What's a Culture Network?

Polylude brands itself a ‘culture network’.

This is not some marketing gimmick to distance itself from the familiar ‘social network’. Rather, it’s to contend that calling these platforms ‘social’ is at-best misguided. Rather than describing a strength, the name is inherited from the mathematical formalism at their heart.

A vibrant social life is a complex social life. Whereas the virtue of networks — by contrast with communities — is to simplify. Life within a community offers a nuanced view of those around us across time, but we join networks to focus interests toward narrow, more transient purposes. While we hope Polylude can be a stepping stone to richer communities and networks, we think it’s important — given the possible influence a platform can have — to be clear-eyed about our nature.

The course of becoming cultural is like a ‘reduction’ in cooking. After a simmer, with distance from personal particulars, only those socially-salient essences of past experience remain. We see this process at play on — and given shape by — our tools for interacting.

A strong affordance of tools is to create distance: for one, distance from our individual limits. Yet a cost of defying these limits is to threaten the affinity between what we intend, and the results of our actions. This threat invites us to consider when this trade-off is worth it, and how to mitigate harm when uncertain.

Perhaps religion (from the Latin verb religare, ’to bind’) in part arose in response to this tendency. The author Kobo Abe observed:

“The Rope” and “The Stick,” together, are one of humankind’s oldest “tools.” “The Stick” is for keeping evil away; “The Rope” is for pulling good toward us; these are the first friends the human race invented. Wherever you find humans, “The Rope” and “The Stick” also exist.

With communication practices or tools, some broad classes of distancing are:

• Identity: a choice of the somebody — or nobody — to interact as
• Individuality: where person and collective become indistinct
• Asynchrony: where the delivery and receipt of messages are separated in time
• Physical: where parties are not physically present together
• Environmental: where the communication medium abstracts away physical characteristics of the parties and their environment

The development of such varied forms is a primary character in the story of humanity. With new distancings made possible with the emergence of written culture, to our more recent electronics and their virtualising of experience. The key to creating distance is the ability to reanimate facets of the past. Much like developments in astronomy enable us to see the past through the cosmic background radiation, advances in technology dissolve constraints on what we may revive — whether old or recent.

In essence, distancing is what distinguishes the cultural from the social. To recognise something as a ‘culture’ is merely to give a name to such ’life forms’.

It is instructive to consider these definitions of ‘Social Network’, paraphrased from the Oxford definitions¹:

A network of social interactions and personal relationships

A dedicated website or other application enabling users to communicate with each-other.

And to contrast those with…

Culture Network (Polylude definitions):

A network structure that encodes cultural information

A dedicated common medium for the sharing and synthesis of cultural information.

Culture Media:

Media designed to support the growth of a population of microorganisms, cells, or small plants²

Dedicated common media for the sharing and synthesis of cultural information.

Anything that fits the first term — Social Network — matches the second.

And, as is made even more visible by the third — Culture Media — the shift in focus to culture makes a critical difference: The definition of social network pretends that the “dedicated website” stands by, neutral, merely “enabling” social interactions. Whereas the culture network can recognize itself as giving life — and channeling attention — to history.

The channel drawing the most criticism is how platforms choose to moderate content.

Far less scrutiny is given to how platforms shape context. And the kinds of distance this facilitates.

And even when context is considered, it is often reduced to a problem of content control rather than platform design. Rather than acknowledging the platform’s influence over engagement and interpretation, some players take all the blame. Rather than develop their potential to connect varied perspectives and develop the wisdom of crowds, platforms feign omniscience or facilitate partisan actors to isolate the “bad”. To the extent that technology acts as a model for imitating, favoring the stick over the rope invites tribalism.

Polylude strives to be more conscious of the cultures it helps ‘synthesize’.

Its prime tenets are:

1. Encourage accessible context from the bottom-up

   Context — needed to get a sense both of how and what someone thinks — is crucial for the meeting of different perspectives to be constructive.

   Polylude makes context a first-class citizen, by offering ideas a regular structure of topics, statements, and links, and transparent access to original contexts for shared ideas. A form in which it becomes easier to see how views once thought distant can have a lot in common with those already held. And how these wholes are more than the sum of their parts.

   The flip-side of making context more visible is that its absence also comes into relief. Stimulating further exploring for one’s own ideas, or informing one’s trust in others’. And at the same time more clearly separating rhetoric from argument, to encourage constructive dialog.

2. Give space for private reflection on and remixing of complex ideas

   The commitment to accessible context is not just from the time ideas are first published, but goes back to the earliest moments of new thoughts. Each playpen canvas is a space allowing careful review of the ways different thoughts relate to each-other, before putting them into public view. This way, players can more fully contextualize their attitude to ideas they share from others.

   A Premier Subscription allows selectively extending this privacy indefinitely.

3. Give the old and the new similar visibility

   Moving a timeline of one’s thoughts into the background means to bring the organized rather than the accidental connections between thoughts — whether coherent or not — into the foreground. A full timeline is still present, but even that is still viewed in the presence of a two-dimensional canvas. Together, these qualities can prompt divergent thinking while exploring your — or others’ — ideas. As well as keeping the past in dialog with the present.

A culture rewarding those who succeed in spite of limited tools inspires ingenuity. To offer poor tools and then diminish crude results neglects the creativity otherwise celebrated and hides the potential it sacrifices.

No platform can cure the many ills that threaten societies. But cultures have a chance. And to the extent that anything shapes culture — that its influence exceeds its grasp — we aspire for such influence to thrive on dialog, not disguise.

Curious to join on this journey?