There is a group of people I hover around on Twitter which I find thoughtful and earnest. They are loosely referred to as "TPOT" (This Part of Twitter) but this label is rather meaningless because there isn't a legible "thing" which brings them together, it's more of a general vibe of people who tend to be conscious about how they interact with other people online, and they develop, consciously or not, healthier ways of communication as part of a larger pro-social background.
I am fond of this, both the intentions and the fact that the conversations do tend to be constructive and interesting, far more than what you would get on other parts of the internet.
It's worth noting that TPOT is a scene, not a community. The way I see it is that nothing on the internet could be called a community, something which insures some form of long-term value to its participants and gives them a sense of belonging, similar to a real culture. But it is certainly a scene, a more transient but still real cluster of intentions, protocols and vibes, which help a group of people go in a certain direction. The point of a community is to create solid foundations and give a sense of stability, so that something beautiful may emerge, whereas a scene is more transient, which means its successes might involve some key members leaving, perhaps doing their own thing, or taking part in their own local community.
And I think pretending that it is a community is part of a larger set of blindspots that TPOT has, which is to say that the scene features intelligent and conscious people, but who haven't yet learned what a real community is and all the mundane but real challenges that living together for a long time entails. As expected from an internet scene, it is obsessed with possibilities and experimentation, it is very nomadic both physically and intellectually, but hasn't come face to face with the constraints and ups and downs that communities have to face, and therefore hasn't settled into a more stable and coherent structure.
Which is fine. I think scenes can be a very powerful container for helping people move towards a healthier and more whole version of themselves, and many people have met through it who would otherwise have never even known about one another. I think if we accept the transient reality of what an internet scene is, we can participate in it and recognize that there is ultimately something else, more local and grounded, asking us to move towards it.
Some people are in fact building local neighborhoods, such as the NYC Fractal, which help people find and learn from one another, build things together and spend more time offline, which are initiatives I salute. I do not know enough about the details to assess the long-term sustainability of those neighborhoods, and how resilient they truly are to ideological and financial pressures, but they do have real outcomes to show for their effort.
The blindspots and ideological positions of TPOT make it difficult, if not outright impossible, for me to feel truly "at home" there, but then again, why should I expect a large group of very online people with wildly diverging views to provide a suitable replacement for my relationship needs. They clearly can't, because nothing online can.
But I say this because I do have my fair share of problems with many of the fundamental assumptions and directions of the "bigger" accounts, namely:
Not that I expect any of them to read this list, not that I expect to convince anyone if I were to write more deeply about those subjects, but it is useful for me to write the fundamental grounds on which I disagree with people, because it clarifies what I see and think.
TPOT is an online scene all around possibility, and while I love the individual side of it, the conscious examination of oneself and how to uproot patterns which do not support the life you want, I find myself disagreeing with basically every aspect of their view of a "better" future, one which makes people even more dependent on the inhuman and unsustainable technological system, one which is out of touch with basic material constraints such as our dependence on non-renewable fossil fuels, and one also severely out of touch with what a majority of people think about our times, such as the right-wing at large.
I like it when people focus on what they want to see more of, but that too has its limits. On an individual level, you can be blind by focusing on the wrong things and being too stubborn, and on a collective level, unchecked hope becomes delusion and grift, creating a shadow from those who do not believe in the naive vision of hope and who will do anything it takes to improve their own life.
1 I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that software people don't care about hardware, but it is quite harmful that many of those people posture themselves as "technology" experts, when really they are only knowledgeable in software, and not the harsh realities of finite resources and industrial processes.
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2025-10-09