The internet is flat.

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2021-06-08 19:00:06

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There’s a line that Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian used to repeat back in the halcyon days of 2012. It went something like: ‘The world isn’t flat — but the world wide web is.’

Ohanian meant that the internet was an engine of opportunity — that it democratized industries and put people on a more even footing. You could start a business or a publication with a few clicks, and then immediately put it in front of millions of eyeballs! This, of course, was an overly utopian view (the internet does democratize opportunity — but also entrenches many power structures). Reality, as always, is far more complicated than a catch phrase.

I’ve been thinking about a different internet flattening, namely the way that social platforms collapse time and space and context into one big pancake of conflict. I wrote a bit about this phenomenon in my inaugural post for this newsletter. It’s called context collapse, which is when a piece of information intended for one audience finds its way to another — usually an uncharitable one — which then reads said information in the worst possible faith. (For that piece, I spoke to Elle Hunt, a journalist whose movie opinion tweet exploded into a culture war argument as result of this audience switching.)