I’ve been toying in the last day or so with the idea of ‘outfluencers’ as a way to explain / express the movements of people and conversations away from typical scale-driven central gravity to a more free-floating, incentive neutral set of conditions that prioritizes non-programmatized human interaction (spontaneity), non-qualified, open participation (serendipity) and non-transactional benefit (serenity, kinda). Looking at ‘frictionmaxxing’ or ‘funmaxxing:’ (or various other zeitgesty trends captured in the links this week and lately) through those three vectors lends creedence to the inevitability, I think, that our shared technoanxiety is misplaced and that the natural state of AI etc will be like that of electricity; eventually invisible, omnipresent, less a consideration than an expectation. Except in places where it’s not (ie the natural world, in physical work etc), but in those it won’t be missed, either. “Outfluencer,” is a term that already exists, unsurprisingly, given its logical linguistic relationship to ‘influencers’; it’s used primarily (logically) by the Outdoor industry - but to describe Influencer-y behaviour in nature. I’m talking about something different: selective self-removal from big optimized system to embark spontaneously on building (or letting something be built) small. Not because it’s inherently hard, or inherently ‘anti’, but because it seems inherently (emotionally?!) logical right now. - Ben Dietz
