IN THE HUMAN CONDITION, her 1958 philosophical treatise, Hannah Arendt fretted about the eventual disappearance of what she called “the common world.” What exactly she meant by this phrase was always a little vague, but it seemed to signify for her all the concrete and stable elements—the institutions and artifacts, from schools to street signs—that constitute our shared reality. Her book was a response to what was the then-accelerating space race and push for automation that Arendt felt, presciently, would cause people to decouple from this common world (to, literally, escape the bounds of Earth) and move toward synthetic and virtual versions of reality in which the very definition of what it meant to be human would be utterly changed.
I am drawn to this idea that what saves us all from being atomized and adrift is a set of binding elements. For Arendt these elements were the prerequisite to politics, to maintaining society and culture, and, also, to living a meaningful life. At one point in the book she uses an extended metaphor to describe what it would be like if we lost them: “The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible.”
You are all there together, sharing a table, eating lunch on it, getting angry, and slamming your fist down or seeing your spit fly over it or shaking hands over its grainy wood. And then it’s gone, and you are nothing to one another, just people sitting around awkwardly. Arendt was saying that it was the existence of the table itself that connected us, that made a group, a community. And I think her use of a table as a metaphor was intentional: the context for this coming together was a human-made thing, something sawed and carved with thought, an object whose primary purpose was to draw individuals into deliberation, their faces turned toward one another.
This is what I’ve been searching for in our pre-digital past, these tables, and I found them in letters and samizdat and zines. For Arendt, the common world was more generally about what made humans human, but her thinking would also seem to apply to any group of people whose aspirations sit outside society’s norms, who need a means to relate to each other, separate from everyone else. It’s the tables that allow for new identities and possibilities to form.
When the internet began to colonize every corner of our lives, the promise was an infinitely vast room filled with such tables. But I didn’t find very many of them when I began searching in the mid-2010s. Only destinations we all called “social.” Much of the problem, I realized, was a semantic one. What had “social” become? We could join Facebook or Twitter and enter the rat’s maze of rewards and punishment that made these sites’ business models run and end up feeling quite alone, distracted, and confused. We’ve seen what this did to the activists of the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter who had arrived with the best intentions, to pull up a chair, and found themselves knocked flat on their faces.
By the end of the decade, though, this misreading of what “social” signified was pretty well cleared up, and very few people had any illusions anymore about what it meant to interact on Facebook—including Mark Zuckerberg himself. In an extraordinary post in March 2019 in which he announced a new direction for his company, Zuckerberg acknowledged the category confusion. “Over the last 15 years,” he wrote, his platform had helped people “connect with friends, communities, and interests in the digital equivalent of a town square.” But it turns out that Facebook’s users, woken up to the bustle and noise of the street vendors, the town criers, and the endless gossip, wanted a different sort of social sphere. “People increasingly also want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room.”
This “living room” sounds a lot like our table. As Zuckerberg described it, “People should have simple, intimate places where they have clear control over who can communicate with them and confidence that no one else can access what they share.” In their seclusion and focus, these living rooms would be a break from what he said his site’s objective had always been, to “accumulate friends or followers.” It goes without saying that Arendt would be appalled by the notion of accumulation as the raison d’être of any social environment. And it’s certainly not the way to nurture radical ideas.
In recent years, both degenerates and dissidents have come to this conclusion on their own, finding ways to repurpose new platforms like Discord, or older technologies like email chains, to provide them with what they needed. The desire for tables is human and has never gone away, and it’s particularly strong when you wake up and realize that your own interests and concerns might skew sideways. For those early digital pioneers, this is what the internet was all about. They imagined they were building communes, off the grid and among their own, a pixelated reconstitution of the tribe. We have strayed from this original vision, and in truth it was always essentially a fantasy, a mescaline trip in the desert. But if we now understand just how necessary tables are, where can we find them today, and where might they be located in the future? Radical change can’t wait for Zuckerberg to start constructing living rooms.
WHAT IF WE CONCEIVE of social media more broadly, as any digital platform that allows people to communicate with each other? This was what Ethan Zuckerman did as a visiting research scholar at the Knight First Amendment Institute in 2020 when he began a project to map the full breadth of social media. Zuckerman was intent on capturing not just the large landmasses, like Facebook, but also the tiny islands and peninsulas that jutted off the mainland. The former head of the MIT Center for Civic Media, Zuckerman has become something of a Buddha of digital activism, responsible early in his career for creating the pop-up ad, that bane of our online existence, for which he seems to have been atoning ever since. His tendency as a thinker is not to look outside the box necessarily, but to rummage around in it to make sure there aren’t any unused tools. That was the impetus for this project. Rather than dream about regulations that might break up Facebook, critics need to look further afield, “identifying platforms that depart from the status quo.” As he put it, “There is a diverse space of social media outside of the shadow of the major platforms and we believe it’s there where the key to a different future lies.”
To begin this search, he pinpointed the elements that make up any social network’s character, among them its governance model (what speech is acceptable and who decides), its ideology as a platform (Facebook’s, he said, was “connect everyone and maximize shareholder value”), and, most interestingly, what he called its “affordances,” what it enables a user to do (share a post, “upvote” a comment, show off a number of “likes”). He believed these were the features that shaped a conversation, and he started using them to build his map, first dividing the full range of social media into broad regions, separate continents, each driven by a different “logic.”
He found, for example, a group of platforms that were “local” in their orientation, meaning they hosted chatter around the doings in a neighborhood, like someone searching for a lost cat or pointing out a hawk spotted in a tree or advertising a garage sale. Even among these, using his gauges, he found some differentiation. A site like Nextdoor, for example, functions much like Facebook in its affordances. Anyone can post anything, it instantaneously appears on the site, and then others comment. And, like Facebook, this can sometimes devolve into rants about whether it was racist to assume a Black man was prowling around or whether a new zoning ordinance should pass. There are other sites with this local logic but different governance and affordances, like Front Porch Forum, which was started by a Vermont couple who were looking for support from their neighbors after their son developed cerebral palsy. The site now serves every town in Vermont and a few in New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. Unlike Nextdoor, Front Porch Forum has a team of moderators that check out each post to make sure it adheres to the site’s “community-building mission.” Also, posts and comments don’t appear right away but come bundled once a day, like a local newspaper, with the built-in slowness often leading to more thoughtfulness and fewer fights.
I liked the way Zuckerman was thinking about the architecture of a social network, how it can encourage certain kinds of talk and shut down others. When I asked him to point me toward his map’s samizdat archipelago, though, Zuckerman was more circumspect. Mostly, he said, these kinds of private, intense, intimate group conversations happen when people are forced off the larger platforms. “These are groups essentially saying we can’t have sufficient free speech in these environments, so we’re going to carve out our own spaces,” Zuckerman said. His examples of communities doing this were fairly horrifying. He mentioned Mastodon, a Twitter clone that has one critical difference: it is decentralized, meaning that anyone can host their own server node in the network (Mastodon users call these nodes “instances”), freeing groups up to create their own smaller, self-policed versions of Twitter.
At one point in 2017, curious about Mastodon, Zuckerman looked into it and discovered that it had mostly taken off in Japan, and when he dug deeper, he realized this was because one of the largest nodes was made of people interested in lolicon. Lolicon (brace yourself) is an offshoot of manga that consists of sexualized drawings of young girls. Twitter had knocked lolicon adherents off, classifying their hobby as child porn, so they found their way to a different, less restrictive place. The United States saw a similar trend with white supremacists: after Discord kicked them off, many of them went to Gab, another Mastodon node. This pattern was repeated after the storming of the Capitol in the last days of Trump’s presidency, with his die-hard band of believers leapfrogging from Parler to Rumble to MeWe to DLive.
I told Zuckerman I needed something a little more pro-social, a place on the map where, say, Black Lives Matter organizers could strategize among themselves about the best way to influence a local city council. “Taiwan,” he said. “Look at Taiwan.” It turns out Taiwan has been conducting an experiment with just the kinds of platforms I’d been looking for. It all started in 2014 with the Sunflower Movement, when a group of students occupied the parliament building in Taipei for three weeks to protest a trade bill that was about to be signed with China and that they feared would give the menacing superpower too much leverage over their country. As part of the government’s attempt to resolve the tensions created by the standoff, it invited Sunflower activists to design a platform that would facilitate communication with Taiwan’s youth. A group of civic-minded hackers known as g0v (pronounced “Gov Zero”) soon produced vTaiwan, a social media tool for bringing a wider swath of the population into the legislative process. And powering this tool was a platform called Pol.is, which seemed to flip social media on its head by both incentivizing the expression of a wider range of views and helping to create consensus.
In one of the earliest uses of Pol.is, in 2015, the Taiwanese government was faced with the question of how to regulate Uber. Young people liked the service, while local taxi drivers resented the competition. Anyone who cared about this issue and wanted to weigh in was invited to join the debate on Pol.is. There, they were presented with a series of statements that ranged across the spectrum of opinion, some proposing Uber be banned altogether, others insisting the market decide, and others somewhere in the middle (“I think that Uber is a business model that can create flexible jobs”). Participants could also add their own statements, but they couldn’t reply to other people’s. To those, they could only indicate “Agree,” “Disagree,” or “Pass.” Pol.is then used the accumulating data to build a real-time map of opinion. At first, this just broke down into large pro- and anti-Uber factions, but as each group looked to bring others along, people started producing less polarizing statements such as “The government should set up a fair regulatory regime” or “It should be permissible for a for-hire driver to join multiple fleets and platforms.” The map then began to break up, moving from two parts to seven clusters, each of which represented an opinion that most people thought reasonable and which became the starting point for actual regulation.
Even though Pol.is has been used almost exclusively in these sorts of large-scale democratic debates, what inspired the platform’s creation was actually a social movement. Pol.is was dreamed up by a handful of Seattle-based poli-sci geeks, led by Colin Megill, who came to the project not with the skills of a programmer but as someone with a degree in international relations. Megill was motivated to develop it after seeing what was happening to activists: “I was watching a whole bunch of people in the Occupy Wall Street movement all try to talk simultaneously and no one had any idea whether they were speaking for everyone, but everyone thought they were. And that movement did pull itself right apart.” His next data point was Tahrir Square. Twitter and Facebook were basically a place for “pillow fights,” he said. “But when it came to saying, ‘Let’s write a constitution,’ it was like, that’s not really what this tool was built for. This is for pillow fights.”
So Megill and his friends thought carefully about how to design a platform that allowed people to visualize their points of difference and areas of agreement. The decision not to permit users to reply to each other’s opinion statements was purposeful and had its intended effect. “Think about social media as a soccer stadium. If everyone is just talking across the stadium to everyone else, you’ve got fistfights,” Megill said. “But if a comment has to go onto the field, and everyone has to walk past it single file and add a tick mark, now there’s some order imposed.” There is still interaction, “but the interactions are producing a lot of helpful data.” He said the largest group to test Pol.is has been a leftist German political movement, Aufstehen, in which thirty thousand people worked out their platform.
Megill sees social movements—the drivers of change—as limited in their actions and their ability to evolve and adapt because they rely on tools that only deal in binaries. When you can discern shades of difference, new strategies and alliances open up. “We live along one political dimension because our categories for expressing ourselves and our tools for thinking about ourselves and others are one-dimensional,” he said.
POL.IS IS CERTAINLY a kind of social media, and one that Egyptian revolutionaries or Black Lives Matter activists could have made much use of—it could have aided even the emergency room doctors who were trying to harmonize the guidance they were presenting to a confused and fearful public during the pandemic. But it is also essentially a survey app equipped with some helpful data visualization. What people need is to be able to talk.
I saw more promise in another of Zuckerman’s broad territories: chat apps like WhatsApp, Discord, iMessage, Snapchat, Slack, Telegram, and Signal. Zuckerman categorized their defining features as “privacy, ephemerality, and community governance,” some of the exact qualities that made the pre-digital forms of interactive media so useful. By the end of the 2010s the top four messaging apps had surpassed the top four social networking apps in their number of monthly active users. It’s probably the reason Mark Zuckerberg wants to turn Facebook in this direction (and why his purchase of WhatsApp in 2014 now looks so smart).
These chat apps, as we’ve already seen, can be quite useful for replicating in digital form the sorts of small communities that letter or samizdat or zine writers created among themselves. It’s a point often forgotten because we tend to concentrate on their darker aspects—how they evade surveillance or provide a home to pedophiles or hate groups. But they also allow for a certain productive intensity and creativity. The creator of Signal, an elusive anarchist who goes by the name of Moxie Marlinspike, described his platform’s role in a New Yorker profile in 2020. Because an app like Signal is infamous for its airtight end-to-end encryption, it’s easy to forget what all this secrecy is for and to imagine the worst. But Marlinspike sees privacy as a necessary ingredient for the kind of experimentation that makes social change possible. “If I’m dissatisfied with this world—and I think that I might be—a problem is that you can only desire based on what you know,” Marlinspike said. “You have certain experiences in this world, they produce certain desires, those desires reproduce the world. Our reality today just keeps reproducing itself. If you can create different experiences that manifest different desires, then it’s possible that those will lead to the production of different worlds.”
Marlinspike’s app allows people to control the size of their rooms and who can get in. It ensures that the walls are soundproof. For a group of dissidents, this is a wonderful thing. But it’s also useful for any group of people who need to figure out how they are going to challenge a status quo, or even just convince themselves that they can.
I recently read about Alyssa Nakken becoming the first woman in the history of Major League Baseball to coach on the field. It turns out that she is part of a semisecret WhatsApp group among women who work in the sport. Starting with ten women, it grew to forty-nine in just a year and has become a place to commiserate, share stories, and offer support. It is their way of surviving and even possibly thriving in a heavily male-dominated culture (it’s easier to imagine a female president than a female pitcher in the major leagues). The group, started by a life skills coordinator with the Cleveland Indians, has built solidarity among the women and has functioned as a launching pad from which to infiltrate this closed world. “This is like another type of family,” said Nakken. “If there’s something going on, I can share it with them and they’ll get it. They just get it.”
Could a larger platform, like Facebook, create these opportunities? A few people pointed me to China and its enormously popular WeChat as a glimpse into the future. WeChat began as a messaging app in 2011 and eventually took on a range of other functions, including an e-commerce platform adopted by practically everyone in the country. Part of its success has to do with the way it defines social networks: they are purposefully small-scale and mirror a person’s actual contacts in the real world. If two people comment on the same post who aren’t themselves connected on the app, they will never see what the other wrote. Because WeChat does not make most of its money from advertising, it has never had an incentive to maximize engagement. In other words, it’s not meant to introduce human beings to each other (despite there being more than a billion human beings who use it). This was appealing to the Chinese who seem to prefer it now to Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter. An Xiao Mina, a writer who has studied the Chinese internet, explained to me that after all the trolling and misinformation and contentiousness of Weibo (sound familiar?), there was a “shift to private, where it’s just like, okay, at least I have my own little oasis.”
WeChat is, of course, a fraught example because the privacy that its users experience is an illusion. WeChat users are being watched at all times, thanks to a surveillance system called Skynet that scans for politically sensitive phrases, links, and images, sophisticated enough to catch a joke at the leader Xi Jinping’s expense. In the early months of the coronavirus, a watchdog group called the Citizen Lab found that more than two thousand keywords related to the pandemic were suppressed on WeChat. This included the name of Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who, Red Dawn–like, tried to warn colleagues about the emergence of a possible new infectious disease, was reprimanded, and then died of the virus a few weeks later.
I could wander around Zuckerman’s social media map for a long time. There are promising platforms, or corners of platforms, even as social media as a whole seems ever more dependent on capitalism and its familiar dialectic: when a surefire way of making a profit bumps up against what people actually want and need, there’s a readjustment so that the money keeps flowing. Will Facebook really remake itself into a series of living rooms? Not unless it comes up with a business model that makes those rooms as lucrative as the town square. Can an app for secluded chatting like Signal remain a nonprofit? Maybe, but if it doesn’t scale up—which will take money—how can it reach the people who could use the islands it provides?
Perhaps pining in this way, for a perfect, magic medium for social and political change, is in itself misguided. Hope for the future might come instead from a changed mindset, cutting through the dreaminess that has colored so much of our thinking about online communication for so long and finally ingesting this fact, that the platforms are not neutral. The internet is a world of hammers and screwdrivers, saws and pliers, each with its own particular function, useful for some tasks and utterly futile for others. For the vanguards of the present—Rachel Gilmer or Miski Noor—this is the essential insight: that the shape and extent of the change they seek depends as much on these tools as it does on their own will and hunger. They know now that they need to be thoughtful about which one they pick up.
WHEN WE LOOK BACK, what were the rewards of that quiet intensity when it was achieved? I wish history could offer us a resounding answer, one with chiming bells, but that’s not how change works, even in the best of circumstances. To discern what followed from the stories of early incubation and what the future might look like, we need to get comfortable with progress that takes the form of a relay race.
When Mina Loy left Florence for New York in 1916 in the middle of World War I, she then moved through a series of bohemian enclaves for the next few decades, back and forth between Paris and Manhattan in the company of writers and artists like Ezra Pound and Marcel Duchamp, enjoying a counterculture where she felt freer. Still, she never dared to publish her “Feminist Manifesto.” Her last years were spent working on assemblages of found objects, and she died in Aspen, Colorado, in 1966, three years after Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. Mina’s own manifesto was finally included in a posthumous collection of her writing in 1982, and ten years later a group of young women, who would become Riot Grrrls, fulfilled in their zines her directive to stop looking to men for self-definition and to “seek within yourselves what you are.” This is how it moves, a radical idea incubated in one place and time revealed nearly a hundred years later. For that matter the Manichaean, reactionary worldview of the Futurists, which had inspired Mina’s own break with convention, bears not a small resemblance to the concepts that ignited the passions of a different group of young men in their internet forums, also a century later, when Pepe the Frog became their Mussolini.
In some cases, the movements that seemed promising are then undermined over time, obscuring the breakthroughs they once represented. After becoming the first president of independent Nigeria, Nnamdi Azikiwe was removed from office in a military coup in 1966 and barely avoided the fate of many others in his cohort: assassination. He died in 1996, honored as one of his country’s founding fathers, but he also lived to see Nigeria undone by the tribal conflicts among Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa—precisely the sort of sectarian violence that Zik had worried would hold Africans back from full self-realization. Natasha Gorbanevskaya was finally released from the Special Psychiatric Hospital in Kazan in 1972, a little more than a year after she was admitted. She left the Soviet Union for good in 1975, moving to Paris, where she would live for the rest of her life. But she did return to Moscow in 2013, more than a decade into Putin’s rule, to re-create the 1968 protest in Red Square on its forty-fifth anniversary. Natasha and a group of nine friends unfurled a banner with the same slogan, “For Your Freedom and Ours,” and stood at the same spot by the stone slab of Lobnoye Mesto. They were instantly arrested by the police, and Natasha died a few months later.
More often than not, though, the fights of the past just keep resurfacing in slightly different forms, but still call on the same methods for seeding a resistance. Over a century and a half after Feargus O’Connor traveled around the English countryside with his petition, demanding a government more representative of its people, Stacey Abrams did the same in the state of Georgia. Starting in 2011, when she became minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, Abrams set out to register more people of color to vote so that their concerns and demands might find fuller voice. Her first step, though, came from manuals that had helped her parents, United Methodist ministers, when they were looking to build up the church. They recommended intimate and frequent conversation. And that’s what Abrams did. Her organizers set up dozens of listening tours centered on registering new voters, moving them past their sense of powerlessness, and letting them talk about their needs. Without much attention and with a projected time frame of a decade, Abrams’s team did their slow, steady work, which culminated in turning Georgia, which had been a solidly red state for more than two decades, into a blue one in 2020—with the addition of a million new voters since the previous election.
Abrams’s approach rhymes with O’Connor’s because it embodies certain mechanics of how we’ve seen new ideas, like enfranchisement for all, make their way into actuality. Radical change—change that strips off the stucco and gets to the girders, that offers a chance to see ourselves and our relationship to nature or to others in new ways—doesn’t start with yelling. It starts with deliberation, a tempo that increases, a volume set first at a whisper. How else can you begin to picture what doesn’t yet exist?
Whatever new ways we find to carve a path beyond our current cacophony will have to take this into account—and it’s safe to assume that we haven’t even begun to imagine what uncharted territories of social media are still out there, existing now only in a programmer’s mind. We can rage against it, dream as I do occasionally of pens and typewriters, but the internet, this network of networks, is where we live our lives in the twenty-first century. It has almost completely annihilated all those other modes of communication. So we need to ensure the possibility of those spaces apart, especially in a flattened, too-loud world that perceives dark corners only as dangerous. They are where the first inflections of progress can—and almost always do—occur.
Change seems hard to conceive of otherwise. Because it is the act of entering into those closed or semi-closed circles that alters identity in a fundamental way. Facing that gray unending slab of reality seems less lonely, and chipping away at it less foolish. You become something else: a person at a table.