Minimum Viable Networks

Transmission 004

Let’s talk about the oncoming shatter belt of virtual overworlds.

We’ve discussed overworlds before. They are a part of my growing conviction that the future of human-digital systems is not going to look like Ready Player One. Less Metaverse, more Medieval. For at least some significant part of society, digital tools will be crafted into bespoke invisible layers of connection and collaboration that augment their real lives, rather than exist as a replacement for or escape from them.

But what’s a shatter belt? Well, if my memory of Geography 200 is still good,¹ these are zones of friction or conflict which result from (and are in some measure also caused by) large sections of the map carved up into tiny spheres of influence. Look at an ethnic map of the Balkans for an instant visual reference. Shatter belts represent the layers of real community present beneath the apparent uniculture depicted by national borders. They are miniature overworlds, existing side by side, transcending the visual boundaries of the world.

Ok, now we’re switching to History Mode.

As has been documented by many, many people (most recently and most persuasively

Thomas J Bevan

in an excellent essay linked below), the Social Media Monopoly Era of the Internet seems to be drawing to a close. It seems like a good time to take a step back, draw a few conclusions, sketch out some hasty and probably-overexaggerated historical comparisons, and plot a rough map of our next steps.

The End of the Extremely Online Era

If this masterful essay is correct (and I feel increasingly confident that it is), then the Public Square Era is over. I would argue, in fact, that it has been over for some time, assuming it ever truly existed. This has generated oceans of digital ink, with hand-wringing calls for a return to the Walter Cronkite Tells America What Happened Era of Media. But here’s the main issue I have with this view of history: it’s incomplete, at best.

You see, the television news era was itself a brief and strange break from what has happened throughout most of human history. Proliferations of media outlets has been the rule since ole’ Marty L fired up a press and started getting saucy in the general direction of His Holiness. And before that, to be honest. The TV era papered over a roiling sea of yellow journalism, local newspapers, and warring magazines competing for coffee table space. The human community has always been fractured into small localized entities that think Very Differently from each other. We aren’t going back to National Consensus because that never even existed, including during the supposed Time of National Consensus.²

I think that Too Big To Fail has become demonstrably Too Large to Succeed over the past few years. The very hubristic pursuit of growth, uncapped and unmetered, that caused the explosion of the social media networks in the first place is beginning to dynamite them internally. Turns out that most people don’t want to be caught in a dung tornado of competing and bizarrely illogical demi-worldviews right next to their attempts to say GM to the Frens. Trying to cram a third of humanity onto a single messaging network isn’t sustainable. This whole Eternal Thanksgiving Dinner Table where we’re forced into close contact with each other forever has got to stop. History could have told us that. We would have been far better served by a reinvention of the Salon Era, or the Newspaper and Magazine Ecosystem, or the Pulp Explosion, or any number of other media models.

Current fearmongering over Online Radicalization and insistence that we all need to receive the same set of sacramental Facts from sanctioned infopriests is actually making things worse. Misplacing trust from the local editor to the distant conglomerate all but guarantees that rhetoric and argument increases in viciousness, as we are forced into daily contact with people we never knew existed in the past. A world in which myriad tiny information ecosystems flourish, catering to vastly diverse viewpoints and kept in check by strong bonds of cultural trust and social credit, isn’t some sort of futurist utopia.

It’s actually how this whole thing has historically worked, with brief exceptions.

What I’m arguing for is Minimum Viable Networks. If your idea for a new media outlet or social layer or cultural bloc can only work with asymptotically explosive growth, it will not work in the new environment.³ By building for everyone you optimize for no one. By treating a robust and active like-minded audience of two hundred or even ten thousand like a failure, you over-index your landscape into a broken monoculture. Forcing every endeavor to ignore the Lottery Winner’s Fallacy and hew to an exponential growth curve is (part of) how we got into this mess.

Instead, I’m proposing that both creators and consumers of media begin to narrow their bandwidth intentionally. You need to stop thinking “How can I become the next viral creator/runaway success entrepreneur” and start thinking “How small can my endeavor be and still meet my criterion of success.” You need to be Sustainability Maxxing. Value the fifteen people who can honestly say “His work changed my life” over the fifteen thousand who can recall your name if they think hard enough.

The world is going to get smaller.

I’m going to spare you the inevitable rhapsodizing about how wonderful this platform is for exactly this purpose.⁴ There are other points of light in the chaos as well. You want a prediction? The winners of the next stage in the media economy will be flexible operating systems for small-scale production. Growth at all costs is out, sustainability is in. Pipelines are out, cottage industries are in. There is a groundswell of miniature press newspapers, underground zines, limited-run tapes, and ultra-niche publishers coming. The only way to fail in the new era is fruitlessly trying to copy the look, feel, and failed strategies of the past one.

What will you build?

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I’ll see you in the Future.

1. One of the top 5 courses I ever took in undergrad, thanks Capt. Geo.

2. As always, do yourself a favor and read primary sources. They are typically an incredibly comforting litany of complaint against How Divided Our Times Are. As King Solomon states, business as usual under the flaming orb.

3. Arguably, it never worked to begin with. If you want more examples outside of Media, just examine the boom and bust of the Attractional Church movement.

4. Writing about Substack On Substack is a genre that I have tried and failed to avoid.