It's crazy, Twitter and its peers are now the largest public space and forum in all of history, with no precedent coming remotely close, and we're all in unchar

It's crazy, Twitter and its peers are now the largest public space and forum in all of history, with no precedent coming remotely close, and we're all in uncharted territory and everyone is struggling, either to get this right, or to gain power and influence through it. To make things worse, the mode of communication, too has completely changed – never before has there been a medium with that reach, such low barriers of entry and such short cycle times, it's completely novel. It's fascinating and scary and very exciting to be a small part of it, really. But as Twitter has become an occasional stage for highest-level international politics, stakes have become much, much higher – it's no longer a relatively niche platform on a medium most people may have heard of on TV, with mostly kinda sorta nerdy, strongly self-selected participants and little to no actual reach and consequence to what happens there. So I get the urge to demand something be done about the ... unintended side effects, especially from people who've been thrust into this new world over the last few years and must find this even more disorienting. Will the current knee-jerk reactions by the platforms work out well? I strongly doubt it. Yet all the the free-for-all, hands-completely-off approach has achieved is to hand vastly outsize influence to those who game it best, often without any transparency at all as to who they even are, and quiet assistance by the platforms themselves in some cases. The last bunch of elections in western societies have illustrated quite well that that's quite certainly not how we should want our democracies to work. So that's not the way to go, either. No idea what we'll end up with when the dust settles, but I expect it will have ended up being a lot harder and a lot more complex to get right than we currently expect it to be. At any rate, the old internet some of us grew up in is no more, it's dead and gone, and it cannot be brought back, in the same way that the neighborhood I grew up in and that has been massively gentrified, modernized and rebuilt, the former neighbors all driven out, cannot be brought back to what it was. The early internet was a unique experiment that may not see its equal for a long time, and it was great to be a part of it, history being made by nerdy people in front of big CRTs and all, and it turned out pretty well, actually – for all the issues the current internet raises, it is doing enormously, mind-boggingly huge amounts of good. But it's now a whole other experiment, and I feel like it's time to move on.