Culture Is What We Collectively Agree upon

annie’s blog: Every small thing you do actually matters

Culture is what we make it. Culture is what we collectively agree upon. The loudest voices seem to have the most influence: people with fame, wealth, in positions of power, getting media attention and amplification.

People like us, normal people, might think: I can never be influential like that. I can never be influential enough to matter.

The first thought might be true, like that. But the second one is not. You do not need power, or money, or fame, or media, or a big following, or any kind of following to be influential enough to matter. You need only to inhabit the space you inhabit here, now, in this time in which you live.

Culture influence happens when one person amasses a lot of reach; one voice gets amplified, cranked up.

Cultural influence also happens when a lot of people (a mass) each have a little reach. Like, say, the reach from your home to your neighbor’s, from your phone to your friend’s, from your keyboard to your blog.

Every small thing you do actually matters.

Just after we recovered from the Y2K anxiety, and the dot com boom burst, and I’d lost my job at an enterprise software consulting firm, I finally started to pay attention to the web. I’d heard about Blogger on Wired’s website¹ and upon kicking the tires decided this was the future of art. I’d been working on an idea for nonlinear writing, inspired by ARGs and some cool short films I’d seen², and by the “alt worship” scene I’d stumbled upon during my frequent work trips to London. Of course, hypertext and Interactive fiction had been around since before the world wide web, but I was ignorant.

The oldest version of this site I could find on the Wayback Machine

A couple of years later I found myself requiring a change of life and convinced an internet friend to join me in founding Integration Research, where we tried all kinds of things to encourage artists to use the web for their creative purposes. IR failed even before Web 2.0 took off, but as I mention in 2016 in the above post:

Technology tools for creatives are more numerous than they have ever been, and show no signs of suffering a reduction in demand. While digital distribution has disrupted the cultural economy, independent artists have embraced the web and leveraged every tool at their disposal to great effect…And new platforms have emerged: YouTube is the dominant cultural platform of the present day. Leanpub and similar online publishing tools are better than anything I ever dreamed up.

All the while, the “normies” who had forgotten the first thing about HTML as soon as they dumped MySpace for Facebook flooded the pipes with “user generated content”, enjoying the connection Web 2.0 tools afforded us a decade prior. Until it all went wrong.

Now there is a new generation of tech-forward kids looking for places to call their own. We’re pointing them to Pika, Ghost, the Fediverse, and freaking Neocities!³

It’s weird living through 2001 again 14 years later, but as the tech world burns again in a very similar fashion⁴, I’m totally here for it.