- By Owen Thomas | Examiner columnist |
- May 4, 2023 Updated 19 hrs ago (SFExaminer.com)
For me, the streets of San Francisco are a web of memories. I dragged two friends of mine the other day around a corner off 16th Street to show them the Mission District apartment where I lived in the 1990s.
Blocks away, on Ramona Avenue, was the flat where a loose group of friends gathered for weekly dinners. They called themselves the Cyborganics. I started dropping in and getting to know them — sometimes only by the same handles they used online, like Sonic, Rocky and Spudboy.
One of the things you got for being a Cyborganic was a homepage, a rare privilege back in the early days of the web. If you worked somewhere like Netscape, Wired or a university, you might get space on a server where you could upload a picture, quote some lines from a movie, and post your favorite links.
It might sound quaint now, but conversations that shifted from a shag-carpeted living room to an email list and then got written up on a website were novel enough at the time that everyone from Rolling Stone to this hometown publication took note.
Cyborganic petered out, but people kept coming to San Francisco with the idea of turning the online community into something more. There was Blogger. Flickr. Six Apart, which bought LiveJournal. Tribe.net.
The best way I can explain it is that there was something fertile in the air, like the microbes that gave rise to San Francisco sourdough — or maybe a lingering loneliness of all those newcomers, a hunger to connect.
Among those newcomers was Ev Williams, who started Blogger and later hired Jack Dorsey. Along with Biz Stone and Noah Glass, they founded Twitter, which its present owner, Elon Musk — the occasional resident of a bed in a Mid-Market office — seems intent on burning to the ground.
Dorsey, the former Twitter CEO who once backed Musk’s takeover of his company, has turned on his friend. He has not tweeted since January, a longer hiatus even than his famous vipassana retreats. Lately, Dorsey has been favoring Nostr, a decentralized social network.
While running Twitter, Dorsey also helped start Bluesky, another decentralized effort that’s been taking off among some of the ex-Twitterati, though it only has some 55,000 users and remains invitation-only.
What people like about Nostr and Bluesky are the ferment and chaos. Bluesky attracted some celebrities who have grown tired of Musk’s blue-check games. It’s also got a lot of users who seem intent on posting photos of their rear ends. Why? To prove that they can, which is part of the point of these decentralized networks. No central control means no army of moderators and no capricious CEO making up the rules as he goes along.
Back in the 1990s, you could show your ass on your homepage if you really wanted to — but that didn’t seem like the point. The hope was to announce your presence and find other people, maybe even make conversation.
I was hiking on San Bruno Mountain with a friend the other weekend, looking down at The City, flooded with memories etched into its streets. He told me that, however improbably, a trace of Cyborganic had resurfaced in a private Slack group. I got an invite — and there were Sonic and Rocky and other old friends.
That’s why I tell people not to worry too much about the death of Twitter, or which new social app to join. These are all overlays on top of the real network, which is a set of human connections. Our profiles, our homepages, our posts, our tweets, our skeets are all fragments of ourselves, traces we leave behind as we fumble toward each other.
“Live in fragments no longer,” E.M. Forster wrote. “Only connect.”
For a bunch of awkward nerds, San Franciscans are awfully good at forging links. And not just those of hypertext.
Owen Thomas
Owen Thomas is a journalist and a longtime resident of San Francisco who has thought about tech’s relationship with The City since the first internet boom brought him to town. His columns appear weekly in The Examiner.
