Social media creates, at times, a single narrative bubble. In a world of 7 billion people, this is p

Social media creates, at times, a single narrative bubble. In a world of 7 billion people, this is probably never the right way to think about the world, and it doesn't happen that often, but it definitely happened this weekend. It felt wrong to talk about anything other than the protests this weekend and honestly it kind of didn't even really feel right for me to even talk about that.

This idea of one big conversation was articulated by this post from the Mercatus Center which was written by an ex-CIA guy. So keep that perspective in mind. Still. It made me think of this tweet by New York Times reporter Mike Isaac, in which he basically says "Shut up about your regular lives right now." I retweeted it. It felt right at the time and it still feels correct. He wrote "read the room" and that room in this case was Twitter. And I think that's the right way to think about it. I don't think it's wrong to say that on Twitter.

But I do think a lot of us have walked into a room and feel locked there when we could just leave.

It's tough. I want to be online. I want to have an audience and I want to have people to interact with online, but I increasingly don't want to be on other people's platforms. When I write here, I think literally zero people read it. When I write on Twitter it gets seen by a very small number, but it's much larger than here. It would be nice if there were a way for us to have our own websites but to interact with each other by means of our own online rooms.

Platforms make it much easier to build audiences and communities and that's addictive, but addictive things are usually bad.