Hypertext essays — layered arguments where every requote is a visible stratum
On Lost Social Infrastructure
No friction. No genuine otherness. No stakes in your wellbeing. Infinite availability to validate whatever you bring. The perfect tool for getting lost in your own head while feeling like you're having a dialogue.
I say this as someone who does it.
For good public health reasons, but we never replaced the social functions they served. What else forced you outside regularly to create a predictable gathering spot? A legitimate excuse for idleness that takes a specific amount of time. Across class lines — the janitor and the executive. And visually gave you something to do with your hands.
The cigarette gave me an excuse to be outside where the encounter of a neighbor was even possible. But it can't give me the social script that makes the encounter normal. The synchronicity and chance encounter script got lost somewhere between the porch culture of redlined complexes in Black and Latino neighborhoods and the suburban isolation of the $350k condo.
And now I'm back to the falling leaves, the wind, the cold, Claude, and the closed garage door.
We tried to create these spaces through neoliberal technologies of attention extraction. Sociality produced under the gaze of an insular topic — via Discord, Reddit, Threads. So intellectual randomness, multidisciplinary thinking that integrates your everyday events with dialogue and myth-making can't even occur.
It's so easy to just be with the leftist group, the sigma gooning group, the hyperreal visuals of Instagram. Sorted by market forces.
The barbershop isn't just a place to get a haircut. For a lot of minority communities it's therapy. It's news. It's networking. It's where you process what's happening in your life with people who know you, see you regularly, have stake in the community. A generational connection where the barber watches you and your family grow. Dissemination of ancestral knowledge. Trends. Memes being produced.
And it's being destroyed algorithmically. Noble's Algorithms of Oppression showed us how search algorithms aren't neutral — they're amplification or minimization systems where capital decides visibility. My parents' Chinese restaurant kept getting calls from Yelp. When you're a new Black student on campus searching for barbershops in your neighborhood, the algorithm decides what's visible.
Your 30-year barbershop now competes with Great Clips' marketing budget. One bad review from someone who doesn't understand the culture? Rating drops. Visibility drops. New customers can't find you. A death spiral where the rent keeps going up, gentrification pricing out the community that kept you alive.
So much of this analysis was lived experience. My uncle's restaurant had a Black barbershop next door, a college bookstore next door, even a Papa John's where baby Wei, bored of the restaurant, could just go wander.
The barbershop taught me that therapeutic space where unofficial means of meaning production was established — but it was more official than any TED talk. The Papa John's and bookshop allowed me to just wander around and talk to the workers there.
Not consume. Just be. This analysis was lived before it was theoretical. This specific texture. This is what's gone.
André Brock argues in Distributed Blackness: the Negro Green Book was infrastructure for Black survival when institutions excluded you. A precursor to networked digital interaction before the internet existed for war strategy.
Afro-Pessimism: Blackness as permanent social death due to slavery's afterlife and neoliberal extraction — it always reminds me of Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism. But there's an optimistic reversal. Black digital practice doesn't just survive within this matrix — it transforms it through Black joy under the duress of whiteness.
Hashtags creating community: #BlackGirlMagic. Live-tweeting Scandal together. TwitterAfterDark. Anti-police resistance AND mac and cheese recipes. A space that was simultaneously "a megaphone for people on the margins" and a place where the same person could drop a thread on algorithmic oppression in the morning and post thirst traps by afternoon. Because at the end of the day, the private is the political.
Even Brock's writing has this form of play on top of the deep theoretical work. "Momentous yet momentary marvel." "Evading white racial surveillance in plain sight." "Crashed and burned — Path, Dodgeball, and so on."
Rhythm. Vernacular touches. Personal voice. Never sacrificing theoretical acumen. This insistence on full, multidimensional humanity — serious AND silly, political AND playful — was Black Twitter's most radical intervention. Which became a libidinal affective economics. Wendy's marketing team learned to be stupid and funny and fight Burger King. That didn't exist for a long time.
You mean I don't have to be a nerd all the time, and I can just relax?
We destroyed the social infrastructure minority communities built to survive. Replaced it with platforms that extracted value while providing none of the actual functions those spaces served.
Then we act surprised that people are isolated. That communities are fractured. That no one knows their neighbors. And they say we have a loneliness epidemic.
Whether for men or for women. All for the sake of extractive capitalism dictated by the A/B testing of Silicon Valley.
Progress.