The internet is flat and three-dimensional human beings can’t thrive in a one-dimensional space.

From The internet is flat by Charlie Warzel.  Interesting insights.  Follow the link for the embedded links.

I’ve been thinking about a different internet flattening, namely the way that social platforms collapse time and space and context into one big pancake of conflict. I wrote a bit about this phenomenon in my inaugural post for this newsletter. It’s called context collapse, which is when a piece of information intended for one audience finds its way to another — usually an uncharitable one — which then reads said information in the worst possible faith. (For that piece, I spoke to Elle Hunt, a journalist whose movie opinion tweet exploded into a culture war argument as result of this audience switching.)

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“Part of the problem is how time itself has been warped by the internet,” Hill writes. “Everything moves faster than before. Accountability from an individual’s employer or affiliated institutions is expected immediately upon the unearthing of years-old content. Who you were a year ago, or five years ago, or decades ago, is flattened into who you are now. Time has collapsed and everything is in the present because it takes microseconds to pull it up online. There is little appreciation for context or personal evolution.”

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Combing through a person’s past to change our opinion of the present is, of course, a pillar of the whole important, yet interminable cancel culture discussion. Which is really about the extremely thorny relationship between the passage of time, personal evolution or lack thereof, and group enforced accountability. None of us seem to even have the precise language to talk about all of this, much less agree upon outcomes.

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The Kemper event is an instance of context collapse happening on multiple fronts — time, audience — at once. There’s a problematic group. There’s an event that happened 21 years ago, with visual documentation. There’s a well-known but not A-list celebrity. There’s a random tweet (I believe the user who kicked this off has roughly 800 Twitter followers) that gets some pick-up and sends people digging around online. These factors cause an old article to go viral, and leads Twitter’s curation team to attempt to turn the conversation into something…helpful?

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Where does that leave us? In a tricky spot. Many of the current conversations about power and accountability are conversations we desperately need to have. Now, I’m not all that hopeful that many of the stakeholders are willing to have them — many would rather just flatten the complexities themselves into a vague ‘cancel culture.’ But, even in an ideal world of good faith participation, we don’t really have productive spaces to have such discussions. The world isn’t flat but the world wide web is — and three-dimensional human beings can’t thrive in a one-dimensional space.