On software for communities

2007-2013 was the golden age of apps. I had been on the internet for a decade but was reluctant or resistant to the new social media apps. So I was a late comer but still early enough to catch some of the fading golden light that reflected off the floating orb filled with VC funding and optimistic hubris floating above the Bay Area. Facebook was first to keep in touch with the friends that I just put the country between. Then Twitter from my flip phone. I was driving back across the country and could text status updates as we travelled. It all was incredible. Excitement is hard to separate. It was a thrilling time of my life, personally. I was bringing energy to the table, but it seemed a drop to what was happening in the bay. It feels silly now, to have been caught up in this sort of naive wave. To have thought that connecting people via apps in our pocket, was to usher in an utopia. The share economy was a way for us to collaborate, to push against the inefficiencies of capitalism, of cars parked unused for 99% of their lifetime, to fill homes unhoused. The naive part was to expect a utopia. It was wise to expect change. But in that moment of time and place, running in circles with others who expected a democratizing wave of information. The ripples of our own youthful beginnings expanding into every community. The epiphanic rush of our first multiplayer doom match, our first online chats. Our hands connected to all knowledge, our minds becoming a node in the network of knowledge, blinking on and jacking into the amphetamine lightning of constant, continuous knowledge. A personal moment to be Galileo or Leeuwenhoek, through the looking glass, and instantly seeing the entire world expand. For a moment, to be the sole keeper of the evidence that the world is bigger and more connected than we could ever imagine. As still as plants we sat in basements in summers Our hands and eyes s the roots of plants, stationary but absorbing the water of knowledge.