The Happy Moron

Scott Hanselman expresses a thought well:

“I’m of a slightly older Internet generation that doesn’t believe everyone is a unique snowflake and that if everyone behaves with a “this is me, like me or leave me alone” attitude then anarchy (ahem, or the internet) will emerge.”

Community is hard. It means seeing other people and caring for other people. Sometimes it means sacrificing what you want because you believe other people are important.

I know what it is, even though I’m not very good at it.

Sacrifice isn’t mentioned very often on the internet. I think that’s because most of us approach the internet as something of an escape from the real, sacrificial world. The internet is a place where we can be who we want to be and portray ourselves as we want to be portrayed.

In some ways, the internet doesn’t feel real.

Facebook is a wonderful example of a mixing of the internet and the real world – it’s more real than the rest of the internet (people are who they say they are) but it’s less real than the real world (people pick their best photos for their profiles).

Of course, when you say it like that, the real world is less real than the real world, too.

If you want to make things work on the internet, eventually you wind up acknowledging the need to sacrifice, because the internet is really all about people, and people need to sacrifice in order to get along.