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Chris La Tray's avatar

I love the photos, thank you.

I really should have stopped reading after the second paragraph. I suppose having "twitter" in the title should have served as a trigger warning because I just can't take it anymore. I think if it was anyone writing but you I would have stopped.

It seems to me that people aren't going to do anything about changing any of this because all they see are the so-called "advantages" but unless the hate and misery are on their own doorstep (it is, actually, but most are oblivious) they ignore it all. I need to log off, stay logged off, and try and live what's left of my life because the discourse makes me wonder why to even bother with these final few years. I don't even want to write a fucking newsletter anymore! Gah!

Ugh.

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Mike Sowden's avatar

And now I understand your backstory with Twitter a little better. I know we'd talked about it before, but not in this level of detail, this amount of *yikes*.

Like Elle in another comment, I have hope for Twitter. At least the idea of it, which is based on the best of it (which may be over now). It's easier for me to have hope, though, because I'm a middle-aged white dude who gets to hide in his Britishness when under attack, and that means I will automatically have an easier ride than just about every woman and non-binary person out there. It also means that if I publish something, I'm far more likely to have the subject matter the focus of all the attention, rather than my identity.

So my hope for Twitter is that all this foul, useless nonsense is in the process of burning down (in particular, it seems Mr Musk's employment law legal troubles, particularly re. Europe, are looking like the mother of all shitstorms for him, the kind he seems to lack the emotional temperament to sail through. That alone might do it).

The world needs a digital commons, that's a fact - a place where people can meet and actually truly talk across huge ideological divides, and sit comfortably with each other while having wildly different ideas and identities. I don't know what that could look like - but I think you'd know better than most, Antonia. You're the person I come to with ideas about this stuff (no pressure!).

But part of it has to be relearning *how* to use something like Twitter. About how quote-tweeting "idiots" is actually THEM getting YOU to do their viral marketing. About how performative shaming is the exact opposite of problem-solving (so if you really care about an issue being fixed, you try something else). And about how what we say online comes with great responsibility towards others, because it can have an effect we'll never see, so if we're broadcasting our own dread and anxiety and rage into the timline, or our own dread-filled, anxious, raging 'hot takes' on things that have little to do with what's actually likely to happen, we have to be fully aware that all those words and feelings have the potential to land on someone else and utterly ruin their day.

If we can't learn to use our empathy that way, I have no idea how a digital commons could be anything but a hopeless, angry, bitter and cynical place - like Twitter so often is, right now.

"What I loathe is how it’s been dictated to us."

Yep, that. But maybe - only up to now. Maybe things are shifting. Facebook's stagnated and shrank, Twitter is self-immolating, Instagram's a well-documented farce.

The thing about newslettering being the new Golden Age Of Blogging: it's easy to forget how much blogs shook stuff up. And it was mostly a grassroots thing. Blogging DNA (Kottke's phrase: https://www.niemanlab.org/2013/12/the-blog-is-dead/) is now found in every app, every corporate attempt to open a communications channel with customers. Blogging didn't stop social media from nibbling away at it - especially the lost battle to keep comments on blogs! - but hey., here we are again, and what was lost is now found anew. Look at that. Comments are back. In *newsletters*, of all places.

So I'm hopeful for Twitter, but only because its first version now looks like such a failed experiment, and because there are fresh platforms to use to think about the problem. Next Twitter? That might work. But I bet it'll emerge from the ground up - which means there's real power to change things there. That's my hope.

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