I recently watched the show Halt and Catch Fire. Fantastic, would recommend. I took a lot away from it, namely the fact that I need to redefine how I think of innovation and my position in tech (or lack thereof). I'm just gonna ramble and it won't make much sense unless you've watched the show so go watch the show. Also SPOILER ALERT. You've been warned.
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You have to dream the impossible, or discover something new and take advantage and make something out of it. Mutiny and Community built on Cameron's method of massively increasing the data transfer rate over telephone lines. Joe's vision of twice the speed half the price pushes everyone to find innovative solutions to complex problems in service of the desired result. They succeed in what they're trying to do, but the business is where they falter. Mutiny survived for as long as it did because it had heart, and pushing out Cameron took the heart away and commodifying the platform for the sake of transaction made the place more of a market than a 3rd place.
It begs the question, what am I doing? I've always wanted to create and maintain a sort of digital 3rd place, and seeing as how that is desperately lacking for children, I would want to make something to accommodate them. When I was a kid we had Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel, Neopets, and a thousand other platforms just like them. Now, it doesn't seem like there's anywhere for the young to congregate. Private Minecraft servers are great, but they don't open you up to new people or broader socialisation. I suppose the closest thing would be Discord? But that steers into the trend of social media in general sucking up every aspect of life it possibly can.
I've worked on a project for a while now, I tend to call it 'Social Club', but it's gone by a few names and currently sites on https://Counterphase.Space, but that was sort of my beginnings of an attempt to build a digital 3rd space. Obviously inspired by Club Penguin, and essentially following the vibe of Mutiny in HaCF, I want this to be a set of parallel servers running an open social island filled with fun mechanics and minigames and stuff. Right now you can walk around and chat and that's about it, but I have big ideas and I intend to see it through.
I do wonder though, what is the thing that leads to the thing? In HaCF it was computers leading to the internet. But what comes after a digital 3rd space? What follows a social hub? What about all the other projects I have in the pipeline? What follows them? What are the implications of the technology I'm building? Ever on the premise of a safer environment for everyone, data sovereignty where possible, and open access to expand, adjust, and build.
It's all quite difficult when you consider the impact of AI, and the time and scale of digital projects worldwide. It feels like everything has either been built or is a heartbeat away and yet I find the internet has lost its heart. Maybe that's where I need to focus my energy, at least when it comes to personal projects like Social Club. Not necessarily creating something new, but renewing an old idea for the modern world to solve evolved problems. It's an interesting problem...
How do we innovate on something that feels both complete and utterly lost?