yearning for a digital community

I find myself once again yearning for a digital community. I believe the future of social media (for me) is some kind of invite-only group chat where the conversation flows like a river. It might live in Discord, Slack or even IRC, I don’t care¹. Physical community is important but as a millennial I need text-based friendships too.

On Friday, I got a message from kerey on WhatsApp saying that “there is a need for a non-normie consortium”. It triggered a long conversation about the normie/non-normie dichotomy and whether this type of distinction is elitist or not. I collected my thoughts on this in Against the Non-Normie.

This type of interactions is at the heart of my ideal community. An off-hand remark starts a discussion where we argue and develop the idea and in the end this turns into some kind of writing. Then this writing gets responses from other members in the community in a variety of forms. A community that perpetually creates discourse for discourse’s sake.

This is not something that I might just land on. This type of community requires someone to build it from the ground up. “Somebody has to, and no one else will.”

Speaking of Against the Non-Normie, I feel a bit uncomfortable about that piece. I believe what I said there but I feel uneasy because of the process I wrote it with. During our conversation, kerey raised the similarity between non-normies and queer community. Since gender studies and queer theory are not my forte, I asked Gemini to make the connection:

So I used AI. This might be an acceptable use of AI but I also copied two sentences from its output:

• “The ’normal’ (heteronormative) subject only exists because it has successfully ‘cast out’ (abjected) anything that threatens its boundaries.”
• “Reclaiming ‘Queer’ is an act of strategic essentialism; it’s taking the site of your own exclusion and turning it into a fortress for survival.”

These are not things I couldn’t write myself but they were just sitting there for me to copy them. But the fact that I copied them verbatim into my post makes me feel ashamed. I don’t believe this stains the whole post and makes it slop though. Maybe I think too black-and-white about the AI problem. This will be a problem I will need to navigate in the near future.