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Just a short appreciation of Howard Rheingold here. I was re-reading parts of his 1993 work on virtual community for a project, and it holds up in a way so many of the works of that time do not. https://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/10.html
. @hrheingold really had it all in there, from paid promotion, to the threat of a marketing/panopticon alliance, to the problem with the Prodigy model of moderation, importance of competition, etc.
I think the work is maybe -- and keep in mind I am critiquing predictions from 1993 or earlier -- maybe a little to focussed on disinformation as something polished and packaged (I think this is a thing with Postman too)
But so much of the rest of it is as quotable today as then, maybe more. In particular, it really hammers home that the work of community-building cannot be put on autopilot, and worries what happens when larger entities try to commodify BBS culture.
And it is a critique just as much of technophiles and techno-utopians. If technologists refused to take seriously outside critiques, Howard argued, we'd be doomed to create the sort of dystopias we were trying to avoid.
Here's Howard on the particular dystopia of combining social media with marketing surveillance.
Anyway, it's a work still worth reading and thinking about today, and a work I wish a lot more people currently ruling the world had read back then.
