The future is built by small, weird groups

Gathering in niche communities.

This is the foreword to the third annual print volume of my work, written by Austin Tindle. Paid subscribers at the Collector tier will receive their book in January.

This book is about building better futures. Not predicting them or demanding them, but actually building them. The essays here are experiments—attempts to explore how groups of people can create genuinely new things together. Utopian futures need a specific foundation. They grow in small, trust-rich groups. Groups that are small enough to stay weird, focused enough to get things done, and intentional enough for their work to build on itself over time

Most of the places we call online ‘communities’ are the exact opposite. They are defined by infinite content, and with it, infinite isolation.

The default state of our online world is frictionless, algorithmic, optimized for virality. These attributes have created an environment where we can always be comfortably numb, but never fulfilled. The platforms promise connection but deliver only the semblance of it: parasocial relationships with influencers, vicious arguments with strangers, hearts and shares that have no lasting meaning the moment we put the app aside.

Algorithm-driven content culture rewards the simple, the reactive, the tribal. The incentives are clear: be outraged or be ignored. You can pick a side or be invisible. React quickly or be irrelevant. We’ve found ourselves in a social system that punishes slow thinking, a system which has left no reason to engage in careful consideration and genuine curiosity.

The bigger the space, the less room is left for nuance. As communities scale past the group-size threshold where we can know each other as individuals, our shared fictions must simplify to remain coherent. Left versus right. Capitalism versus socialism. Good guys versus bad guys. The mass platforms surface binary thinking because binary thinking is the only thing that scales. And so we doomscroll through political outrage and cat videos, consuming the simplest, most compressed narratives without ever being tested in our beliefs.

What we consume binds us, it shapes our identities and gives us a shared foundation for understanding the world. Right now, we’re bound by algorithmic suggestions rather than any sort of deliberate choice. The recommendations arrive pre-chewed, optimized for engagement, designed to keep us clicking but never challenging us. We’re never challenged to build something of our own, never invited into the productive discomfort of making our own, original, half-formed ideas public.

Our dominant platforms make it harder for most people to imagine and build better futures. Instead, they make it feel impossible that things can get better. It’s another simple shared fiction that generalizes well, that gets as many heads as possible nodding together in a naive pessimism. “Things are bad and they won’t be getting better any time soon” is perhaps the most viral fiction of all. It’s not just dystopian, pessimistic thinking, but anti-utopianism, the idea that things not only won’t get better, they can’t get better.

This is naive pessimism masquerading as wisdom. We should reject it.

Not for naive optimism, the fantasy that things will simply get better on their own, that the arc of history bends automatically toward justice, and that we can passively hope our way into better futures. That’s just another comfortable fiction, another way to avoid the work.

“The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented,” Dennis Gabor wrote in Inventing the Future. We don’t wait for algorithm culture to reform itself. We don’t hope for platforms to prioritize people over engagement. We don’t consume our way to clarity.

Instead, we participate in small groups that gather in non-viral spaces. Spaces you can be weird and curious instead of reactionary and ironic. Intimate archipelagos instead of monoliths of infinite scale. We prioritize creation and raise the collective over the individual. We embrace the idea that writing is thinking and the best way to learn is to build.

Complex shared fictions can only emerge in these conditions. Productive tension rather than “one right answer”. Curious exploration over blind consensus. Discovery and dialogue, not “my team versus your team.”

The cool thing is that we can simply do these things ourselves. We can create the conditions where different futures become possible. We can embrace anti-anti-utopianism.

This is the philosophy of the works collected here in Elle Griffin’s Elysian: a rejection of the idea that things cannot get better, coupled with the recognition that better futures don’t arrive, but rather, are made. By small groups. In weird spaces. Through deliberate constraints and collective creation