Mapping out the online communities you didn't realise could change the world
Those who can harness the latent power of communities with existing roots have a better chance of changing our world. Build where passion already exists, and is latent, waiting to be awakened.
Today, there is enormous interest in building new movements. But you don’t have to start anew if you want to change the world. Communities lie on a spectrum in terms of their origins: either they have been created to achieve a goal, or they appear to have been created almost by default; no purpose, they just exist.
Who can harness the latent power of those default communities? What power do they have?
This essay was commissioned by Folklore. Today’s except explores how to find these types of communities, how to assess them, and analyses two communities which are already using these characteristics to change the world.
Default and Designed Communities form ends of a spectrum.
What unites members of Default Communities is not self-interest, but community bonds fused by a passionate part of members’ identities, which they share in common.
These communities lack the dynamic structure which makes Designed Communities so successful, but community leaders who can build that dynamism will find themselves leading a community that is far better placed to change the world.1
Astute digital adventurers will ask ‘where are the latent communities of the internet?’ In such an artificial world, every detail was created by some person, for some reason. But there are two unintended characteristics we can look at:
unintended consequences (the ‘nature’ of the internet)
personal values (the culture of the internet)
Unintended Communities
The intentional decisions which built the internet nonetheless caused unintended consequences, and it is here where the default communities lie. Default communities of the internet will be found around the most defining characteristics of our internet nature, like the decisions made by dominant internet companies (like Amazon and Meta) and consequences from the rise of new internet primitives (like search engines and artificial intelligence).
Decisions made by organisations:
Mental health.
Ignored for years by social media platforms, it is undeniable that tragic declines in mental health are driven by news feeds. Jonathan Haidt cites 476 studies to this effect in The Anxious Generation alone (whether you agree is beyond my scope here).
What this produces is a group motivated to tackle a common suffering, culminating in legislation like the UK’s Online Safety Act. In Britain, the 2017 suicide of a teenager prompted government interest, in a country already aware of social media’s manipulative potential, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal and 2016’s Brexit referendum.
Amidst the furore of British politics, which saw three elections and 4 Prime Ministers since that Brexit vote, the Online Safety Act was an irresistible force motivated by its own extensive volition. Buttressed by a highly motivated constituent group, both media and political voices alike saw reason to champion the cause.
The process is well known to policy entrepreneurs. Step 1: identify an intrinsically-motivated community, or one in a crisis. Step 2: nurture its passion, shepherding it towards a specific goal and, to go further, towards a broader economy and cultural system.
Key for any default community is its source of dynamism, which makes the difference between a community like Trawden and a community which succumbs to the dynamism of others. For the mental health community, its dynamism came at first from people closely related to it: movement activists, parents of children who suffered, or social media whistleblowers. But note how other groups, from business, politics, and media, which largely picked a side later on, were critical dynamic allies in the battle against some of the most powerful companies that human society has ever produced.
Internet censorship. The alliance between a community’s members and others prioritising their own interests is no more apparent than in the case of internet censorship. A movement fostered on then-Twitter, the community motivated by free speech is a blend of libertarians led by their own minds and others led by leaders who chose the cause for their own gain. And the movement has had some success: anti-censorship social media platforms have reached millions of users and billions of dollars in valuations.
But anti-censorship has not generally been a winning cause, usually falling second-fiddle to other competing interests. Whilst Elon Musk claimed he bought Twitter to make it the internet’s town square, the platform has become sharply more compliant towards government-requested censorship since his takeover.
Even the success of anti-censorship movements have mostly come from leaders who selected the cause to support other personal priorities. Donald Trump held notably mixed views on the First Amendment before becoming a free speech defender when being so was electorally advantageous. As a default community, anti-censorship simply was co-opted into the agendas of others, whether this was good for the movement or not. It’s more than ironic that adverts on Truth Social are called sponsored truths.
Lessons can be learnt from both cases, but internet censorship was a particularly hard battle to win. On one hand, censorship does not rank highly on the priorities list for most people who care about it. Meanwhile, they went up against organisations which united billions of people. With 20 million users at Parler’s peak, even the biggest ‘free speech network’ pales in comparison.
These two limitations, the relative priorities of a group and its relative size, are key in identifying which default communities are likelier to succeed. Relative priorities refer to how much a group’s members value the cause, compared to other priorities they have, like career progression and sharing funny TikToks. Relative size refers to how influential a group is, compared to the group from which it seeks to extract concessions (such as more stringent or more loose moderation).
Privacy campaigners also suffer from this double-limitation. Many people care about privacy to a rather low degree, and when you remove these people there are only a few who truly prioritise it. Privacy movements had victories in Europe, but these came from lawyers and policymakers, not a real community. And the opponents they faced were the same social media networks, if not even larger organisations.
Other communities are hamstrung by just one of these two limitations, with members who either are too weak in number and influence or who don’t sufficiently prioritise the cause. Groups of people who suffer from significant accessibility issues online or from internet scams are typically just too small to achieve their ambitions, despite the personal severity of their cause.
Changes in how the internet works
Eternal September. Meanwhile, it is also possible for a default community to be limited even with many members, if they don’t prioritise the cause. These are the default communities which tend to form in response to evolving internet primitives: fundamental changes in the nature of the internet.
The first such change came when the online world evolved from a secluded network to the cultural zeitgeist. Writing in a time so distant that people could use their full government name online, Dave Fisher lamented on a Usenet forum that “September 1993 will go down in net.history as the September that never ended.”
He was talking about AOL’s decision to let millions of its customers access the internet for the first time ever. Internet users in the USA, numbering just 2% in 1993, more than quadrupled, ballooning to 9% by 1995.
The flood of new users overwhelmed the existing Usenet forums. And whilst disgusted oldtimers made t-shirts and text posts in protest, little else happened to protect the internet they loved. When push came to shove, Usenet was just a pastime. The internet which came next was different to Usenet, but it wasn’t bad enough to be worth seriously opposing.
Almost two decades on it happened again, when the internet crossed the 2 billion user count in 2011. That January, TechCrunch explained Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google. Of course, SEO fought battles on your eyeballs since the Usenet days, but whilst Google had originally swung the balance back towards users, SEO bait and content farms were back on top by 2011.
Two major changes soon came to the Google algorithm, called Panda and Penguin, but the appeal of monetising a customer base that has since grown to many more billions means that still today there is the common feeling that SEO ruined the internet and Google pulled the trigger.
But who really cares?
A whole host of startups have sought to do internet search without SEO bait.
In 2011 TechCrunch sung the praises of blekko, a search engine which used human curation to find better results, and many search engines have risen up and fallen away since.
Others have also tried human curation (Sproose, Mahalo).
Thematic engines grouped results on a visual map (Kartoo, Quintura, Grokker).
Semantic tools promised to respond to your underlying intention, rather than keywords (Kosmix, hakia, Yebol).
Others tried to compete on the back end: a bigger data set (Cuil), an open source algorithm (Wikia Search), or aggregated results from other engines.
Now is the era of the AI search: Neeva, You, Perplexity. But the lesson from two decades of failure to displace Google is that the default community which says they want an internet untouched by SEO bait… will happily accept SEO for the benefit of convenience. Google in the 2010s was different to Google in the 2000s, but it wasn’t bad enough to be worth seriously opposing.
That notwithstanding, AI is a main character all on its own. Changes in how internet content gets made strikes even deeper than how it gets searched. And unlike Usenet posters or Google searchers, creators from art to entertainment have a lot to lose from computers which let anyone do their job in an instant. What comes next could be bad enough to be worth seriously opposing.
The dynamism that default communities so often lack is present and well in singer Holly Herndon and her partner-in-every-sense Mat Dryhurst. For years at the forefront of AI applications in music, Herndon advocates for the AI creative revolution just as passionately as she advocates for a specific path of its development: one that accommodates creators rather than running roughshod over their rights.
To identify what the pair have done well, we should remember what makes Designed Communities so effective: institutionalised methods to accumulate assets, coordinate people, and allocate capital. With their organisation Spawning, Herndon and Dryhurst are building these structures atop a much stronger foundation: a default community deeply motivated to shape the future of computed creativity.
Spawning is most successful today as a coordination device. Their tools are the first in the world that give artists an idea about whether AI models have been unethically trained on their work, and they make it easy for artists to declare an opt-out from future model training, as well as tools to block AI scrapers.
The aim is to create an animal welfare food label for AI models. So far, artists have protected 80 million images with the service. Whether AI companies recognise any opt-out is up to them, but Spawning’s aim is to persuade the world that stolen training data is as unethical as factory farmed meat.
Respected visual models like StabilityAI’s Stable Diffusion V3 already adhere to the opt-out, as do Hugging Face’s AI development tools, making it “effortless to honour creator wishes”. The cold start problem is out of the way.
More recently, Spawning have launched Source.Plus, a 40 million-strong dataset of opt-in and public domain imagery. Building a visual AI model that respects artists is now a choice that engineers make with a few lines of code.
The fact that Spawning’s tools represent millions of images, and are thus relevant, is testament to a massive public coordination success that likely could not have happened without the deep ties that artists have to the cause.
Having raised $3m and built a team of 6, Spawning is attempting to accumulate and allocate capital as effectively as it has coordinated people. It is easy to write a thesis explaining why it will fail, why Big Tech-backed AI juggernauts will win, and why everyone will go along with them. But the strong foundations of Spawning’s ambition make it an underrated bet that aims to change the world.
Personal values
For Spawning, values play second fiddle to the specific issues they work to tackle. But internet adventurers can also build Default Communities around the values themselves.
This practice is well-known as the subtlest form of advertising. Brands don’t spend millions at the Superbowl to just get 100 million eyes on their product. They advertise at the Superbowl to connect their brand with a set of values. It’s not just the fact that loads of people watch Superbowl ads. It’s the fact that everybody knows that loads of people watch Superbowl ads, and thus everybody knows the values each brand is trying to connect with.
The attempt quickly becomes self-fulfilling as people who want to reflect that value self-select into buying the associated product. Whether it’s soft drinks or cars, the work of a brand marketer is to corner a cultural niche and then, rather than moving onto the next one (which would dilute the brand), occupy that niche for decades.
The brand marketer opportunity is exponentially larger on the internet, where cultural connections spread further and faster than anywhere else. Much like the Superbowl squeezes smaller forms of marketing that can’t generate such broad cultural connections, advertising at internet gathering points will squeeze the Superbowl.
Yet whilst there are billions of people online, such internet gathering points do not yet exist. Hence why Meta is investing so much in the metaverse, which is where these cultural connections will form online. And hence the excitement of Meta, Reddit, Roblox, and the like for digital assets, which are the medium for these cultural connections: over 1.5 million people adopted NFL-themed avatars during last year’s Superbowl, for example.
Digital assets are uniquely powerful cultural symbols because their owners have meaningful property rights and their provenance can be trusted. They can thus be transferred to anyone at negligible cost, and their authenticity and value can be trusted across the entire internet, not just within the walled garden of a given social network. Testifying to this, numerous organisations are working to tokenise values, culture, and authenticity, like KPMG and their partner Awsm for brand equity and Blackbird for restaurants.
However, the most common values which digital assets have been used to symbolise have so far been wealth and exclusivity. When you set an NFT as your Twitter profile picture, this is all you can achieve. By contrast: wearing your Vans at the skatepark (or on Roblox) is an authentic use of the brand, because it is a product of and a complement to your original behaviour. Compelling brands and communities cannot simply be promoted with cash: how they are shown to the world matters.
Internet gathering points and digital assets allow people to authentically express their identity and values online. Gathering points are the where and digital assets are the how. As these complements come together (sooner rather than later), new values-based communities will be consecrated and grow online; digital assets will be how their members signal the values they hold dear.
Few communities have done this better than crypto projects Base and $Higher. A community built around being action-oriented, your own person, and supportive of others, Base quickly became one of the largest competitors in its sector. The clear exposition of Base’s values attracted developers who sought to build products for the type of people those values appealed to, creating a cycle of growth which allowed Base to make a huge impact in its niche, with plans to spread across the rest of the internet too.
The Higher story is much the same. “It's for all those aiming to do more, to think bigger, to leave their mark on the world.” The community-turned-movement is currently sponsoring a group of Higher Athletes who align with the brand’s optimism and ambition. Like Vans in skate culture, wearing Higher gear is a product of and a complement to your original behaviour.
The Base-Higher playbook is this. Harness the power of digital assets to develop cultural connections with a set of values, and then bring dynamism to the Default Community which emerges (rather than ‘forms’) around them. This helps community members take effective actions to promote those values, where the price of membership is that those actions complement the interests of the dynamic actor (for Base: building on the Base chain; for Higher, using common memetic symbols).2
But the approach of recognising these deeper sources of connection, which people already share, is common to both. Today, there is enormous interest in building new communities, but it is not the case that if you want to change the world, you have to start anew. Instead, build where passion already exists, and is latent, waiting to be awakened.
I warmly invite you to read the full essay on Folklore.
In the middle of the spectrum lies communities which combine elements of both those Default and Designed. Typically, members of these middle communities form ties around shared passions, but with no shared purpose. Their membership is a disinterested impulse, to borrow de Tocqueville’s term. But because these Coincidental communities tend to form around specific ideas, they can adopt a shared purpose when motivated to by leaders linked to those ideas.
The playbook is simpler for the Default Communities formed as unintended consequences. When a dynamic actor like Spawning forms a direct connection with the Default Community’s unifying force (like concern about AI art), the actions which that community takes are already naturally aligned to the dynamic actor’s interests.