OK, here's a thread that will annoy everyone. What do worker co-ops and pre-social-media Internet social spaces have in common?

tl/dr People find it convenient to blame their destruction on external rather than internal factors @ceesa_ma

I'll start with the worker co-ops. Why doesn't everyone work in a worker co-op? Enthusiasts for them will say that workers have more control, they get to keep more of the value of their work since they don't have a boss or owner, etc

But they do have to deal with other workers

I'll leave aside for now the concept of "self-exploitation", which basically means that if a worker co-op is embedded in a capitalist society then in order to survive workers have to push themselves to work just as hard as a boss would

What I mean is something a bit different, though it's certainly aggravated by self-exploitation. Most people in US society are jerks. Maybe this is particular to or aggravated by our culture, but in a worker co-op you have to continually deal with and negotiate with jerks

People really don't like this and find it exhausting, especially since a little bit of self-knowledge will usually tell them that they are being jerks as well.

I think that a whole lot of the acceptance of workplace hierarchy is so everyone can have someone distant to blame

This was, by the way, highly visible in Occupy and seems to be a general feature of horizontalist movements. Day 1: "I'm so inspired, I have an equal voice!" Day 2: "If someone doesn't do something to shut Fred up I'm out of here"

The same exact thing occurs on the Internet and is a large part of the shift from pre-social-media social spaces to the huge corporate entities that we know and detest. It is better to detest a large corporate entity that you will never interact with in a meaningful way

Yes, social media companies are run by horrible billionaires, yes Twitter is run by people who seem to favor Nazis. People who complain about Twitter bans can at least console themselves that they were banned by an overworked faceless technician somewhere who didn't care

Because what people don't remember about the pre-social-media spaces is that:
a) they had all the same problems as we do now -- death threats, doxxing, mobbing, etc.
b) doing anything about that meant personal politics with some person rather than even an illusion of neutrality

That illusion of neutrality is an illusion, but it's a powerful one. People want it so badly that they are willing to take some kind of Hobbesian solution.

And that's a large reason why corporate social media took over. Yes natural monopoly, yes corporate investment too

Until people are willing to acknowledge this I don't see any real chance of building something else that a community will actually want to use

/end