problem of stimulation thresholds; over the past twenty years, demands on attention have steadily increased, the cognitive drain of filtering and assessing information has increased, and simultaneously our friendships have increasingly taken place online. The idea of your friends being with you all day, every day, in dozens of caves, is itself a very draining prospect. It’s easy to poke your head in and maintain a relationship by saying hi in a chatroom (or, for millennials, by liking a friend’s post in the global feed), but there just isn’t time to spend writing a post. There isn’t time to spend reading your friend’s book. Instead we maintain the friendships, soothe with low-effort stuff for hours, and can’t structure our minds toward constructive outcomes.

I understand the logic of withdrawal — whether it’s focussing on the people around you, working out to regulate yourself, making your own cave and abandoning clearnet interactions altogether. But what we long for is each other, and no cave can provide that; no body is enough to exit the hell that is the self.

And so where is the flame?

I don’t think nostalgic recreations are the answer. I think the novel configurations of our communities will mirror novel configurations in technologies. Paul Frazee, who I quite admire, recently described the AT protocol as practical decentralisation, learning from the past decade plus in p2p and mesh to surface clearnet affordances while allowing for some of the amenities of decentralised solutions. Honestly, I’m more of a communitarian; I’ll build caves, but ones that open onto something — more hodgepodge of past and future than pure nostalgia. I think I can do something more interesting than paralogue.

I’m not sure it’ll look like a lifeboat, though. My God is a relational God, and the inexhaustible Trinity is itself relations in constant movement, a perichoresis. I am to be out in the world, present with others, pursuing encounter, pursuing love. This is something that feels paramount, imperative, even vocational to me. It is my posture toward life. It is my orientation to the world. It is my singular foundation, the ground within me.

I think in the past I wanted to retain some control about who I would become, and how I would form; I saw myself as a creature forming masteries through behaviours and repetition, and to be so present with people all the time rendered me a social creature, not anything ‘useful.’ But it’s taken time for me to dispose of the notions of efficiency, usefulness, justification. I think if anything we are facing an emptying on the ongoing ask of the human being to be a mercenary, a brand, a narrative.

It has not been sustainable to demand it of all people to become charismatic in order to survive, to demand attention in order to survive, to retain some sliver of shininess, something interesting about you. To become more like the Shining One is a curse. But most people can not bear to be a little one⁵, to be meek, humble, self-effacing; I think they instead choose a middle path instead of pure kenosis.

The flame we speak of doesn’t exist as a thing to be carried or preserved; it is itself alive only in movement, alive between us — it remains in that drive toward each other, toward that connection.

It is itself inexhaustible.

Postscript

The Dreher book I mentioned above based its argument on a stray mention in Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue:

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless very different — St. Benedict.

But indeed, the point of MacIntyre’s book wasn’t withdrawal at all, but the recovery of virtue ethics as a counter to liberal individualism, the formation of intercultural navigation as an ethics in itself. MacIntyre went on to critique Dreher’s points in 2017.

Even if After Virtue described this decline in 1981, even if we are still waiting for a synthesis to emerge from the contradictions of liberalism — I think MacIntyre (and Charles Taylor, though that’s another essay) points to what makes that waiting possible. It is the longing, at whatever scale, that constitutes us; and in that longing is the courage to remain open.