It’s a question that’s been plaguing me for years at this point and one that only grows more pressing as time passes. It began as a single seed, the desire to understand how I could go on when the world around me seemed not only hopeless but hellbent on remaining hopeless. I watched the choices of people with far more power, influence and wealth than I will see in all my lifetime, water that, choice after choice, through greed and deed, until I stood in a garden.
And I was alone.
And I was afraid.
How do we survive in a hostile world?
Hell, what even is a hostile world? There are so many things wrong with modern society, with each problem interlinking into a dozen other problems, all of which are rooted in several lifetimes worth of mistakes, that a single article or even a single writer can’t hope to explain them all. I will draw a thread between two interlinking factors and three interlinking solutions, to guide you through the isolation of social media to the value of third places and the kindness of community and potential for mutual aid.
I’m excited to write about solutions for once, I am. But first comes isolation. First comes social media.
In 2009 Eli Pariser described the concept of a ‘filter bubble’. Essentially this is the way the algorithm weeds out any content on your platform of choice that isn’t in your particular interest, political belief, or part of your social group and serves you only a repetition of what you’ve enjoyed before.
The reason for this is twofold; firstly, you will stay locked to your screen, using the app longer and returning to it again and again if you have a guarantee of seeing more of what you liked before. Repeat customers see more ads. Secondly, by narrowing down which content you enjoy, the clearer your digital fingerprint becomes. i.e. What products can be marketed to you?
Now, despite the horror of the previous paragraph, there are merits to this system which are worth discussing. Convenience is key; the practicality of not having to spend potentially hours searching for something you might enjoy. Accounting for potentially infinite personal taste is hard and allowing individual people effectively to filter based on their own taste works around the issue. Additionally, there is an undeniable value in marginalised and vulnerable groups such as people of colour, immigrants, LGBTQ and disabled people being able to form communities online which intentionally filter out hateful and bigoted content and news.
Online forums not dominated by algorithms – such as Discord or chat forums – administer themselves through human moderation, self-selection by reading the topic and the ability simply to leave a conversation if it no longer interests the user. There is no algorithm to filter ideas in these spaces; instead, human beings must navigate each other’s humanity in a wonderfully human way. The result is that there are valuable connections to be made through this option, especially if you make friends with people outside of your own country, allowing you to enjoy perspectives vastly different from your own, or if you have a situation or disability hindering you from engaging with a community outside the confines of your own room.
But there is a distinct difference between that self-selection and the invisible hand of an algorithm. As Eli Pariser said in his 2011 TED Talk, we aren’t always aware of what’s being filtered out of our sight by the algorithm. We don’t often get to make a choice. “When you turn on Fox News or MSNBC, you have a sense of what their editorial sensibility is,” Pariser said on the subject.
A hostile world is one that slowly pulls us apart from each other, using hidden strings to remove unchallenging ideas and alternate perspectives from our view. A hostile world keeps us ignorant of each other because it prevents us from seeing the puppeteers holding the strings; the ones causing the real damage to our lives.
In his 2022 comedy special X, sandwiched between two excellent jokes too inappropriate for print, comedian Daniel Sloss said “I’m trying to talk to people who I disagree with. Because either they strengthen my argument, or they change my mind and neither of those things are bad.” I will never agree with someone who does not agree with my right to exist as a trans person and that gender affirming care should remain legal, but I did not arrive at that opinion in a vacuum or independent of help. I spoke to trans people, I did research on transitioning and I not only arrived at the perspective that was right, but I discovered a valuable truth about my own identity. There was value in my learning from the trans people in my life. I hope you will find value in learning from me.
How do we survive in a hostile world?
When we’ve walked away from these platforms. Where do we find alternatives to the social media spaces we’ve been living on for so many years?
We look at the world beyond our screens. We look at third places.
If a first place is your home and a second place is where you work, then a third place would be the places you visit beyond these two.
Understand that the isolation of social media is not all that creates a hostile world, but also how we mentally transition from a state of work to a state of relaxation.
To explain:
Let’s say that the act of working is also the act of renting out your hours to a job. On average, you rent out eight hours per day to your job, for five days of the week. You are subsequently paid for those hours.
Then an unspecified number of hours must be dedicated to dealing with chores and assisting with your family or household; this could be grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, maintenance or more.
Hours given to your first and second places play out as I’ve written above. Any remaining hours are yours to do with as you see fit. So, the question remains: How do you use those hours? After all, if your work owns your time from nine to five, but you spend all hours from five to nine recovering from work and preparing yourself to work for the next day, do you truly own your own time?
How you use the hours which remain to you matters. It matters so much.
This is the value of a third place. Somewhere you are intended to exist without the purpose of productivity. A place where you may exist in timelessness, as Mouhamad Mbacke wrote in his 2023 article on third places. In a third place we can simply exist in the moment, drifting outside the expectations of routine and productivity.
A third place could be many things; a sports club, a coffee shop, a bar, a board-games store, a park, or many other options. It does not have to have a social element to it; getting a cup of coffee and listening to music counts but finding a third place with a social element is preferable. Remember back to what I discussed earlier? We’re escaping our filter bubbles, escaping isolation and meeting new people.
Speaking of which…
How do we survive in a hostile world?
At this point we’ve escaped our filter bubbles; we’ve found a third place… What next? What else is there to do? I’m sorry to say but now we’re at the scary part – We’re going to have to talk to strangers.
A question: Do you know the names of your neighbours? The last house where I knew my neighbours’ names was one which I lived in over fifteen years ago. Since then, my family’s interactions with neighbours have been confined to brief waves in passing. Beyond that we’ve all kept to ourselves. Isn’t that bizarre? In a time where every neighbourhood has its own WhatsApp group making it easier than ever to communicate with every household nearby; how often do those groups get used for anything other than asking, “Is anyone else’s water off?” and “When’s the power coming back on?”
We can do better than that.
The tale of Hulbert Street comes to mind. In 2023 Shani Graham gave a TEDx Talk on community building. She recounts going from door to door with her daughters across her neighborhood, asking neighbours to attend their picnics. By the end of this process, about a hundred people had agreed to join them. People brought food, they talked, neighbours met for the very first time. And it was not the last time they would meet.
The budding community continued to hold gatherings as time went by, coming together to spend their time in each other’s company after work, or during the day at weekends. The community found strength, friendship and closeness in each other.
This community was formed directly before the Covid 19 pandemic.
Suddenly, isolation once again. We all remember what that feels like.
But this community kept in touch as best they could. They had geographical proximity, after all. Even lockdown could not prevent some form of hello from a safe distance. Mrs. Graham recounted how a car from their community drove down the street, with a musician in the back, performing for their neighbours who sat in their yards.
The result of this community building was the formation of a mutual aid society. Mutual aid is a term with a very simple explanation: “If you need help, I help you. If I need help, you help me.”
This is exactly what their community did. They put together a contact and information sheet which had, as described by Shani Graham, “the lists of skills and resources and things people have and things that they’re willing to give. As well as what people need. No one buys a fridge trolley in Hulbert Street. Adam and Brian have the fridge trolley.”
Perhaps it doesn’t sound like much, until you realise that this can be scaled to so many other needs. Food, cookware, clothing, new skills, raw materials, labour, or even the company of community members with empathetic ears.
If this sounds appealing to you then, please, go talk to your neighbours after reading this. Step out of your filter bubble. Join a third place. Form a community.
If you’re scared about talking to strangers, that’s understandable, but that’s why you bring an icebreaker. Bake a set of muffins or something similar yourself and bring them with you! Invite them to a potluck, a neighbourhood movie night, or to watch the bokke. More people will say yes than you think.
Humans are social creatures; this is a fact. Pulling us apart, teaching us to hate, reducing and quantifying us, exhausting us and removing us from community… placing us in a hostile world will not work for long.
It’s been tried before.
The sheer fire of the human spirit wins every time.
How do we survive in a hostile world?
Together.
