Apr 7, 2026, 8:17 AM…Capitalism is a network effect. It, or something like it, seems to be what happens when status seeking primates pile technological insight upon insight. Put differently, convenience upon convenience.
We go faster and bigger and further and tell ourselves that’s stronger. (It’s not.)
Everyone designed it
Apr 7, 2026, 8:20 AM…And now, we’re going too fast, too big, too far
Apr 7, 2026, 8:21 AM…And have been for quite a few generations
https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/111284511932083107
Apr 7, 2026, 8:32 AM…Some people are choosing to go a bit slower. Not nearly enough for safety, but it’s a start.
Mastodon seems to be one of those places where W.E.I.R.D. digital primates are most open to the idea of going slower. It is itself to some degree an expression of going slower.
For example, the largest following of a personal account on Mastodon is @georgetakei with 459k.
On Bluesky, it’s AOC with 2.2 million followers.
So on that measure we might say Mastodon’s ~5x slower
Apr 7, 2026, 8:40 AM…That is of course the most crude of broad brushes. But also of course, Mastodon has network effects. We can catch a glimpse of the rough outline of some of them but not clearly. Because we are those effects.
Anyway, when people say they’d like Mastodon to be more diverse (I’m one of them) what they’re kind of saying is they’d like Mastodon to be bigger.
Let’s suppose that happens. The challenge would be to not also go faster. And that is one hell of a challenge
https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/114936791480014566
Apr 7, 2026, 8:54 AM…In the early hours of my morning a handful of people went further from home than anyone has ever been, after going faster than all but a few tens of people have ever gone, on some of the biggest machines ever made.
They tell us this is “for all mankind”. It’s not.
It’s overwhelmingly *for* the greediest, most wasteful people trampling over each other to run the greediest, most wasteful nation state that has ever existed.
Going faster and further is part of accelerating unsafety