A recurring dynamic within the ongoing technological revolution is the process in which the forces of centralization sweep up the various nodes within a particular area into a dominant organization or industry. Centralization follows the initial success of some new technology or use of a technology. Once a set of dominant players control a market, the forces of decentralization kick in and pick away at it. It is like the expanding and contracting of the universe.
In the early days of computing, you had big machines maintained by an army of engineers at special facilities. As more computers were created, the next step was to network them into the first distributed network. What followed was the age of the mainframe and midframe, which centralized all the users of an organization into one main computer, which they accessed via terminals. The original internet was a consolidation of these machines.
The PC started to nibble away at this structure. Instead of the user storing all his data on the central machine, he kept it on his local machine. He shared his data with others by copying it onto a disk and then walking it over to that user using what was eventually called sneaker-net. Soon, the local area network allowed the office to share resources and disconnect from the mainframe. The internet then allowed those offices to share data with one another in a distributed network.
Of course, the forces of centralization roared back as servers came to dominate the office network and then the organizational network. As quick as everyone had a personal computer, they were soon forced to make it fully accessible to the impersonal network and then make it little more than a terminal attached to the organization’s network of servers. This soon led to the return of the mainframe era, which was pleasantly renamed cloud computing.
This consolidation – disaggregation cycle is a pretty good model for the history of human civilization, so it makes sense that it plays out in technology. In the disaggregated world, there are those who see a benefit, personally, morally or philosophically in bringing the disparate parts under one roof. At some point in the consolidation process, there are those who begin to see a benefit, personally, morally or philosophically in breaking the blob into pieces or creating alternative pieces to the blob.
A good model for this is the internet community. The first “social media” was the BBS created in the early days of computing. The Bulletin Board System was modeled after the old-fashioned bulletin board. The main difference was that when someone posted something, others could post replies and then others could reply to those replies for as long as the topic required replies. Sites like 4chan are pretty much just the old BBS with a cheap graphical interface.
The problem with the BBS was that it did not take long before the topics grew too diverse to organize, and the users started to hate one another. Soon groups of users started to spin up new boards for their specific topic or to get away from a rival fraction they used to war with on the old board. The central board broke into a million bespoke boards organized around the tribal instincts of their users. It is not hard to see how humans spread around the globe once you understand this.
What we now call social media has been defined by the consolidation – disaggregation cycle that is the nature of humanity. Just as the centralized BBS splintered into many small communities, subsequent technology followed the same pattern. Big email groups eventually broke into small email groups. Usenet, a technology that aimed to solve the limitations of the BBS, went from a set of large channels into an impossible to track number of small channels.
The message board, which made it easier for the tens of millions of new internet users to be herded into communities online quickly followed the same pattern. The big forum for sports soon broke into forums for specific sports and then forums for specific teams and then rival tribes within the team fanbase. The main driver was always the inability of any group of people larger than the Dunbar number to interact with one another inside an internet community without conflict.
We are now seeing another round of this with microblogging. After the election, the doxers, deviants and lunatics that came to dominate Twitter in the pre-Musk age have jumped ship to something called Bluesky. They have all sorts of reasons ranging from technological to conspiratorial, but the main reason is they cannot face the reality of their moral turpitude, so they are seeking shelter among the like-minded, in a similar way described in the study, When Prophecy Fails.
In one of life’s amusing ironies, they can thank Andrew Torba for the opportunity to create their own fever swamp. The tireless efforts by Torba to keep Gab going, despite the relentless attacks by the crazies, was the first step in the disaggregation phase of the modern social media platform. Gab became a fun refuge for those excluded from Twitter, something like Alfred’s fort at Athelney, from which he waged his heroic resistance to the great heathen army.
Gab surviving and thriving in its inimical way was a proof of concept that opened the door to the coming disaggregation. Mastodon and now Bluesky are hoping to attract niche communities that seek an alternative to Musk’s Twitter. The people into “right wing” conspiracy theories first tried mastodon, but found it too challenging, so they have landed on Bluesky, which is easier for them to navigate. They can now share their conspiracy theories in a “safe” environment.
Twitter will remain the dominant player, owing to the fact it is owned by Musk, and he is besties with the new president. Advertisers are returning to the platform, so it will probably start to turn a profit or at least break even. The ascendent economic interests want one central platform, so they will support it, but those forces of disaggregation will keep gnawing away at it. Nature, at least human nature, does not like centralization, at least not the reality of it, so disaggregation always prevails.
That is the engine of history. Whether it is family dynasties, empires, authoritarian regimes or the unipolar world order, the desire to centralize and control always crashes into the rocks of disaggregation. The tribal nature of man, evolved over millions of years, has not been completely beaten out of after ten thousand years of civilization, so conflict and separation are baked in the cake of human organization. Separation, peaceful or violent, is always the end of the story.
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