Living my life often feels like hopping from one Monty Python sketch to another, each moment utterly absurd and disjointed from the next. It leaves me in awe at the sheer unpredictability of it. It’s hilariously absurd and inexplicably fun. I love it.
I grew up watching the Iranian version of Monty Python and started reading Camus when I was 14. I don’t know if these two only contributed to how I interpret my subjective experience or if they hyperstitiously caused it. Regardless, long ago I found joy in eternally rolling the boulder uphill, embracing its absurdity and finding happiness in the journey. I find much comfort in the agency that absurdism provides, in being able to set meaning subjectively rather than searching for it in the objective realm.
There’s an issue with embracing absurdism — the world is in search of cohesion and meaning while you embrace the objective lack of both. This search for cohesion and meaning percolates in product design. Social networks cannot embrace the multi-faceted nature of their users. This further fractures identity across variously optimized social networks.
Navigating each social network is like performing an opera in a language invented by a society of particularly cultured dolphins — beautiful to those who understand it, utterly bewildering to everyone else. Just as this opera would challenge the audience's perceptions and expectations, so too does the experience of managing our identities across platforms challenge our sense of self and communication.
I’m supposed to be a professional on LinkedIn, fun on Instagram, and an iNteLleCtUaL on formerly-known-as-Twittery. Yet, none comes close to my full experience.
Farcaster’s design embraces the multiplicity of human experience via Channels. Users create Channels around a certain community, or a topic. But what really drives the channel is the vibe.
The ‘vibe’ isn’t the new age, Buddha-Bar, Tuluminess of your spirituality. The vibe is the feel of the current Monty Python sketch that you’re in. Channels are numerous yet each is confined and unique in its vibe. The collective of channels on Farcaster mirror the range of subjective experiences in plurality of social settings far closer than any other social network.
Farcaster’s embrace of our disjointedness unintuitively allows for a totality of self-expression. Perhaps we can call it gesamtausdruck — after all, some feelings can only be expressed via German compound words.
Today’s Monty Python sketch is the meta: The Temperament of the Vibes.
P.s.: if you vibed, consider collecting the post or one of the images.
