Distributed Heterotopia

Oct 23, 2025

Chatbots are the ultimate the anti-third space: where there are no friction, no genuine otherness, no stakes in your wellbeing, infinite availability to validate whatever you bring. The perfect tool for someone to get lost in their own head while feeling like they’re having a dialogue.

we’ve removed cigarettes for good public health reasons, but we never replaced the social functions that they served. Like there aren’t acceptable equivalent that. What else forced you outside regularly so that you can create or we can create a predictable gathering spot. Which also provides a legitimate excuse for idleness that takes a specific amount of time. Where across class lines between the janitor and the exactive. And visually gave you something to do with your hands.

cigarette gav me an excuse to be outside where the encounter of a neighbor was even possible. But it can’t give me the social script that makes the encounter normal, the syncronicity and chance enounter script got lost somewhere between the porch culture that a lot of redline complexes like in Black and Latino neighborhoods, where this suburban isolation of the $350k condo produces.

And now I’m back to the falling leaves, the wind, the cold, Claude, and the closed garage door.(REQUOTE INTO A)

We tried to create these spaces through various neoliberal technologies of attention extraction. The creation of sociality is produced under the gaze of an insular topic, via discord, Reddit, and even threads. So intellectual randomness, multi disciplinary approaches to thinking, that integrates your everyday events with dialogue, and myth making can even occur. It’s so easy to just, be with the leftist group, the sigma alpha gooning group, the hyperrealvisuals of instagram, for market forces. (REQUOTE INTO C)

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REQUOTE A:

the barbershop isn’t just a place to get a haircut, for a lot of minority communities it’s also it’s therapy. it’s news. it’s networking. it’s where you process what’s happening in your life with people who know you, see you regularly, have stake in the community. You’ll have a generational connection to the community where the barber would see the growth, of you and your family. It’s also where dissemination of ancestral knowledge, trends, memes, being produced. (REQUOTE INTO B)

And it’s being destroyed algorithmstically. Noble’s algorithms of oppressions showed us how search algorithms aren’t neutral, that they’re amplification or minimization systems where capital is required to distribute to new locations. Thus amplify existing inequalities, for example my parents Chinese restaurants kept getting calls for yelp, so when youre a new Black student on a campus, search for Black-owned businesses, for barbershops in your neighborhood, the algorithm decides what’s visible.

Now your barbershop that’s been in the community for 30 years is competing with chains that have marketing budgets and can game the algorithm, great clips can buy more yelp ad space. One bad review from someone who doesn’t understand the culture? your rating drops, which spirals into your visibility drops. new customers, students, transfers can’t find you.

Creating a death spiral where the rent keeps going up, gentrification is pricing out the community that kept you alive.

We destroyed the social infrastructure that minority communities built to survive, replaced it with platforms that extracted value while providing none of the actual functions those spaces served and then we act surprised that people are isolated, that communities are fractured, that no one knows their neighbors, and they say we have a loneliness epidemic. Whether for men or for women, all for the sake of extractive capitalism dictated by the a/b testing of Silicon Valley.

Progress.

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Requote B

so much of this analysis and exploration was lived experience. My uncles restaurant had a Black barbershop next door, it had a college bookstore next doors even a papa John’s where baby Wei, when he was bored of restaurant can just go hangout in. The Blackbarber shop taught me that therapeutic space where unofficial means of meaning production was establish, but it was more official than any TED talk. The papa John and bookshop allowed me to just wonder around and talk to the workers there lol.

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Requote C:

One possibility that Andre Brock (@docd_re) argues for in distributed Blackness, using the Negro Blackness Green book as a baseline for the radical act of community integration underneath the hegemony of whiteness to creating networks of safety, community. The Green Book, Brock argued was infrastructure for Black survival when institutions excluded you, and a precursor to the modern internet network style interaction before the creation o the internet that was used for war strategy meetings.

This precursor for survival emerged from the conditions Afro-Pessimism describes:

Blackness as permanent social death due to slavery’s afterlife and neoliberal extraction, for some reason it always reminds me of Capitlaist Realism of Mark Fisher. But there’s an optimistic reversal: Afro-Optimism.

In optimistic turn, Black digital practice doesn’t just survive within this matrix, it transforms it through Black joy and the creation of joy under the duress of whiteness.

Today’s Black digital networks do the same work. Not just adapting to platforms designed by white masculinity for white masculinity, but hacking them, using them against their intended purpose, creating counterpublics where the algorithm thought there would be isolated consumers. For example from the Hulu Series Black Twitter, Hashtags were used to create community discussions like #BlackGirlMagic, live-tweeting Scandal together, creating memes that moved culture.

There was laughter, there was joy, there was TwitterAfterDark, all these became the perfect example where a digital third space that was both distributed AND relational, connected by the singular act, of being Black, and the recursive nature of subject formation of Blackness in the digital space. It was simultaneously "a megaphone for people who are on the margins" and a space where Black people could simply be themselves while creating anti Police resistance and Mac and Cheese recipes.

This was one of the fundamental anthesis to the Twitter community idea where a person, or brand, or group can only produce legitimate knowledge, where it’s the posts went from can/cannot — a scholar can only post about Foucault, or Critical theory, and instead — like humans, be multi faceted beings that can post about shitposting, AND cat pics AND Foucault analysis.

You mean, I don’t have to be a nerd all the time, and I can just relax?

Thus screw the respectability politics, this insistence on full humanity, full multi dimensional humanity that is both, serious AND silly, political AND playful, that was Black Twitter’s most radical intervention. Which also heavily influence the digital social landscape because it became a libidinal affective economics. Where authenticity ultimately turned into production of attention economy. Wendy’s marketing team for example, that sh didn’t exist for a long time.

(REQUOTE INTO D)

Wendys can be stufpid and funny and fight Burger King. It challenged the white academic model where legitimacy requires performing singular expertise at all times.

On Black Twitter, the same person could drop a thread on algorithmic oppression in the morning and post thirst traps by afternoon, similar to the barbershop had always worked this way, this deep conversation about politics flowing into jokes about someone’s hairline, because at the end of the day, the private is the political.

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Requote D

Even within the book distributed Blackness the way Brock writes has that form of play, on top of the deep theoretical sht. Enmeshed not only in professional academic speech but also, shows he is also playing with the dynamics of language.