On Identity, Exits, and Utrecht
Newsletter 012
Dear Writer,
At the beginning of this month, I went to Cambridge, Massachusetts on behalf of Switch-Lit to participate in the Applied Social Media Lab’s inaugural workshop at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. The purpose was to bring together perspectives from industry outsiders and academia to inspire new solutions for how social media can better serve the “public interest”, which I defined as this: Any place where the collective and individual interest becomes one.
📍Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA)
Switch-Lit was one of about a dozen selected projects from around the country to present, receive roundtable feedback from both fellow participants and Harvard faculty, and ultimately leave with a new network for future partnerships.
Here are my takeaways from that unseasonably humid day in Cambridge:
Across all social media projects, there were recurring themes: Identity; Governance; Interoperability; Artificial intelligence; Content moderation; Scoring measures. (Switch-Lit embodies a few of these, particularly ‘Identity’.)
The majority of projects were technology-driven solutions (some of which I honestly did not understand) whereas Switch-Lit became an outspoken favorite for some because of its human-first, social-oriented, and art-driven approach in which technology plays an essential supporting role (not the other way around).
The future of social media, and a better Internet overall, will likely favor those who find and serve their own niche communities as opposed to scaling for all.
The day ended with a cautionary debate around the lack of long-term funding and viability of new projects given engineering costs, which raised questions of “over-engineering” products for lack of thoughtful design, research, or planning.
Given that Switch-Lit is an independent project (by Studio Esmé), one of the workshop moderators believed it was well-positioned for a new type of ownership structure – “Exit to Community” – where community members grow the platform they value and own 😅🤔
And then two weeks after the workshop, I boarded a plane for the Netherlands 🇳🇱.
During the nine-hour flight, over 30,000 feet in the air, and with the theme of identity still in mind, I read an inspiring book review of Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment by the esteemed ninety-two-year old Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor whose new study of Romantic poetry, music, and language is also about modern life, its discontents, and how we might transcend them.
Below are excerpts whose provocations have found a place in Switch-Lit:
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By wresting our identities away from a sense of community and common purpose… we became estranged from a sense of belonging and meaning. We wanted to be alone and now we are.
Taylor emphasized the primacy of shared experience – the idea that identity resides within communities rather than inside brains – without succumbing to nostalgia for some lost organic society.
We are not atoms in a mindless universe, he argues, but agents in a metaphysically alert one, embodied and embedded in meanings we jointly create. Art is not an accessory to pleasure, but the means of our connection to the cosmos.
What matters most in life to actual people, he has argued is not the standard liberal question, “Who am I?” but the richer humanist question, “Where am I going?”
🛬
📍Utrecht, Netherlands (NL)
I arrived in Amsterdam on another unseasonably humid day, so I was told, and traveled an hour south by train to meet with our Switch-Lit design and technology partners – Studio Airport and September Digital – in their lovely city of Utrecht.
Over the course of a few days, we collaborated in person to lay out and design some significant new updates for Switch-Lit based on your direct writer feedback and our own observations of how the community is using the platform.
We’re excited to share these updates and more with you coming soon as we continue to develop Switch-Lit as a public place, or park, of the collective imagination.
Until then, I’ll end with an imaginative question that I posed to our Dutch partners as a way to quickly grasp a local’s perspective of a city: If you had to leave your city, what is the one place or experience you would miss the most? Leave a comment for your own city or town below.
Proost,
– Ken
S••L Editor
Featured prompt:
Prompt 4
The invention of a breakthrough recording device leads to the discovery of a new sound wave – Omega – with supernatural properties.
by Switch-Lit
Did you know?
There are five different types of human brainwaves with corresponding states of mind that are accessible through the sound waves of binaural music:
“Gamma” (30-100 hertz): Insight, peak experiences, and synchronization (listen)
“Beta” (12-30 hertz): Alertness, concentration, and thinking (listen)
“Alpha” (8-12 hertz): Meditation, creativity, and relaxation (listen)
“Theta” (4-8 hertz): Visualization, trance, and dreaming (listen)
“Delta” (.5 - 4 hertz): Deep sleep, transcendence, and restoration (listen)
Don’t give up.
“One can win your love and you must choose between the two
One can win your love that is eating through and through
Only one can win
Ooh-oh only
Only one can win
– “Two Can Win” from Donuts by J Dilla
Contact us:
📟 Ping us with any questions, requests, or proposals for Switch-Lit:
editors@switch-lit.com