Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Backspace to the Future (the dislike club part I)

Episode Date: November 14, 2014

Paul Ford is a technologist and a writer, sometimes these two things blur. For example, he’s currently working on a book about webpages, but he’s also building a content management system for webpages –  because you know it could help with the writing.  (yeah his book is late) Its not like he’s trying to procrastinate, this is just what life is like when you are Paul Ford.  A couple of Monday night’s ago he was sitting on his couch drinking some rye whisky and chatting with his friends on twitter  and he accidentally a brand new webpage community.  This is the true origin story of his tilde.club. Yours truly also started a new thing it is called dislike.club. We also check in with Librarian and community manager Jessamyn West for advice on how to start an online community that doesn’t suck. The Dislike Club is  a story-in-progress, it will play out on the podcast over the next few weeks and then culminate December 21 on Radiotonic, from ABC RN’s Creative Audio Unit.  

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker Theory of Everything. This installment is called Backspace to the Future. What happened was we got the kids to bed and it was like eight and we'd made a rule that you only should drink on the weekends because I'm 40 and I just had to like get start to get stuff under control. And so I was like, well, it's it's you know, it's the weekend, I think, or maybe it was Monday night. I got to go back and look anyway. Yeah, it was Monday night. Sorry. Paul Ford is a technologist and a writer. Sometimes the two blur. For example, he's currently working on a book about webpages for FSG,

but he's also building a content management system for webpages because, you know, it'll help him with the writing. Yeah, his book is late. It's not like he's trying to procrastinate. Things just happen. Like on that particular Monday night, Paul Ford was sitting on his couch, drinking some rye whiskey, chatting with his friends on Twitter, and listening to Stevie Nicks. Does that sound like a man getting ready to launch a whole new webpage community? Like I said, with Paul Ford, things just happen. It just occurred to me, Stevie Nicks Thanksgiving. So I googled Stevie Nicks Thanksgiving,

kind of thinking maybe there was something. And lo and behold, there's this Stevie Nicks blog post from 2004 that's one of the most amazing things I have ever read. She's making her Thanksgiving dinner and she's writing about it and there's 25 people coming. She's making all these pies. I'll just read it. Many, many times in my life when I've been sad or unsure about what I was doing, my mom would say, you're on a mission, Stevie. You always have been. And then there's a Tilda. Like she actually has a little Tilda character. I think she means, I thought she meant to put a dash in and then it's your destiny. I like Stevie Nicks a lot. And man,

you know, she can really like, as it comes to like being backlit on a horse, she's killer. So I asked my wife, what are all these Tildas about? My wife is from California and she's like, oh, you do that when you're writing in California. Like, that's a really normal West Coast thing. You use it instead of a dash. Like, I think it's a little more like handwriting. So, you know, Twitter loves factoids. So I tweeted that out.

And my friend Matthew Howey, who runs a website called Metafilter, wrote back to the point that, like, you know, the only good use for Tilda's is in front of a username on the web, which is just an inside baseball nerd thing to say. In the early days of the web, what you would do is there'd be some company. I remember the one that I first signed up for. I got out of college and I signed up for an account with Interactive.net. And I got the Ford account, F-O-R-D.

Sort of my home page on the internet at that point was at Interactive.net slash Tilda, the little squiggle character, Ford. Tilda was kind of a shortcut. A Tilda site, I mean, that's almost like an after-the-fact name. So, I went to the domain name registrar that lets you claim a website name, and I looked for sites that had the word Tilda in them, what was still available. And of course, Tilda.com is gone. But Tilda.club was available. Twitter's bearable when you're drinking.

You feel comfortable being stupid, and everyone sort of realizes that it's an okay place. And so I tweeted out, I have registered Tilda.club. Actually, I was a little in the bag, so I tweeted, Yes, also I, and I didn't capitalize I,

just registered HTTP colon slash://tilda.club and will give in, so that's, I didn't get that right either, anyone a Shell account who wants one. That night I went to bed. Tilda Club was a joke. It was just a folly, something I was going to share with 10 or 12 people. Maybe we'd make some goofy webpages, and that was going to be it. The following morning, when Paul Ford woke up, he discovered that a bunch of his friends had taken him up on his offer.

People started making Tilda sites, webpages like the ones they used to make in the late 90s. There was lots of orange and green type and lots of ASCII art. Someone even made a Tilda Club web ring. Within days, Tilda Club went viral. It trended, and think pieces were written. Everyone wanted to know what this retro computer community was all about, and everyone wanted in.

When I visited, about a week and a half after that Monday evening, there were over a thousand people on Paul Ford's waiting list. So this whole thing started as a really retro joke, but as more and more people showed up, I realized that there might be a point to this more than nostalgia. I think what actually happened is that the nostalgia got everyone back to their younger selves and their more vulnerable self. There's a post on here by a guy who goes by SixFootSix. Let's see if I can find him.

There we go. SixFootSix, the Internet Diary of Ryan Pants. That is not his actual name. I've met him once, chatted with him on Twitter a lot, and he's a programmer. And he's been writing these very ironic, like, Tilda Club is over posts. But then the other day he lost someone. He lost a grandmother. And she passed away, and his son had a sixth birthday. And he wrote this straight-up, honest story about getting on the flight

and having to go see his grandmother at Grace's funeral. And it was just real. There's a line at the end where he's just like, I'm crying now, I've underslept, and I've made some mistakes recently. It's been a long summer for me and my family. I don't know where you necessarily write that anymore. I don't know where that sentence belongs. Definitely not on Twitter.

And then Facebook, if you write that, it's going to be like, Hang in there, buddy. It's going to be all right. I'm here for you. We're friends. You know, or like your aunt posting like a Christian picture of Tweety Bird or something. Like it's just how many people are like a little bit exhausted by Facebook. That's all that's really going on is that we truly have come to see the web and the Internet as social networks. Like that that is the fundamental sort of layer over all of it.

And it doesn't have to be quite that way. You know, you can start over. You could reconstruct it along different principles. The thing that I did was basically just go back and say, you're allowed to reset. If you get onto Twitter or even Facebook, it's just a kind of relentless tribality, and if you express a political opinion,

there's a way for someone to... Everyone can sort of talk back to you at all times. And so there's no processing time. And that's the money for Twitter and Facebook is in people constantly dumping more pictures, more feedback, and so there's no processing time and that's the money for Twitter and Facebook is in people constantly dumping more pictures more feedback and so this is not even a criticism of them I think this is a natural endgame for that kind of expression if you get people constantly putting stuff into the system you're gonna be able to create a better advertising product and you'll have more to work with but I don't even know if it sucks as much as i personally

seem to lack the necessary maturity in order to because you're a human well regardless right like it doesn't matter like it doesn't matter you're a human being it's not made for humans it's bad it seems to be really bad for people and i feel terrible about that because it looked so great. Everyone had, I mean, it's like we went in with the best intentions. And I think we just want to talk openly without getting yelled at. And it's also just, I want to hang

out with cool people who are respectful of each other. I want that so bad right now. I need it. Because I just, I actually, I got a bunch of kids and I'm late on everything. Like I can't keep building my personal brand. It doesn't work. We don't always credit computers for how evocative they can be,

how evocative the experience of using one and writing things and thinking can be. And I think that I short-circuited that. And I short-circuited all those defenses that we've built up over the last 20 years. You just don't have to feel like you're under siege when you want to express yourself. Look, I turned on a computer and I tweeted a tweet and people found something that they didn't know they missed

and they joked about it and then they all kind of looked at each other and they went, I like this. Thank you. So so Before I carried a smartphone, I used to walk around, looking at the sky. Actually, I would look at everything. The sky, the earth, the cracks in the sidewalk, the plastic bags hanging from the trees, parked cars, birds, and homemade advertisements stapled or taped to telephone poles. Back then, it was easy to get distracted, whereas today, today, I walk around with an intensity of focus that I never knew I had in me.

I walk around focused solely on the screen in my hand. This morning, I accidentally collided into a man who was also staring at a screen. He didn't apologize. He didn't even look up. But I did. His t-shirt read, New Features. new features. I cherish my old memories because I can almost remember what it felt like, what it felt like to wander both in body and in spirit.

Today, I find it impossible to get lost. My path is preordained, pre-programmed, pre-installed. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Gmail, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Gmail, Instagram, Facebook. Somehow, I managed to stay off the internet until the fall of 1999. Until one October afternoon.

I'm at the Boston Public Library. I spend all of my afternoons there, perusing old books, old magazines, and old things. On this particular afternoon, I'm reading a book about Gruby Ceramics. In 1894, William Gruby founded a ceramics company that specialized in arts and crafts style vases and tiles. You can see some of his work today in the New York subway, the beavers at Astor Place, the giant blue oval at Bleecker Street.

But by the turn of the century, factories on the eastern seaboard were churning out cheap imitations of groovy green ceramics, and William Groobie was forced to close up shop. What I want to know is this. In those final days, did Groobie have a strategy, or did he know that resistance was futile? There's this homeless guy sitting at the computer next to me. He's cackling and typing furiously.

I can't help myself. I glance over. He's on the internet, writing a man-seeking woman post for what must have been the early Boston Craigslist. He types out in all caps, I want everything, and I want it right now. And then he hits send. Then he goes to the Hotmail website and enters a password. And I watch as replies start streaming in. Every time he refreshes, there's like 10 more. He starts opening them. There are

phone numbers, mash notes, long detailed life stories, photos of naked women, wire transfers, job offers, plane tickets. When he sees my bulging eyes, he closes everything down and walks away, muttering. When I'm sure he's gone, I take his seat and wave over the librarian. And I have her help me sign up for Hotmail. It's now been 15 years of signing up. Hot mail, Gmail, Yahoo, Flickr, Photobucket, MySpace, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Dodgeball, Friendster, Tumblr,

Foursquare, Yelp, Uber, Ello, Facebook. I'm done. I am done with these hucksters and thieves. Because it turns out that everything right now is the same as nothing. I've spent the last 15 years staring at screens. So, I'm starting my own thing. I've already found a bunch of like-minded individuals we're meeting regularly. You, dear listener, are totally welcome to swing by.

And yes, I know this might sound a bit ironic, but there is a website. It's dislike. Dot. Club. We've always been at war with Facebook. That's kind of definitely true. But I think what's been happening simultaneously is that people feel like they have the tools to do the thing themselves. And they want to figure out, how can I get the kind of community that I feel in various comment threads or groups or pages on Facebook, but not have to deal with all the awful things that are associated with Facebook? Jessamyn West is a rural Vermont librarian who teaches people how to use

technology. Until recently, she was also the director for operations and community manager of metafilter.com. I asked her to help me figure out how to successfully build and sustain the Dislike Club. Anytime you're creating a new community, whether it's five people at the book club in real life, or five people at the online book club, and you're using a Facebook page to do that. Choices need to be made. And there's basically a list, you've got to think about what you're trying to do. Given that what's encouraged, given that what's allowed, given that what discouraged. Given that, what's disallowed. So you've got a continuum of things that aren't cool,

but you're not necessarily going to make rules about, and things that will get you blocked, banned, whatever. And things that are illegal. No, no, no. That's way too many rules, Jessamyn. I want to keep this simple. Like one rule, no liking allowed. I just want to create a place that doesn't suck.

Well, I'm not sure you can build a community that doesn't suck, but I believe you can build a community that won't fall apart because of its own internal contradictions, if that makes sense. Where you're going to have the problem with your dislike club, for example, is wanting it to be a certain kind of space, if that makes sense. Where you're going to have the problem with your dislike club, for example, is wanting it to be a certain kind of space, but also maybe wanting certain kinds of people there. And then if you find out that the certain kinds of people you want there want to engage in the prohibited behavior, something has to give. And I think those pressure points are where a lot of online communities either fall apart or wind up not walking the talk or just wind up sad.

I definitely don't want to build the sad club. Here's the thing that I see coming up a lot with what I call aspirational communities, people who are intending to build a thing where there is no thing and they have ideas about where that thing will go and what will happen to that thing and um it's it's one thing to just be like you can't do that here every time you do it we'll just flag it ban it hide it block you block it whatever like it's easy to try and do that play whack-a-mole. What's trickier, but I think ultimately more effective, especially in the long run, is to incent other kinds of genuine communication and interaction that don't... Suck. Yeah. You have to find ways to get people to like the disliking. you have been listening to benjamin walker's theory of everything

this installment is called backspace to the future radiotopia from prx