The Cult of Good Times
Everyone is the Good Times Gang
You know the group I'm talking about.
Maybe it's a crew you've had since your twenties. Maybe it's the people from that job, that city, that scene. Maybe it's the family group chat that quietly went toxic and nobody will name it. Maybe it's the community you used to feel held by that somehow just... dissolved.
Or maybe — and this is the part nobody talks about — you never got to have it at all. The third spaces closed before you got there. The platforms that replaced them turned out to be stages, not rooms. You have followers. You eat dinner alone.
We are living through the loneliness epidemic in real time. Not as metaphor. As lived, daily, undeniable fact. The infrastructure for forming community was quietly removed and replaced with something that looked like community from a distance but felt like performance up close.
The Good Times Gang
My version of the story has a name. Kenny gave it to us around 2007. It stuck the way good names stick — not because anyone voted on it, but because it was true. We were people who knew how to have a good time together. Nightclubs all over Toronto. Then Vancouver. Then wherever any of us ended up. A few hundred at the edges, seventy in the core. People who notice everything and filter nothing — who found each other in the specific way that people find each other when the room is right and the music is good and something clicks.
We've been to each other's weddings. We've watched each other's kids grow up. We've held each other through losses. We've shown up at cottages and on dancefloors and in hospital waiting rooms. For more than twenty-five years, across Toronto and Vancouver and New York and scattered everywhere else, we've been the people who show up for each other.
That's not nothing. That's the most important thing.
This is written from inside that love. It is not a verdict. It is an accounting — honest, because you deserve honesty — of what happened, and why I think the tools we've been building matter to people like us.
The Infrastructure We Were Given
For most of our existence as a group we lived on Facebook. Then Instagram. Then WhatsApp. And now we are firmly entrenched in a Signal thread that hasn't evolved in years — and smaller ones underneath it, private, that some people don't know exist. Walled gardens inside the walled garden. Some people feel the exclusion. Others are quietly relieved not to be in them. Both of those things being true simultaneously is its own kind of damage.
I tried to move us, more than once. It never fully worked. Not because the people didn't want to connect — they did, they do — but because the platforms had already shaped how we communicated. The feed had become the group. The algorithm had become the culture.
That was not an accident.
The platforms we were given were not designed to help communities survive hard moments. They were designed to maximize engagement. Those are not the same thing. Engagement optimizes for what keeps you looking at the screen. Survival optimizes for what keeps you in relationship when the relationship is difficult.
Those two things are almost perfectly opposed.
A platform that profits from your attention has no incentive to give you neutral ground for repair. No incentive to slow things down when the fast-moving dynamics of a group chat are doing damage. Every incentive to let the loudest voices dominate, to let performance substitute for presence, to let the appearance of connection replace the actual work of it.
We were not given the tools we needed. And we were actively kept from building our own — not through conspiracy, but through the more mundane mechanism of capture. Everyone already on the platform. Everyone's history already there. The switching cost too high. The alternative not yet built.
Good Times Aren't Enough
Here is something I've taken a long time to say out loud.
A group built on good times is built for one kind of weather. When the music is right and everyone shows up and the room is exactly what it's supposed to be — that's real. That mattered. It still does. But it is not connective tissue. It is not the thing that holds when things get hard.
And things get hard.
We showed up for the acute moments. Weddings. Hospitals. Losses. Those were real and they still are. What atrophied was everything in between — the maintenance, the hard conversations, the daily work of staying honest with each other.
The losses came. The fractures came. The slow drift of people in different directions, the moments that needed naming, the conversations that never happened because the platform always offered an easier path — a like, a reaction, a silence that could pass for presence. The muscles for repair never got used. So they weakened. So some of us are feeling it now — the not-held part. The group that shows up for the good times and goes quiet when it counts.
That is not entirely on the tools. But the tools made it easier to avoid than to address. Every hard conversation that could have been had in a room got routed around — by the feed, by the thread, by the option to simply not respond. Platforms are not designed for repair. They are designed for engagement. And discomfort doesn't engage.
So we kept using the tools that were failing us. We keep using them. The Signal thread sits mostly quiet. The sub-threads carry conversations the main group never sees. The fracture that everyone feels and almost nobody names keeps widening — not because people don't care, but because the infrastructure we're on gives us no place to stand while we have the hard conversation.
That's what I want to fix. Not the good times — those were always ours. The infrastructure for everything else.
What the Feed Takes From You
There is a specific thing that happens to communities inside the extraction economy.
The people with the most social capital — the ones at the center of the network, the ones who have been there longest — become the most insulated from the consequences of how they use that capital. Not because they are bad people. Because the infrastructure makes them so.
The feedback loop that would exist in a healthy community — where the people closest to you notice drift and come talk to you — gets interrupted. Not by malice. By architecture. The platform is between you and the signal.
What the old third spaces gave us, and platforms never could, was legibility. You could see each other. Not the curated version — the actual person, in a room, over time. Who showed up when it mattered. Who disappeared when things got hard. Who held the group together and who quietly drained it. The community was legible to itself.
That legibility is what made accountability possible. Not surveillance. Not judgment. Just — you could see the shape of things. Who the trust actually ran through. What the group actually valued versus what it said it valued.
Platforms make that impossible by design. The feed is flat. Everyone performs to the same audience. The actual texture of the relationships — who the real connectors are, where the real trust lives, who has been carrying the weight for years without recognition — disappears into the algorithm.
What We Didn't Honor
There's another failure underneath the platform failure. One I think about more, because it's ours.
The Good Times Gang is full of makers. DJs, producers, photographers, lighting designers, event organizers, visual artists, builders of all kinds. People who put real creative work into the culture we share — who make the rooms we dance in, who shape the sound, who show up every time with something they've built.
And we don't have a culture of honoring that.
Not because we don't care. Because we don't have language for it, and we don't have infrastructure for it. The contribution dissolves into the vibe. The person who held the room together for years gets the same credit as the person who showed up twice. The DJ who read the room perfectly at 4am, the photographer whose shots became the memory of the night, the organizer who absorbed a thousand invisible logistics so everyone else could be present — all of it just... flows into the shared experience and disappears.
On a platform, there's no mechanism to say: this person made this, and it mattered, and they should be recognized and compensated for it. The platform takes the creative output, serves it as content, and the maker gets a like. The attribution chain collapses at the point of upload. The value flows up, not back.
We inherited that culture. We practice it on each other. And some of the damage in that community — the specific bitterness that accumulates when people give and give and feel invisible — comes from that gap. Not from bad intentions. From the absence of any infrastructure that makes contribution legible.
There's a name for what was missing. It's called attribution. I'll show you what it looks like. — Ryan VETEZE aka b0b