Intimacy does not scale (2021)
Great post. I wouldn&#x27;t be so defeatist about technological solutions though. I can think of a few technologies that we already have which have allowed intimate, important and meaningful discussions to scale (imperfectly) in our past.<p>1. Parliamentary proceducers. This is a tool that allows debate to scale up to a few hundred&#x2F;thousand people. It provides rules for how topics can be chosen for discussion, altered, debated and how to reach consensus during a discussion. It&#x27;s a social technology that is not easy to apply, not obvious, but used by dozens of countries and I&#x27;ve no clue how many large organizations.<p>2. The judicial and academic systems. Again, not flawless, but these ones show that we can have asynchronous debates over long periods of time where people reference and use old cases and studies.<p>There may be other mechanisms which humans have used to structure conversation, facilitate debate and allow for important expression. All of these require training and only work when participants agree to certain rules. To my knowledge none of these apply to online media. But, who knows, maybe it will take a few hundred years for us to discover some social technology that does. The examples I bring were not obvious to society and took similar timescales to develop.