 I'm going to talk about building a home on the internet, like becoming someone who just lives their entire life through distributed technologies, and Facebook, and Guild Wars, and all of my friends are on my Steam friends list, all of them, because it's just how I live my life, right? And how I go about doing that, and how maybe you can do it better, too. Adventure out into the brave new world of social networks. You find the unexplored land of Tumblr hashtags, cool friends, and Reddit forums. You've never newly even existed. So yeah, if you want to be someone who engages more on the internet, and wants to broaden your horizons and stuff, most people know about social networks. They know about Facebook, Twitter, maybe Tumblr. But from there, there's a lot more you can really do with it. I know a lot of people who exist primarily on meta forums, like websites that hold a bunch of different separate forums, like Reddit and I guess 4chan. I think those are the easiest ones to get engaged with, if you really, really care about a specific topic. Like if you really care about some specific subset of stuff, like if you really care about material science, I'm pretty sure you can have your entire social circle be based off of the 10 people that frequent the material science thing on Reddit, and you all talk about the cool stuff you've done, and no one else in the entire universe knows what you're talking about. But you're in there talking with certain engineers, because that's the only place on the internet that you can find your place. Or another strange thing for me is that I know people who can subsist entirely off of chat rooms. I know people who just have an IRC account, and that's their only social networking. And I'm like, how do you? But they have like 30 IRC accounts, and they're constantly hanging out with everyone, and they're having all these good conversations primarily and that's how they exist. That's almost the entirety of their social life through IRC networks, which probably weren't created for the sake of having someone base their social network off of them. And I think that's really cool that at least from my point of view, there's this wealth of websites that you can use to create a social infrastructure off of, and to find people who share interest with you. Right, so now I'm gonna talk about interests. And the very obvious joke here is that if I'm on internet, no one can know that I'm actually a cat, except for the people on my cat forum where I always talk about being cats all the time. That's one good thing about the internet is that people talk about how on the internet, like you can find anyone who holds your specific fetish or whatever. Like okay, yeah, but it can spread so many things like I talked about the material science or like trans stuff or queer stuff or your specific issues as someone who came from a conservative state and is now moving into a blue state. I'm pretty sure you could find that, right? And you can find people who share that specific subset of your identity and who really wanna engage with that part of your identity. I specifically get a lot out of the trans Facebook and Tumblr groups because when I was first coming out, my Facebook people were like my friends that I knew from meat space and college and my family and stuff, right? And then I jumped into this trans group and all of a sudden trans stuff became majority of my life because there was just a lot of work and trans people that I'd known for 30 seconds became, they knew more about the basics of my identity than people I'd known for like 20 years, right? And I think the internet enables you to have, like to switch between these contexts and have these different identities. Like you can have like five, six different identities if you wanted, right? Like I know for sure there are at least as this like gender queer people who like, they wanna be male in this context and female in this context. And there's nothing that like internet completely enables that, right? How do you have all of these different, diverse and amazing identities in these different contexts? Another thing that happens in the internet if you're like building your networks and your social stuff, politics plays out on internet in basically different ways than it does in real life, right? Like if you've been on Twitter or Tumblr for any period of time or Facebook for any period of time, you've probably heard the phrase in certain network here, drama. Like I'm very well acquainted with Twitter drama. Like I'm building a social network. So I like, I look at Twitter drama and I'm like, how could I address this specific issue from a technical point of view and like from a sociological point of view because the way that we interact with pump, like politics, drama and riffs on social networks and online is very basically different from the way we do it in real life. My first example is like, if you're on Twitter and you're complaining to your best friend about something and you're not DMing them, like everyone who's mutual with you can see it. There's no, there's kind of this illusion of space and privacy and a lot of these networks that you really don't have. People often see a lot of things, a lot of dramatic things that they really shouldn't. People know more things about their, the negative politics of the people around them on social networks than they would in real life. Like I can't scan the room and find the MRA right now, right? But like if I went to Twitter search for you all, I'm pretty sure I could do it in like five seconds, right? And it, I just think that the way social networks are created and the way we interact with the internet has created this like false, this false like dramatic tension inside all of our social networks that we have to work actively against. Like try to be more empathetic of the way that, the way that we structure our social networks online is like creating more dramatic situations than we would like. And another thing about that is someone mentioned Gamergate earlier, which is good. So I don't have to do much of a lead up into that, but like Gamergate in large part exists on 4chanted, but also in large part exists on Twitter now. And it's almost like, that's almost like having a neo-nazi working in your building. They're just right there. They just have to like turn around the corner and then up there in your mentions and like this, like neo-nazi image, all of your mentions because they're just right there, right? This doesn't happen in real life. Like when you have people with that huge rift of politics there's usually a geographical difference between those two sets of people, right? Like I'm most likely not gonna find neo-nazi unless I go to Germany, right? But like if I'm on Twitter, they're right there, right? And in the specific case of communities that have like clearly diametrically opposed views, like feminists versus anti-feminists, the way that you find people in those tags and the way that people search for those tags, it's more like having a brother or a sister or a roommate who has that view all the time. Like if you have someone who has a diametrically opposed view on the internet and you talk about it a lot, you're gonna run into them as opposed to like in real life, if you did democratic activism and stuff, you aren't as likely to run into Republicans by virtue of doing democratic activism. You're likely to run into Democrats because that's who you're targeting, right? On the internet that sort of gets inverted because of the way that we search for things, right? So that's something that they'll be aware of like internet dramatically increases all of these different political effects. Another problem with building your networks online is the way that time influences like the social interactions we have with each other, relative to how they influence each other in real life. Like, so for example, if it's like 3 a.m. and I'm sad posting, I do all my sad posting at 3 a.m. I very much recommend it. But like, if I was like just being depressed or like crying at 3 a.m. in my house, which is the equivalent of my 3 a.m. sad post on Twitter.com, it's like only people in my house hear it, but like if it's 3 a.m. for me, it's 6 a.m. in New York and you might be waking up for when you, like my beats are waking up and you have like my sad posts on your dashboard when you're trying to get ready for work. And this, or like I said it three hours ago and it's still the only thing on your timeline if there's no one says anything at 5 a.m., right? And like it just creates this inappropriate situation where like I'm not gonna talk about, I'm not gonna like come to work or I'm not gonna be talking dramatically about like how my cat just died on a commute at 6 a.m. on a train. Like I try to be more appropriate than that, but like if I'm on Twitter, it's 3 a.m. for me, it's perfect time to talk about how my cat died, but like you're trying to go to work, right? And so when you're on social networks and stuff, you have to be really extra aware of like people's subjective experiences of time, how far it is between you seeing something and like them posting it. And because like it really dramatically changes the appropriateness of your potential response. Another specific quirky thing with periods of time is a lot of people like I'm just a specific advice. A lot of people really don't like it if you favor a selfie from six months ago. Just unless you're like your best friend or you're like flirting with them or something, like just don't do it, right? And I'll tell you civically, trans people really don't like it if you do that. Just don't do it. But this is just like a general thing, right? Like if I'm walking down the street and I see someone on the street, I'm not gonna see them as they were a year ago. Like that's not how time works. But like if I'm on Twitter, them right now is like it's almost as accessible as them from a year ago, right? Like it's just like a few swipes over. But that's not how they experience it subjectively, right? And so you as someone who would potentially want to interact with the internet, you have to be aware of like that extreme difference between like at least a specific aspect of physical presentation, how someone's opinion on how you would comment on it changes dramatically based on time. And the last thing that's really specific I don't want to say about time-based effects on social networks is that like, a lot of people like, a lot of people will like, like I delete my tweets after three months right now because I don't feel like dealing with me from three months ago, right? Like if you come up to me and you were like, Glenn, you said something really racist six months ago and be like, I don't care. Me three months ago was like really drunk. The whole like, I don't care, right? But I don't know if it's like internet subculture just because it's how we work when we have access to so much information. But I feel like I'm in a space right now, especially in social justice space where I see a lot of people talking about something that someone said three years ago that's like mildly oppressive, but I don't really care because it was three years ago, right? Or something that just decays by virtue of the fact that it's something that doesn't matter more as time passes, right? You have to be aware that people can change. A lot of these oppressive forces don't exactly have the same force as they would over time. I think misogyny is probably an exception to that. Like since misogyny is one of the more ridiculous culture forces, since women are half of the population, yet people still manage to be misogynists. I think that's one of the forces that people tend to stay misogynists as opposed to the other forces where someone is transphobic, but then they see a trans person first time ever, right? So if someone was transphobic six years ago, I don't care. But as your subjective experience on internet, it might be your first time hearing it and it's not like you're hearing it as I'm saying, like yeah, when I was a little kid and I was in my early 20s, I was really bad at X, Y, and Z ways. You just see it quoted or you see it outside of the context of its age, right? And so you have to really, really be, especially with people in their early 20s like me, be aware of like how like stacking gears onto a message or like someone's presentation can dramatically change it. And again, like this is something you only see online. Like I'm not gonna, I don't see anyone going to a conference and giving a conference talk of like five years ago, I was this, this, this, and this. That's usually not relevant, but on internet, it suddenly becomes relevant because that's how the internet works. And my last major point is, I think all of my other points were, except for the first one, were about like here are things you shouldn't do. Here are common part falls that happen when you're trying to build yourself on internet. On the opposite side, I wanna talk about how you make yourself vulnerable, how you bring people in more on a place where like, especially like Twitter where everything is intrinsically public. It just feels like you have inherent distance from everyone that you don't have in real life. So this specifically is just a picture from Wild Star of me sitting on a little mat being really zen. It's a game about like shooting like bunches of rats with like really sharp discs. But I'm like, I'm chill. I'm like sitting on my little mat. I'm like, look like I'm meditating or something. I'm not about to like go slaughter like a hundred million rats, right? And like I could be having conversations with my friend who's sitting over there and we're just talking about something chill that happened in our lives. And like after this, we're probably gonna do something incredibly violent. But like if you, you can impress some calmness upon situations or environments or networks that aren't, that don't inherently have it. Like a good example of this is just Twitter private accounts, right? Like I don't, I don't like try it sometime, right? Like you usually have a thousand followers. Say something inherently personal on a public account. Switch your account to private and just think about how much more personal that statement becomes, right? You can do this with like gaming groups or whatever. You create a private gaming group, invite three or four of your friends. And all of a sudden it's a much more personal experience than these random people that you just met on like pick up games and then it would be gone in five seconds, right? Like you have it. I think that a lot of internet tools aren't inherently created to great private, small, emotional, vulnerable spaces. But when you do, you can create like the exact same type of relationships that you would have otherwise. Like me and my fiance, we decided that we were gonna get engaged almost before we even first met, right? And it was primarily through stuff like we talked to each other on private accounts a lot and we would like hang out in Guild Wars. We would talk about our day while we were like slaughtering some Mason Towers and it was cute. And it was good. And these are like the sort of things you can create on internet and these are kind of my rules on how you create them.