All Alone in the Zeitgeist

We are now halfway through 2025, at least as far as Wednesdays go. Well, we're almost halfway there as far as Wednesdays go. As I learned the first time I did a Wednesday series, when the year starts on a Wednesday, there will be 53 of them. Even so, today is the 26th Wednesday of the year, and the last Wednesday of June. Maybe this comes as a surprise, since 2025 has at times felt like it's already been 100 years long.

Today is also the day after New York City's primary election. Don't worry, I don't want to discuss the actual election, neither the candidates nor the results. What I want to talk about is the zeitgeist.

One of the things I most loved about Twitter, in the days when there were things to love about Twitter, was the feeling I had when it seemed like everyone was online experiencing the same good thing together. It was almost a rush, a sense of excitement or shared joy or even a collective confirmation. If you lived in California and you felt an earthquake, you could open Twitter and type "earthquake?" as your feed filled up with similar questions. (Earthquakes aren't always good, but the small ones that caused no harm and made you wonder if you'd imagined it, those were fun to share.) Or if you watched the Oscars, you could share red carpet opinions and make jokes about the proceedings. Sports too, like the World Cup or the Super Bowl. There would inevitably be complaints from someone who absolutely hates awards shows or thinks football (take your pick) is dumb, but even when I grumbled I always loved watching my feed temporarily transform.

There was an effervescence to this feeling, a fleeting lightning-in-a-bottle you could watch build and then dissipate in real time if you were paying attention. It's a little like another one of my other favorite feelings, which is when a group of New York City residents are all annoyed at the same thing in the same moment, like a train delay while standing on a subway platform. Sometimes when that happens I feel like someone has scratched an itch in my brain, and all the collective and wildly varied energetic frequencies of the people around me have momentarily converged into one harmonious, if aggravated, hum.

(I secretly believe the sound of New Yorkers annoyed in harmony is the true song of the city, but that's a discussion for another time.)

I watched this collective vibration bubble up last night on Bluesky, as the results of the primary rolled in. Bluesky is, of course, the notoriously progressive social media platform, per the various agreements and/or accusations of The Discourse, so this will come as no surprise. I had just come in from meeting up with a new neighborhood friend, and we had spent the better part of two hours having a delightfully wide-ranging conversation that towards the end had touched on the internet and online social spaces. The confluence of this conversation with that online experience, at the midpoint of this somewhat exhausting year, reminded me of a big question we tried to answer when I worked at Instagram, one that in a funny way related to questions I'd asked at Slack and even at Spotify:

How do you build online spaces that allow you to capture the zeitgeist but that are not only about the zeitgeist? What would it look like to have an online space that allowed for a zeitgeist-esque experience but was not limited only to that experience? Why is it that online spaces tend to be either/or? Either you are in the thick of it or you are skimming the surface, skating around the perimeter; either you are a part of it or you have no idea it's going on. Can there even be a zeitgeist in an era of bubbles and echo chambers, of angry divides and horseshoe theories, of personalized algorithms and For You Pages, of fluid identity markers and more gatecrashers than gatekeepers?

Spoiler alert: We never answered any of these questions.

I still like thinking about them, though. We build all these technologies and use words like "home" and "room" and "close friends" and "private" to signify...what? Have you ever stopped to think about what a "home screen" in an app is or should be? A group of us sat in a conference room one time at Spotify and spent hours discussing the different mental models a person could have if you told them you were building their "home" on an app. Is home a sanctuary where you come to take a break from the intrusions of the outside world? Is home where all your stuff is? Is home simply a rest stop where you recharge in order to head back out into the world to discover new things and have new adventures? Now correlate all this to an app, and think about what it might tell you about the organization of "home" or the introduction of recommended or even promoted content – both of which you need to show to your end user for business purposes.

At Instagram, the team I was on wanted to see if we could reimagine how people spent time on the app. We didn't want to reimagine them based on the existing framework, though, where there's a feed and a post and a bunch of comments. What if we could create a temporary space for specific events, like a portal would appear in the app that would allow you to enter a sort of bubble – like, a literal effervescent ephemeral bubble, not the bubbles we pejoratively declare other people are stuck in. This bubble would be connected to your normal online world but would not define it, would allow you to participate in it the way you would any sort of event in the physical world without either dominating or being wholly disconnected from your regular sphere of existence. What would something like that look like online?

Let me give you an example. Pretend for a moment you do not hate award shows, and let's use the Oscars. Even if you love movies, even if you love fashion, even if you love popular culture or roasting celebrities, that is probably not the entirety of your life or the sole defining characteristic of your physical world existence. If you have an Oscar party, it is merely a party. The Oscars don't invade your life like a website takeover, changing the colors and pushing stuff out of the way with advertisements and dominating your living space. (They may be your entire personality for a week or two, but that's different.)

But let's say you want to post online about the Oscars. What are your options? Well, you could hang out on a forum or go on a dedicated subeddit, but that's mostly text based with some photos, and maybe all your friends aren't there. You could hang out in Discord or Slack or some other chat-type space, but then it might be only friends, and not connected to the jokes or videos or the bigger stream of conversation. Plus it all goes by so fast. You could post on Bluesky or X but unless everyone else is posting along with you, your posts get lost in all the other random stuff people are sharing. Instagram or TikTok would be great because they're so visuals-heavy, but then you miss out of the fun riffing of Reddit comments or Twitter-esque jokes, and also you have to either post on your own Stories or feed, essentially shouting into the void, or you have to host or join a live experience, which is like the sort of party where everyone is yelling at once and absolutely no one is having any kind of conversation.

When I first went to college, I started going to raves. Like real underground raves in warehouses and on beaches. I mean, of course I did. It was 1992 in the San Francisco Bay Area. I also went to less-underground raves, but the bigger and more commercial they got, the less I enjoyed them. That's not true for everyone. For some people, the bigger and louder and more garish, the better. Some people like Times Square, for heaven's sake. But even at the big dumb raves, and in some ways even in Times Square, it wasn't just all one loud experience, nor was it "I am staying home with three of my friends." You might have the main room where the huge speaker stacks were and the headline house DJ, but there might be a smaller room with drum & bass, and there was usually some kind of chill out room since everyone on drugs would eventually need somewhere to sit and say "oh my god can I touch your hair it's so soft."

There are people who will never, ever, ever in one million years want to go to a dance club. There are people who want to go to as many dance clubs as they can all over the world. There are people who will go to a dance club for fun one time but only with friends and they will not be in the thick of things. There are people who will go solo and dance all night. Even in our shared physical experiences, there is usually – although not always! – some kind of way to move in and out of experiences, to engage with them on your terms, which can range from "not at all" to "all of it." Many of us – although again, definitely not all of us – try to engage in these experiences in a way that doesn't entirely impose on or detract from the experiences of those around us.

So why are so many of our online spaces so siloed? Why do our options seem to boil down to, like, talking TO a few people or talking AT one person or suddenly having 20,000 people talking AT you? I know there are engineering limitations but I refuse to believe the best and brightest minds of our generation (only some sarcasm intended here) can only build individual feeds OR chats OR direct messages OR comment threads OR broadcast surfaces that may result in hordes of strangers suddenly commenting on a passing opinion you shared without fully thinking it through. Why can't we build worlds online that reflect the varying facets of our wonderful sparkly personalities, that allows us to participate in the different and sometimes overlapping spheres we inhabit, and to dip our toes into the zeitgeist without having to face the firehose that is the inevitable result of millions of people simultaneously and spontaneously posting about the same thing? There are some people who thrive in these environments, and those tend to be people who are somehow fueled by outrage, are megalomaniacs, or simply have an ironclad sense of self and unshakable confidence in what they share. That does not describe most people.

It's funny that in our rush to democratize content and public opinion, to knock down the traditional obstacles that kept voices from being heard or people from achieving success, we introduced some new ones. I suppose that always happened (yet another department of unintended consequences). But I do believe that there is a new zeitgeist slowly taking shape. I can feel a whisper of it, even if it's some ways off. People cannot be outraged and angry forever. People cannot always knock down or be knocked down, and the walls we're running into are getting bigger everyday. Eventually we're going to have to think about what we do next. So what will can we build that will get us there?

Until next Wednesday.

Lx