The digital world of 2025 is an increasingly dark place—promises of an end-of-history, neoliberal technotopia have foundered on the rocks of monopoly, nativism, and a fractured epistemological understanding of the world. I’ve personally seen the retreat from the “digital public square” to semi-private spaces: group chats, invite-only servers, forums. Some of them are “group chats that rule the world.” Indeed, we seem to be, collectively, past “Peak Social Media.” This week, Julia Kieserman investigates the rise of a different sort of digital private space: social location sharing.

I saw a video recently about a game I'd never heard of called Technotopia. It looked interesting, despite some flaws. So I went to look it up on Steam and saw that it (1) had been updated a few times since the video came out, so maybe had fewer flaws, and (2) was a whole $3.34 at the time, on sale from a regular price of $5, so why the hell not try it?