The New Era of Online Collaboration
How We Can Use Technology to Come Together and Achieve Great Things
People need productive things to work on. This has become more of a problem in the modern era. In a pre-modern subsistence life, you always know what you need to do, and you don't have many choices anyway. There just aren’t that many possibilities.
More and more people are facing the opposite problem: too much freedom, too many choices, and ultimately getting lost and defaulting to mindless wandering.
We live in an era of rapid innovation in information and communication technologies. The easiest, most obvious thing to do with mass communication technologies was to just blast information at people in the form of books, magazines, and TV. This provided people with passive entertainment and information.
Then we made mass communication technologies two-way, read and write, with the Internet. And the most obvious thing to do was just give people tools to publish writing, music, photos, and video. This allowed a new creator class to be born. Teenagers from the middle of nowhere could attain global fame and spectacular wealth just by making videos people liked.
This world of a million creators is fun and interesting but chaotic and lacking in purpose. There are a million people shouting for your attention in a dizzying, scattered feed. What does it all add up to, where does it lead? It seems we have just invented the greatest time-wasting machine of all time: ultra-addictive entertainment feeds that make it very easy to waste your days.
Now communications and collaboration technologies are evolving again. It is becoming easier for people to form groups and collaborate on projects online. Globally distributed collaboration on open-source software and resources like Wikipedia has been going on for decades. But now, online projects and purposeful online groups are becoming more mainstream. The barrier to entry is lower. The tools are better.
I am in the tech world. It's what I've always loved. But I was never part of a tech-oriented group that worked on projects before (other than companies I worked for, of course). In the last couple of years, entry points into the great online game have opened, like a thousand portals materializing.
Before, you would read an interesting tweetstorm or listen to an interesting podcast, then move on. Maybe you would happen to talk to someone about it IRL. Now, you read a tweetstorm or listen to a podcast, and there is likely to be a call to action, a Discord to join. And you join the Discord and look for any projects that are going on. You stay engaged. You have a lasting commitment to an aligned group. Subgroups form within the community to do things like writing challenges and fitness challenges. Balaji Srinivasan has done a good job of converting Twitter followers and podcast listeners into email subscribers and enthusiasts of his ideas. You can see the success he’s had from the novel network state idea becoming a thing people regularly talk about on Twitter, and cite when starting ambitious new projects.
Of course, it's early days for this kind of thing. Discord is not ideal for organizing purposeful, action-oriented groups. But it's the best we have, and it's gotten us to an exciting place where we can feel something better just over the horizon.
New tools for collaboration are appearing, too. We may one day have a life full of video game-like experiences that create real value in the real world. Not escaping into a VR headset but overlaying quantification, AI, and community on the real world to enhance it.
Something like the fitness tracking app Vital gives a preview of this kind of world. It brings the addictiveness and engagement of social networks and video games to the all-important pursuit of fitness. Instead of checking into the culture war morning, noon, and night, you check into your shared fitness journey throughout the day. You check your sleep statistics every morning and share them with peers in the community, exchanging lessons and encouragement as you compete in this month's sleep challenge. You check your activity level throughout the day, making sure you're exercising enough to stay on track for this month's exercise challenges. It's like a game, but a game that gets you fit instead of fat. What if your day was full of games like this? Games that made you stronger and more focused instead of weaker and more dissolute.
This is just one example, a simple tool made by a small number of people that helps people get fitter and even build friendships in the process. This is what it looks like when our technology works for us, when it helps us unite in productive projects. And it's just the beginning. We are moving from the era of the lone scroller to the era of the aligned, constructive group. We will finally see what the use is of all these new web technologies. As a personal challenge, try to find some kind of productive group activity you can participate in online: a writing challenge, a fitness challenge. You might find yourself becoming more hopeful about the world.