Jun 29, 2022
My kinks are “Helping people” and “Trying to unf*ck the world”
Fetlife is the best social media platform
I recently completed a social media purge. I’ve deleted all the social media platforms I used regularly. I used a lot of them regularly because I spent years trying to imagine a better product than what they offer. That’s documented elsewhere around here.
I waded into the madness of being Too Online™ — although to be fair I’d always been an intense denizen of that space — and tried to use my skills as a senior web developer to imagine a better user experience.
Better is, of course, terribly subjective.
I’d never built a social media platform but I’d at least played around with building most of the bits of one — combining them was pretty straightforward. That wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was trying to give people the tools they need to self-regulate in a fair, rational, and cost effective way at scale. We can talk about specific ideological goals, as those are important ways to determine how a specific community wants to comport itself, but the considerations I’m highlighting are more foundational to the behaviour of this system at scale and are more important than many other considerations. There are meta considerations that apply to a wide variety of communities (people b peoplin’, right?). If digital communities can’t self-regulate in a fair, rational, and cost-effective way at a certain scale then communities will implode. It doesn’t matter what the community is formed around.
Sustainability isn’t a buzzword but it was turned into one.
There are no easy answers here. If this was an easy problem to solve it wouldn’t be increasingly ravaging our culture. It wouldn’t be tearing its way through all of the powerful nations.
The Culture War is waged in part on a spiritual battlefield
If you’re like me and you believe that there are undiscovered physics of consciousness, or any of a number of other metaphysical explanations for some or all of reality, then it’s easy to see how this is true. If you don’t share that perspective of reality and hold a more materialist view of things… there is still a spiritual component to the Culture War in the minds of countless other people who are participating in it.
You don’t have to approve of the existence of that facet of their reality for it to have an impact on you, so it’s worth considering to some extent if only to understand the people you’re engaged in some sort of social conflict with.
Sure it’s not everyone, but we all often see the cries of “Culture War!” emerge with the strongest of pseudo-religious fervency from intensely secular individuals.
The Culture War is such an interesting and horrible and stupid thing. I’ve spent a bunch of time writing about it and you can find some of those writings in my Esoteric Compendium. The Culture War shows us very clearly that you don’t need to want to participate in a war to get sucked into it in a way that fucks all your shit right up in unexpectedly horrible ways — and that this can happen anywhere.
There are people all over the internet who view themselves as being combatants in social conflict that the rest of us haven’t consented to. This issue is atribal, in that it occurs regardless of whether someone identifies with a specific tribe. It’s a behaviour that can emerge from anywhere and often to the detriment of many.
Another thing that is atribal is that we’re WAY more supportive of this type of behaviour from our own tribes than from the others. “Both sides” do this but it annoys us differently when people are doing it to us.
How does this relate to Fetlife?
Fetlife doesn’t have the type of rampant mind-destroying and soul-crushing social conflict that permeates other platforms. It has its own issues of course but the community is definitely more civil and definitely works harder to be respectful of different views, perspectives, opinions, histories, and backgrounds.
First: What is Fetlife?
Like many things in the space of kink, the Wikipedia page is somewhat lacking in meaningful levels of detail, but it’s worth exploring as a start:
I first joined Fetlife in 2019. I’d first heard about it a year or so before. When I first joined (I think I remember this correctly) there were about 2.7 million people on the site.
Fetlife isn’t a dating site for kinky weirdos but it looks like one
It’s not designed as a place for kinky people to meet up and do kinky things for/to/at eachother — although it is undeniably used in this way — it’s actually designed to allow a big variety of people engage in a variety of meaningful ways while navigating challenging social circumstances and attempting to foster and form healthy communities.
Fetlife includes the ability to create a variety of different content types: status updates (a short post), Writings (a long post), Pictures, and Videos. There are groups and events.
A bunch of it is created by incredibly pervy people and a bunch of the other people are 100% there for that. If you’re not there for what they’re there for, the rules of the community loosely mandate that under most circumstances you just keep that opinion to yourself. (Your kink is not my kink but your kink is OK/No kink shaming)
There are some exceptions, of course, but by and large the central premise is that consent must be present and have been discussed in a way that all individuals are satisfied with — and also it works best if everyone has clear expectations about things. This approach is often a great way to handle anything. It’s built right into the culture of kink because it’s evolved to protect the community. Fetlife attempts to enable and sustain this focus from the community through good user interface design.
A visceral and negative reaction to kink will likely be harmful to you
Basically all of the other tribes are present in the kinky tribe. Conservatives, progressives, various faith and spiritual traditions. A bunch of them get along better in kinky spaces than they do elsewhere (this is evidenced by the fact that so many of them smash their bits together in mutually enjoyable kinky experiences, or have interesting and engaging conversations about stuff like that.)
Kink is formed around the reality that we can’t control what other people do in private circumstances, nor should we, and demands a form of pragmatic and meaningful acceptance of diverse perspectives. It demands that because participation in the space means that it’s something we want for ourselves as participants. It’s reciprocal.
Kinky people are a meta-tribe within a meta-tribe
There’s a really great book I read back in 2020 that contains a chapter about the kink/bdsm community that is well worth reading — as is the rest of the book. The ensuing few years have only solidified the accuracy of the analysis and claims made in this book:
Who are the Religious Nones?
The Religious Nones are the people who are Spiritual but Not Religious(™optional). They can often be viewed as people who were shown something that turned them away from organized religion, or who were never immersed in organized religion in the first place, and now seek to find their spiritual structures elsewhere. Because faith and belief are such intrinsic parts of collaborative experiences this manifests in a wide variety of interesting faith-like behaviour.
I highly recommend reading this book if you find that what you see about secularism doesn’t seem to be aligning with what you were expecting. Even if we live in a secular world we still exhibit manifestations of religiosity during creative and social pursuits.
The book is a respectful and detailed analysis about a wide variety of different spaces with different levels of cultural prominence and significance, all of which contain similar themes that are increasingly relevant to our shared global civilization during these times of increased crises.
You can’t just be a shitty human being on Fetlife
There’s different levels of shittiness, of course, but by and large people on Fetlife will ignore, block, and disengage with bad faith actors and sources of sustained social conflict. This happened in part because Fetlife is intended to be a digital counterpoint to an in-person community (not a dating site), and this means that poor behaviour actually restricts your capacity for engagement in authentic and meaningful ways.
Fetlife is technology that amplifies through esoteric means in liminal spaces what already exists in the real world.
Lots of folks are talking about how to change social media platforms in order to prevent a bunch of the harmful stuff we’re seeing radiate outward from them, but these people often seem to be deliberately limiting how they’re willing to consider solutions. From my perspective it looks like it’s for reasons that don’t relate to the viability of the solutions in a technical sense.
We aren’t talking about how Fetlife provides a roadmap to solve the problems Twitter faces because we don’t want to talk about the space Fetlife occupies — even though there are 10 million people in it and there’s still only a fairly limited number of regions and cultures where you can participate in it. Porn is one of the biggest parts of the internet — a fact we’re consistently and collectively afraid to look at and think about.
Ideas about the causes and solutions to a lot of what ails us can be discerned by analyzing the shadow of our collective psyche. Understanding the consumption of adult content provides insightful data many people are uncomfortable looking at.
The emergence of Fetlife as a viable social media platform is one of the biggest things to happen during the pandemic in the space of social media and we’re not talking about it because of cognitive biases. Cognitive biases are the societal level are a bit of a hobby horse of mine which I’ve written about elsewhere.
You can’t just label someone a shitty human being on Fetlife and walk away without consequences. Fetlife does a good job of protecting us from some of the worst things that can happen to us (eg: things like sexual assault) by implementing or facilitating social structures or technological tools capable of reducing the risk its users face, and it also does a good job of protecting us from more trivial (yet still harmful) things like having people say mean or wrong things about us on the internet.
Fetlife is imperfect because of course it’s imperfect. There are probably always exceptions to basically anything. My main point is that Fetlife has locked into a form of synergy between its user base and its technology and the platform has achieved something that isn’t happening at scale in any of the other social media platforms.
One could argue that other social media platforms don’t need to achieve that form of synergy. That’s certainly valid.
But that doesn’t negate the fact that their flaws are harmful to all of us and must be resolved.
It would be nice to see more of the people I see critiquing big tech focusing on the alternatives that aren’t being discussed in the mainstream. There are many.
Thanks for reading. I’m a wizard and you can hire me for stuff. You can get an introduction of the stuff I’ve written here:
