A world has ended. Welcome to the new world pioneers!

We live in the ruins of the 1st networks. Facebook, X, Instagram, Telegram, TikTok are the modern equivalent of ancient giant architecture that sank civilisations. They are the 1st networks. They did great things but their time has ended.

They are the proverbial1 Easter Island statues that destroyed Easter Island, built for abundance, resulted in scarcity.

They failed. The failure is visible, tangible and irreversible.

They look tarnished and erroded. The end of their world took a toll on the remains. As we walk among the ruins, nature reclaims their work. Large swaths will disappear in geological layers of irrelevance. Future scholars will dig them up.

The second wave of social is forming. Currents of ownership, real connection, shared values, privacy bring tremendous energy to this wave. We’re here to ride the wave.

Their failure is not our opportunity. It’s our calling. We need to stand up from the calamities and deluges their fall caused. We need to stand up, dust ourselves and continue.

Their wondrous two billion2 DAU stands tall just like the ancient architectural artefacts we go visit holding a slushy and our camera app on, almost unexplainable, hard to figure out – why did they ever have to do that? We study and learn the technique. We admire the audacity. We then do better.

  1. Apparently the Easter Island ecocide theory is debunked by DNA analysis but the metaphor still holds true ↩︎
  2. A conservative number ↩︎

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