Intimacy does not scale (2021)
I made a similar observation some time ago, so let me add this: human interactions in general don&#x27;t scale. Social media easily turns completely normal human interactions into something perverse.<p>Eg, say you&#x27;ve just exited to the cinema and vent to your friend that this movie sucked. What were they thinking? Who had the brilliant idea to change directors mid trilogy? There&#x27;s a bit of venting, but quickly things settle down. There&#x27;s a bit of bonding over the shared experience. Nobody is hurt, you&#x27;re just having a private talk with your friend.<p>Take that to Twitter, use the same words, and now the same thing is an addition to the torrent of hate aimed at the movie&#x27;s director. You might have meant to reach your 10 followers, but search, recommendations, hashtags, retweets, etc can easily pull your statement out of its intended context.<p>Then there&#x27;s what it must be like to end up on the other side of that. This happens organically, people aren&#x27;t organizing around it for the most part. So the torrent of hate can regain its strength at random, wherever some person posts about it 3 years later, it makes #2 in some countdown on Youtube, comes up on the top of AskReddit, etc. In real life most things settle down, the Internet allows rehashing old stuff effectively forever.<p>And I think human interaction breaks at those scales. A single person can&#x27;t meaningfully interact with a million random people which mostly spontaneously decided to flood you with messages. You can ask a prominent one or two to leave you alone, but more can show up at any time.