When the internet was young, one of its most exciting aspects was that it helped people connect with like-minded individuals, developing communities of niche interests that drab suburbia and mass culture could not support. Today, we find ourselves facing the opposite problem.
On the positive side, the internet has allowed people to find their own tribe. But that comes at a cost: It is actively forcing us toward ever further extremes, removing us from the elements of mass culture, identity, and decision-making that we need to function as a nation.
Given our failure to come together to deal with Covid-19, and the enormous social tension and division surrounding the 2020 election, it is time to start critically examining how the Internet is pushing us away from each other and asking what we can do to bring back some of the better aspects of collective identity, purpose, and politics.
The right path forward is not easy to figure out. Historical attempts to block or limit technology have consistently occurred during some of the worst periods in human history. There is no question, however, that we need to quickly figure out how to adapt to a world that is shockingly different from the one we have occupied until this point.
The Problem of Only Needing 1,000 True Fans to Be ‘Successful’
There’s an idea floating around the internet that in the digital age you only need 1,000 people who believe in you or want what you are selling to make a good living. You don’t need to be famous—you just need a small number of “true fans.”
People particularly like to talk about this in the context of platforms like OnlyFans, Patreon, Etsy, and Substack. If a small community really loves what you do, and is willing to pay you $5 to $10 a month, you can easily be a self-sufficient “creator” making $50,000 to $100,000 a year and live independently.
On an individual level, this is an extremely attractive and seemingly attainable model for many people.
The problem, of course, is finding those true fans and then providing enough content to them to be successful, even as thousands (or millions) of people are trying to do exactly the same thing.
What ends up happening is that people are forced to specialize in ever-narrower niches to get fans—and then pursue further and further extremes to keep those fans.
In the early days, people were excited to use the internet to connect around niche interests like Warhammer, or knitting, or yo-yos. Those communities, turned global, are now enormous and competitive. Being the best knitter is both big business and unattainable for most. Instead, what becomes attainable is finding a subcommunity, such as Knitting Kittens in Pink or Sweaters on Tuesdays—and establishing a brand in a narrow slice of the world.
You can see this pattern happening in politics and political commentary, in the porn industry and in the anime world.
In search of true fans, people go to increasing extremes, which are unappealing to the vast majority of people but engage a tiny segment of the global population deeply.
Is this ever more fragmented world of cultures bad? That is up for debate, but it does mean that a group of people in a neighborhood or city or state, who used to broadly share interests or at least a basic social vocabulary, are fractured into smaller and smaller tribes that have less and less in common.
The Challenge to Personal Purpose and Place
The 1,000-fan microcommunity problem isn’t just a matter for the creator economy and the types of media and entertainment we like to consume. It affects everyone as they search for purpose in the modern frictionless world.
In the pre-internet era, someone might have taken pride from being the best basketball player in their local community or at their local park. Now, with YouTube and instant access to the whole world of amateur basketball players, it becomes apparent to that person and to those around them just how decidedly mediocre they really are.
The same thing goes for being a great baker, accountant, or church preacher. Putting your work in the context of the global environment seriously erodes any respect you may gain locally for a skill or talent.
Having access to the best of everything in the world is amazing. But it means that traditional mainstream slices of purpose or community meaning are lost—and that sends people searching for new extremes and new deep communities where they can be known and validated.
The internet, in this sense, doesn’t just let us be ourselves and explore our passions. It actively challenges how people think of individual purpose and place as communities morph. For most people, it challenges elements of their human dignity and sense of belonging.
It’s OK If Nearly Everyone Hates You and Almost No One Needs You
Changes in culture, even broad shifts in sense of purpose and place, all seem like the types of challenges that human beings can evolve to match. We are highly adaptable and social creatures.
It may be harder for people to adapt to the movement toward more extreme microcommunities. One of the key tactics is usually to release yourself from the opinions and viewpoints of almost everyone else.
Think of this in terms of politics. In a world where you have to broadly appeal to all your constituents in a diverse community, there is a lot of pressure to adhere to norms (not lie, for example) and to have reasonably moderate policies.
However, in a world where you just need a few people to deeply love you, and you don’t care at all what everyone else thinks of you, you can lie, trash social and institutional norms, and so forth.
In a more traditional society—where you would rely upon your neighbors—this tendency toward extremes might have had a natural backstop. The reality of today’s open and free market, however, is that you can still maintain access to goods and services and be treated fairly even if most people beyond your true fans hate you.
On its best days, capitalism means that everyone can buy the things they need regardless of what the community around them thinks of them and their social capital. Aspirationally, our legal system treats everyone the same way, so long as they haven’t broken explicit written rules.
These rules-based binary frameworks enable freedom, which we value. But they also clearly detether people from reliance on local and diverse communities, which detaches them from caring about their broad-based social capital or about getting along with those around them.
This pattern helps explain much of what we see around us, like when we see politicians lie on television and erode the truth. It turns out that in the “small base of loyal true fans” internet model of the world, broad popularity is almost incompatible with the extremes you need to embrace to keep your following.
The Path Forward
Anyone old enough to have had even a glimmer of mall-driven mass society or small town politics understands how deeply amazing, freeing, and important the internet really is. You don’t want to go back.
But there is a burning question on how to navigate the future and how to hold large communities together in a world whose economic and social rationality drives toward ever greater specification and subdivision without paying much attention to the collateral damage.
In my mind, it isn’t going to be a technological shift that takes us forward, nor will it be any sort of legal shift. It is going to have to be cultural.
Somehow, we are going to have to find memes, people, ideas, and projects we can rally behind. And we have to figure out how to reward and encourage people for being part of big communities, rather than seeking out their own niche community.
The incentives all naturally align in the opposite direction, but perhaps figuring this out is the great philosophical challenge of our era.