On monetizing friends

Alastair Sim in A Christmas Carol after he has become a changed man.

Inc Magazine had this piece up the other day, predicting Bluesky's demise.

Now, of course, the platform may or may not last. The author—who himself had a social media platform in the days before the Twitter/Facebook hegemony—says that the basic flaw in Bluesky, if it's going to be a going concern, is that you can't monetize friendship. Social media, as it exists, is not a viable business model, because a) Friendship is not a viable business model, and b) Social media is not friendship. You have to choose one or the other.

I cut my teeth on bulletin board systems and IRC. I met my wife on IRC when I was a moderator in a sex chat channel—Oh, behave!—and she came in to troll us. I kicked her out. Then she messaged me. And, well, almost thirty years later here we are. Back then, making friends was the entire purpose of BBS's and IRC. None of it was monetized. (Sure, you paid a monthly fee for a BBS, but where are they now?) It's like with loaning money to a friend: do so in the expectation that you will never get repaid, and be glad that you were able to help someone you love.

Trevor and I, in a very desultory manner, tried to monetize this blog. We have failed spectacularly. Sure, we did the occasional fundraiser. ("We do this for the love of the community, but bourbon and edibles aren't cheap!")

We were coming from the previous blog, whose owner fundraised regularly. We thought, hey, we can do that on our own blog, rather than giving him the content for free. So here we came.

The fact of the matter, though, is that that was a mistake. You can have a community, or you can have a money-generating endeavor. You can't, in the end, have both.

The things which make a community strong cannot be listed on a financial ledger. The things which elevate human beings cannot be reduced to mere economic statistics.

This past Tuesday, for my monthly film club, I screened the Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol. Ebenezer Scrooge's first employer, Mr. Fezziwig, informed Mr. Jorkin, who was offering to buy him out and consolidate his hold on the market, that having a business was more than making money. It was to preserve the things that mattered. Money wasn't the reason for a man's existence. 

We live in a culture where a business which brings in steady revenue and profit is seen as a failure. Squeezing out more and more blood from a stone is the only measure of success. Creating a business which is self-sustaining and which pays its workers living wages is seen as unprofitable. Unrestrained growth is the goal. Of course, in biology, unrestrained growth is known by a word: cancer.

When I first began this blog, I was thinking of ways to increase traffic. I ran ideas by a trusted confidante: our own BB. And she very astutely asked me: "Do you want the hassle of people who don't understand this place?" I've had to ban more than a few people who, ultimately, didn't understand the purpose of this community. At the time I felt extreme guilt. Now, I realize that I had to do that to preserve this community's health.

We are in a period of decadence. There's no other way to state it. After the Second World War, the United States and the West became the most powerful political and economic entities world history had ever seen. And what that led to was to laziness. It led to grievance. It led to selfishness. The 1960s and 1970s saw an explosion of social movements. And the reaction set in almost immediately. The "malefactors of great wealth" saw their perches threatened. So they used the tried-and-true methods of all autocrats: divide and conquer. "Those people, with the long hair, and the weird lifestyles, and the pronouns, and strange names and dark skin, those are the ones who are making thing worse for you. Not us, stealing your pensions, shipping your jobs overseas, cutting and cutting the benefits for which you worked." And because things had been so good for so long, and now they, seemingly inexplicably, weren't, that propaganda has found fertile ground. And we are where we are now.

Not everything in this life has to submit to accountancy. Not everything has to have and economic purpose. This is why in the spring and summer I sent all donations you gave us to electing Democrats. And it's why, after the Disaster, I took down the donation link. We were in a different world. 

We have a choice. We can choose community. Or we can choose lucre. As we are seeing, the two are antithetical. It's why I couldn't make money from friends. And I consider all of you friends. You whom I've never met in real life. You who exist only as a series of ones and zeroes. Because community is where you make it. Community is what you make of it.

Will Bluesky fold? Will we? I don't know. But it's time to think of a new paradigm, one to replace this one in which we live, which has led us to where we are. Like Scrooge, we must learn to honor Christmas in our hearts every day. Not the religious holiday. But the idea that we are more than what we can contribute to the exchequer. That we are all human beings, all equal before the universe, and not to be exploited for the benefit of people who are no better than we are.