“Nice to talk to about it if this is interesting, Marc BenioffSalesforce founder, texted Elon Musk Spring before. He continued, unequivocally: “Twitter conversational operating system — the town square for your digital life.” This is how billionaires communicate: with slogans, brand recognition, and sometimes big sums of money. It is up to others to find out the details.
“Well, I don’t own it yet,” Musk replied. (To be fair, he was composing a lot of text messages at the time.) But then he owned it, and by winter it was. Twitter The takeover is a giant, thorny public mess. Any spell that kept everyone together on the platform seems to have been broken. It’s like the plot of Encanto no happy ending: “The cemetery for your digital life.”
Twitter’s troubles aren’t just caused by Musk, who apparently shot himself in the leg and burned himself with his own branded flamethrower. No, Musk is merely a vehicle. The real reason Twitter is in ruins is because it is an abomination in the sight of God. That’s the Tower of Babel.
People often interpret Genesis 11:1–9 as a mythical explanation of why we have so many tribes, so many languages. The story goes that the descendants of Noah were living in Shinar, all speaking the same language, and decided to build a skyscraper so they could go straight to heaven. God has gone Not in my backyard! and scattered the people, confusing their language. I like to think that God himself destroyed the tower, but that story is a lie (Jubilees 10:26).
God did a lot of wrath in the Old Testament, punishing those who challenged God’s authority. It makes sense to read the story of Babel in that light. But after several decades of the Internet’s existence, I believe the story offers another lesson. I’m an atheist, so treat this theory like salt in the water, or maybe even a nail: God doesn’t stop us from going to heaven, punishing us for our arrogance. . God has protected us from ourselves.
Every five or six minutes, someone in the social sciences publishes a PDF with a title like “People are 95% happier in small towns, waving to their neighbors and eating bread.” When we gather in groups of more than eight people, for example, it’s a disaster. However, there is something fundamental in our nature that we desperately want to gather people together in one big room, to “work it out”. Our richer, smarter people (in Babel’s time, the king’s name was Nimrod) used to preach the idea of a town square, a marketplace of ideas, a center of speech and focused entertainment—and we listen. But when I turned around and read Genesis, I heard the Lord say, “Children, I have designed your brains to expand to 150 stable relationships. Anything beyond that is overclocking. You all should try Mastodon.
So everyone is run away from the tower with millions of dollars, or at least buy real estate elsewhere—discord, TikTok, Tumblr, YouTube, Instagram, WeChat, Weibo, Moj. And some are finding their tribe in the Fediverse, a collection of decentralized web applications that includes mastodons.
Fediverse, by design, has thousands of servers in multiple languages. They are cheap to run, at least for small teams, and relatively easy to manage. You can chat between loved ones on your server—or blog, podcast, or share photos and videos—and connect to servers in the outside world. All Fediverse apps are built on a set of rules known as the ActivityPub standard, which is a bit like HTML having sex with scheduled invitations. It’s a content polycule. The questions it evokes are the same as with any polycule: What are the rules? How big can this get? Who will create the chore chart?
The real beauty of Mastodon and similar offerings is that they are designed to fall apart. If you want to get rid of a server, you can bring all your followers and followers with you. If one server goes down, you can find another one. That’s not a guy. It accepts that when we centralize and argue, we melt, and so it comes with a giant sticker that says: Babel is built in!
How will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized? This is a conundrum for billionaires. Happy people, who eat bread together, are boring. They don’t buy much. Their smartphone comes in six rear versions and has a badly cracked screen. They fix bikes, then they talk about fixing bikes, then they show their friend, who just came in for no reason, how they fix the bike, and their friend says, “Wow. , well done,” and they made tea. That doesn’t seem to be enough to build a town square.
But someone will figure out the details. The reason the Babel story is important is not that it happens once but it happens over and over again: We Babelize and de-Babelize. The Internet is an engine of both processes. Ultimately, brands will shop on the rocky land of Mastodon and increase engagement. Billionaires will dictate the construction of new idea markets. Everything will come into focus again, and it will seem eternal, as if the tower could never fall. Now, let’s enjoy the dispersion.
