Group Chat City

Thankfully there’s a new kind of social unit emerging which may play a crucial role in helping us to overcome this mostly silent epidemic of loneliness and disconnection. It’s already showing up in a number of different flavours but the four versions I’ve been tracking most closely include Pods, Squads, Crews and Digital Gangs. And while each one h... See more

More recently, similar games of language and form were generated by the “Vibe Shift,” by which I mean the strange ways of writing that appeared in 2021 in places such as Remilia Corporation’s “I long for Network Spirituality” chatroom; Instagram “cellectuals” accounts, which adopt other people’s personae; schizo-affect Substack poetry blogs; Honor ... See more

Groups are hard to form in the first place. Think of how many random Discord communities you were invited into the past few years and how many are still active. “Organization for collective action takes a good deal of time to emerge” observes Olson.