i think every internet subculture has an ideological “conversion funnel” that is known to its ingroup and illegible to outsiders

the funnel is basically an implicit map of “life stages” that a group’s members go through as they make their way through the metaverse

there are as many versions of internet history as there are subcultures. each narrative exists only as tacit knowledge that’s distributed across a hivemind

there’s no one historical timeline — only a multiverse of meme montages that tell the story of a particular group https://twitter.com/aaronzlewis/status/1252717360148078593

oftentimes the algorithm knows better than you which group you’re “looking for”

matchmaker, matchmaker make me a match

there exists something like memetic gravity, which pulls new ppl into orbit around larger accounts

the recommendation algo is the riverbed, users are the water

like all chaotic systems, the platform is extremely sensitive to initial conditions (i.e. the psyche of the new user)

the elders of an internet subculture can pretty easily identify which memetic “life stage” someone’s in by noticing what they read, share, talk about, etc.

“seeing like an account with 30k followers” as the new “seeing like a state”

it’s difficult to emerge from your embeddedness in the hivemind, although some have tried

there’s an observer effect at play with any effort to map the system. if you hold a mirror up to the network, you inevitably end up changing its shape https://twitter.com/menandersoter/status/1234650368182771717

sometimes you can sense the current pushing you this way or that. other times you’re totally in the dark. you end up in a neighborhood w/o remembering how you got there

there aren’t many wayfinding signs or guides to be found; twitter has the collective memory of a goldfish https://twitter.com/brandyljensen/status/1263850501705170945

when i see people on here who were born in like 2004, i wonder what ropes we can throw them, what breadcrumbs we’re leaving behind, how we can help them get up to speed on the geography of the “space”

there‘s no canon, no guide to where we’ve been. only DIY black hole browsing

as the line between “internet culture” and “Culture” gets increasingly blurry, the history of internet-native ideologies becomes more and more relevant to the broader public discourse, or what’s left of it

but it’s hard to create shared futures without collective memory