Nia this is such a brilliant and necessary read, I am glad you shared it on River’s post. I didn’t know about your experience on twitter, it’s despicable how those people targeted you. This aligns with our last week conversation about social media and hate crimes. It is evident that as long as you use your voice and platform against extremism, you will get targeted specially if your reach is wider.
I love how you have connected everything back to your book and your father’s experience living under Stalin. Ownership has and will always remain a problem because of specific freaks whose extreme power and need to dominate surpass the basic human compassion and decency.
Swarna, thank you so much for going back to this and reading! It's one I feel I have to pull out again now and then because these questions keep coming up and so often it feels like most people don't understand what's at stake. I'm sorry you understand it, have had experiences that mean you do.
The Twitter thing was awful, but it was really just a manifestation of what my town faced. What really hit me was that it was from someone local. I live in a small town and the stripping away of trust, of not knowing *who*, it really got to me. But for people in the local Jewish community, it was all far, far worse. People's lives were truly ruined. I only faced a tiny part of it -- bad enough but nothing like what some of my friends were up against.
Nia it pains me to know that these circumstances still exist in your immediate locality. It only reinforces the belief that the light has to shine into these dark crevices of psyche that most of us don’t even know that exists. It brings back the memories of the recent Paris olympics incidents of blatant and open displays of antisemitism. Also proves that hate persists much like irrationality - in places most unexpected and most possibly thought to be hate free.
I strongly feel that way about the western world and its outwardly methods of dealing with racism. For an instance look at the recent UK protests and targeting of muslim immigrants in Britain and northern Ireland. Happens in India too, specially in sectarian states divided over religion based politics. I have so many opinions about it and honestly so tired of it. Why can’t humans put away the past and just be decent with one another? Why do we lack the ability to look at our problems and see the roots of them are not other people but we ourselves? We, as a species, seriously suck at self inquiry and observation of our own cruelty and ignorance.
I tend to get carried away by such discussions. All of these bothers me so much. Anyway, I am so glad to read that your town found a more supportive and collaborative way to tackle such hate. It is heartbreaking to know so many people felt the fear that they felt during that time. After reading this essay, I feel even more honoured to hold you in light of my compassion and friendship Nia, to know that you would stand against such unnecessary perpetuation of suffering, in whatever capacity, with whatever cost. It is because people like you exist that my love for this earth and my hope to work towards a better future for all her children is never lost.
Swarna, you’re not meant to make me cry on a morning when I’m dealing with a messy dog and a family trip to a cabin! But here I am, crying. Because you’re right, you know, what matters is knowing that there are people in the world who WILL stand up against hate. So often what people need is the courage of solidarity, to know they’re not standing up alone (for some reason I’m thinking of all those young female Taylor Swift fans who have been marching in the UK against the white supremacists).
I think about all of this too much, too. It’s so ancient and has taken so many forms. I think all the time about Abdullah Öcalan’s book The Sociology of Freedom and his tracing of these oppressions (which he firmly believes began and has perpetuated through oppression of women) back at least 5000 years to people who wanted to hoard power the way they started to hoard resources. But even that doesn’t quite get into the reality of “otherizing” people. I think about it all the time, including what was I otherize people and how to fight against the reality of their beliefs without dehumanizing them. It’s so, so hard.
I totally understand how you’re feeling. Isn’t it amazing to know that such wonderful people exist in our world—whether in person or online? The light of solidarity will always outshine the flames of hate. Haven’t we proven that countless times throughout history, in our struggles for justice and noble causes? We have, and we will continue to do so for generations to come.
Your recommendation is spot on, Nia. I’ve added it to my reading list. Oppression is so insidious, constantly shifting forms and finding new ways to target people more precisely. It reminds me of the figure of Ravana, the demon king from the Ramayana, who had 10 heads. The story goes that even if you cut off one of Ravana’s heads, another would grow in its place—making him nearly impossible to defeat. Oppression is like that: it may never fully disappear, but it’s always worth fighting against in our lifetime.
I love that story of Ravana and would love to read more of your writing about that! I was just listening to a conversation between two people who used to do dream therapy, and they talked a lot about Greek myths and the kinds of soul sicknesses they can represent, either individual or communal. I'd never thought of those stories as metaphorical representations of our internal demons and struggles. Maybe a lot of our most important traditional stories are important lessons.
Sending you a big, warm hug right back! 🤗 The fight for a just and better world will not give up.
Yes I think these archetypes do represent the duality of thought and the way of human mind and have always been relevant. Since the conception of these stories itself depicts the need for existence of objects of darkness for meditation and reflection upon that which has the power to destroy. Ravana is very fascinating and grey character Nia. I hope I get some scope in my future research to talk about this archetype.
To the just world and shining our firefly bioluminescence upon it 💜🤗
Speaking of strip-mining data, have you read Shoshana Zuboff's book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism? If you don't have time for yet another book, there are an abundance of conversations and lectures by Dr. Zuboff online.
I should have read it a long time ago but still haven't! I've heard a bunch of interviews with her, though. I'll have to put it on my pile, it's become such a reference for all of these issues.
Brilliant piece! And the photo is nice. I do the crossword every morning to strengthen those neural pathways that make me a sharper person, and then I read your reflection which brings in a whole different element of neural processing. I agree wholeheartedly with you about Twitter, and other forms of social media. And the unfairness and disparities in the world – sad and gross. Back to social media, It is addicting, and I’ve been cutting back- as I’ve been cutting back on the caffeine. Too much stimuli, and a lot of it disruptive.
"It’s like pretending that you can be protected from violent rhetoric simply because you don’t speak the language it’s being spoken in."
Everyone talks about how horrible social media is (and it is, frequently) but the first-order effect is that there are a lotta assholes in this world and social media makes it easy to reach out and fuck with someone.
"Having a billionaire who thinks every line of violent rhetoric is a good joke or “free speech” in charge of a platform is only going to make it worse."
He's just a right-winger, aspiring to rule the world as absolute monarch. (He labelled himself as a Dem when Tesla was in California but that's just marketing.) There are a number of these ultra-wealthy nutjobs (Vladimir Putin is one; Zuckerberg is another) keen to control other people's minds so that they stop saying those nasty (true!) things about thing. (Zuckerberg, in particular, has been clearly aiming at the idea that the Matrix was cool movie, but it would be even cooler if it was real and he was the guy who created and ran the place. Think how much people would suck up to him THEN. Think about how much he could control other people's minds! If only he wasn't a run-of-the-mill upper-class white boy dweeb, with no particular large thoughts about society, just a collection of reactionary impulses and a keen lust for money.)
"but for the fact that the person writing the posts knew my nickname (which I’d almost never shared online before), my phone number (ditto), and my family’s routines. "
The usual suspects collect a lot of data on you so all these folks have to do is to use one of the many databases to access various data. Once they know that, someone can just drive by your house for a day or two and there you are.
"It’s been strip-mined and commodified for years now, at the expense of society and our own agency in ways we don’t even understand."
Yeah, well, the tech/telco corps are total whores, which is hilarious given that they are the R party donor class and they'll mouth all the right words for R-style freedom and liberty they're game. When, say, the Bush administration, asks them to allow them to tap every internet IPX in total contravention of the fourth amendment, the telcos were like, 'Sure, can I get you anything else? Coffee? Sandwich? Foot massage?'
"I loathe all the digital technology. But what I loathe is how it’s been dictated to us. How we’re not allowed to buy devices built without literal slavery and poisonous extraction; how we don’t get to decide how we want to use it, and where, and what role it plays in our societies and individual lives."
They're maximizing economic efficiency, or so I have been told. (Bluetooth is supposed to be an open protocol - it's entirely designed and meant for connecting disparate devices and platforms, so, of course, Apple thinks it's 1988 and their bluetooth on this iPad interoperates with absolutely no other non-Apple devices. This is not considered a manufacturer defect, even though it is exactly a defective implementation, albeit intentional.) There's a lot of shitty stuff about 2010-2020's technology that only exists solely because some idiot is trying to do so monopoly shit to (theoretically) make slightly larger profits even though I am pretty sure this is the tendency that reduces sales over time, not to mention consumer satisfaction.
"This is already monstrously long"
Rock-solid piece, Antonia!
elm
you should right more 'ok, i am cranked off with all this bullshit' stuff, it's good
Thank you, as always, Nia. I am weaning myself off of social media for so many similar reasons, and I appreciate and love your nuanced discussion of your social media journey.
Not always! I could be wrong about much of this, but it's really so early in this technology it's exactly the time to figure out what we want it for and how it affects our lives.
Clifford Stoll was ahead of his time in his warnings back in 1995 about some of the down sides of digitalization. His book, _Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway_, was prescient.
I've never read that! I follow Douglas Rushkoff and he talks a lot about how his hope from the early days of the internet was destroyed pretty quickly. I wonder if he's read Stoll? Sounds like I should, in any case. Thank you! I didn't have enough books to read 😂
Your writing is as gorgeous as ever. Thank you for articulating so many of the vague thoughts swirling in my head. I’ve also divested of social media and there are some (personal and career) costs but, as you say, I don’t miss being nauseous swimming in a pool of broken eggs and other toxins, paddling towards an omelette that could be a mirage.
Thank you! I love that, "paddling toward an omelette that could be a mirage." Broken egg soup full of micro plastics and toxic chemicals and who knows what else.
After my last attempt getting back on that platform, I've had to make some serious efforts at finding regular ways to remind myself of why I left. It *is* the platform and all the toxicity and how it's built to make us addicted, but it's also not who I want to be ever again. My capacity to be a good person is very much diminished on that kind of platform, with those dynamics.
This quote is soooo true: which I maintain is a type of ownership over our selves—including our future selves, especially for children—that few of us really grasp the power of. It’s been strip-mined and commodified for years now, at the expense of society and our own agency in ways we don’t even understand.
As for myself and social media, after the 2016 campaign in the US, during which I went to war with my awful high school classmates, I said that I was done using social media to discuss anything political or interacting with people who were giving me ulcers. I wasn't changing their minds, but only making myself sick.
Now I mostly use Facebook, some Reddit and some Twitter, but only to engage in either closed groups or on the topic of travel. Otherwise, all I feel like i'm doing is creating even more content for the awful billionaires you mention. As soon as Substack Android has chat, I'll be using that as wll.
Isn't it weird how Reddit is one of the places on the internet where you can find thoughtful and very accurate responses to almost any question, even while it hosts some of the worst toxicity? I had to go into one of the chans to help an acquaintance out when all the neo-Nazi stuff started here, not something I want to do again. But when QAnon was in the news a lot I read so many stories in there from spouses and parents and kids whose loved ones were deep into the conspiracy. To have a place you can go to share that kind of heartbreak is really important. I also learned a whole bunch about crows in another forum.
I seriously can't stand Facebook. It was the first platform I left and I've never missed it. BUT I'm reminded over and over how important those closed groups are for, for example, parents of kids with disabilities. Nobody I know in that or a similar position has found that kind of community anywhere else.
There is so much potential in these platforms! Their incentives are all wrong, which comes down to how commodification works and how capitalism is constructed. It doesn't have to be like that.
I carried on reading BECAUSE of the word Twitter. I deleted my Twitter account last week. I felt I had no choice, because of the whole megalomaniac billionaire Melon Husk effect. But oh how I miss my writer friends!
It's a real thing on there, isn't it? I liked seeing those conversations and being part of them. I am pretty sure it won't ever be worth it to me again because I don't want to be that person, but there are plenty of things it makes me sad not to participate in. These platforms do tap into a sense of and need for community -- they just need to nurture it instead of twisting it! Or someone needs to build a usable one that does. I'm sure that's super easy 😂
A friend got me on Twitter. I had never read, but was aware going into it, of The Shallows, and Bowling Alone, and Entertaining Ourselves To Death. It was fun, and addictive, and I poked fun at myself over my compulsive phone-checking, but mostly avoided conflict and bad content, and enjoyed wholesome sunrise and sunset photos from neighbors around Montana.
I throttled it back, not because of toxic personalities, or Muskageddon, or even the phone-checking. I noticed that, more and more, I was starting to frame my thinking in terms of 'posts' and live my life before an invisible audience. In that sense, both in the way it was forming me, and the way it shifted my life's purpose, it was extremely god-like. One of the catch phrases of the Reformation was, "Coram deo," which means "Face of God," implying that we should be aware of God's attention and live accordingly. Without any direction or coercion, by the meer religious practice of using the platform, I was experiencing a sort of Coram Twitter, subtly occupying my attention whether I was on my phone or not.
It is hard enough to know one's mission in life, much less to stay steady and true to it over a lifetime, to let something trivial push you off course.
I really like this perspective, Tait. I haven't met many other people who really think about it in that way, how we start to shape ourselves and how we experience life in terms of posts. I guess it comes up in tech and mental health conversations about Instagram, which was one of the things I didn't like about being on that platform, too.
But it's very true. When I first started thinking about the online self vs. the offline self, it made me look differently at all the other ways I curate a "self." Things as simple as how I dress for volunteering in a 3rd-grade classroom versus giving public comment at a city council meeting. How I am with my sisters versus how I am with a non-profit board I'm on.
So these different ways of being in the world maybe aren't new, but I think there's a way that social media managed to wholesale start swallowing whole selves, as well as communities and societies, in ways that humans haven't experienced before.
This is, as always, delightful and thought-provoking. And Flathead looks splendid!
I'm still on Twitter, for now. There are people I really like on there, plus I've curated my feed to be relevant to me. But it's addictive, and I'm in a class of people that nobody's going to come for. It's a shame, I guess.
I guess we'll have to see how the experience evolves for people. Or devolves. I am confused as to how it's going to keep going simply engineering-wise after all that expertise left or was fired. It just sounds like so many things are going to fall apart in small ways and then big. (My spouse works in cybersecurity and my brother-in-law is a Silicon Valley engineer. I'm not feeling too optimistic about its maintenance.)
Flathead is, truly, a stunning lake. It never fails to delight.
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.
We've never met in the ether Mr. Sowden. Your take here is very well formulated. While a bit preachy, the best bit of advice I ever received when it came to speech was (1) Does it need to be said? (2) Does it need to be said now? (3) Does it need to be said by me? I have found, as I have aged that unless I can GENUINELY answer all three in the affirmative, it is better to pause. These platforms may be wonderful in the abstract. What they provide is the very mechanism we need less of which is the ability to respond with our primitive, impulsive brain rather than our contemplative frontal lobe. Facebook and Twitter cannot realize their revenue needs with contemplation. Hence they build in platform incentives for anger, fear, anxiety, etal. A digital town square is certainly a great idea. I am afraid it just has not been built yet. For me I come closest to this while walking/jogging on a treadmill for about an hour with National Public Radio on in the background. Intentionally NOT VISUAL as that short-circuits our contemplation I believe.
Yeah, it's stuck with me. Wish I could remember where I first heard it. But it's come up in non-profit board meetings and elsewhere. Maybe even various public comments at city council.
(Yeah, I've never shared those screenshots publicly before. There's more to say about it all but I'm not sure I'll ever want to go into it very fully. Maybe this was enough)
This is all very well said, Mike! I like the point about blogging -- I still have a couple of defunct ones running around somewhere -- and how its DNA can be found in all these different avenues of communication. I'd never thought about it that way, but it's like we keep snapping back to the craving for connection that was answered through blogs. I really like that. Because the success of any social media is absolutely its ability to tap into our need for connection. We'll always have that, and many, many people want it to look healthier, to not be stuck in cycles where everything feels like a shouting match and there's actual dialogue.
And you're right, it's really dependent on humans to make it work. The empathy, that's it right there.
I wonder if there's a nascent version of that in Discord channels? I'm barely in any, only two really and barely participate, but there's a ground-up feel of people trying to work out the norms and expectations -- of a small society, basically.
(I really does sound like between GDPR and EU employment law there's a lot of trouble being run into for Twitter on your side of the pond.)
A great post Antonia and this was one was "in the commons" :) I am of similar opinion to you regarding social media in general and recently left my modest Twitter addiction. Like most things, I thought an experiment would help me decide. About six months ago (1) I removed Twitter from my phone (2) with notifications no longer a factor, I went on it infrequently and EACH TIME reduced my follows. (3) Over the course of the subsequent months I traversed from 250+ follows down to 25. (4) The curious outcome was despite my efforts, the volume of chaff did not really change. I concluded it was similar to Facebook which I put in the rearview mirror more than a decade ago. I disconnected it and am happier for it.
I doubt that my level of being informed has dwindled, less shouting, less unverified dross, and almost no "yeah buts" anymore.
That's really interesting. I like your way of approaching it. I had originally just removed the app from my phone but my addiction to it was sadly too strong. I don't know why Twitter in particular more than any other platform.
When I still had Instagram, I kept trying to pare down my follows but never got very far. The experience degraded after a while, though, with a lot of the stuff Facebook was trying.
I became disenchanted as I was removing the follows. I would hit the refresh (that's addiction) and no matter the frequency it always had 25 more stupid posts that I "needed" to look at. It became a joke that no matter what I did, more nonsense just filled the gap. It was funny but weird. I thought about those fun days at the beach building a sand castle when you just can't keep the tide from undermining your structure :)
I believe (and I used to "enjoy it") is that Twitter gives the illusion that it is news. I genuinely believe that Facebook/Instagram was always different. I always likened it to 365 days a year Christmas letter from your circle. The Newsfeed was always strategized to overwhelm our primitive brain with nonsense, anger, fear and anxiety. In that way I always considered Facebook and its properties to be the worst thing ever invented. While it came after I left, near as I can tell Instagram was a bit of an assault on young girls in a particularly insidious fashion. It was Facebook for adolescents to attack them via their anxieties. I felt different about Twitter. I think Twitter was a dangerous illusion also though. The truth is even the people we love (and hence follow) have differences. Their outlook and who they might follow are simply a little different. On Twitter it is their backwash that inundates you. At least for me it is the exposure to the backwash of people who you love or are friends but nevertheless they follow Jordan Peterson or whatever. It begins to pollute you at an interruption level. It is not "bad enough" to stop following your loved one. I have clearly thought about this a bit too much I am afraid. Sorry again for the long-form comment.
No apologies necessary! I like that we're all able to think out loud about this stuff in a long-form kind of way. It's new and messy and that's why it needs to be talked about openly, before the infrastructures and systems become completely solidified without our input.
This is a good description: " On Twitter it is their backwash that inundates you. At least for me it is the exposure to the backwash of people who you love or are friends but nevertheless they follow Jordan Peterson or whatever. It begins to pollute you at an interruption level."
Also, early in Facebook days whenever it was they started prompting people to congratulate friends on birthdays, a friend commented that "Facebook has turned Happy Birthday to you into Happy Birthday *at* you," and that somehow describes most everything they've done since.
I've shared it before. One of my VERY FIRST NEWSLETTER posts was a meandering four part post "How to Tame Your Lizard". While I intentionally in those days did not share with ANYONE (perhaps 2-3 readers in those days), I think it was one of the better things I ever wrote albeit too long. No links again because bad form. I shared it as a longish letter to the local paper but not printed. I got more traction when I shared with our US Senator Amy Klobuchar. She is focused on "big tech" and I genuinely believe painting with a broad brush is probably not the right plan. I believe there are public goods that result from tech but there are extremely bad outcomes with some of the forms. Your take on Facebook is FUNNY AND UNHEALTHY.
My observation is FB (older) and now IG (adolescents), Twitter (VIRTUE SIGNAL), and now Tik-Tok (PRIOR RECOVERING ADDICTS) are all curated, impossible presentations of self that cause extreme conflict inside our heads as we know we are not perfect and to curate ourselves as otherwise is not healthy. I realize a strong statement but it is what I have come to observe and believe.
I think Substack is a reasonable stab at public square. It is a bit of Catch-22 though as the barrier to entry is reading (condescending comment I fear). I fear it attracts those genuinely attracted to long-form thoughtful but to be relevant and survivable it needs to link to all the legacy nonsense that will inevitably draw the trolls. I have begun to observe the trolls and the foolishness on the platform. I hope it can manage to keep it reasonable.
Many years ago in my work career, I would write longish messages to my team. The joke always was that way near the bottom (or even the middle), I might include a random "so there" just to see if anyone was reading or not. I fear the trolls never get beyond the 2nd paragraph.
Thanks for the inspo to finally deactivate my personal Twitter (still have my work account though). I have wasted So Much Time doomscrolling. I've pretty much got everyone I really love being connected to on one of the other apps, so time to pull the plug.
I am really liking Mastodon. I like that it's decentralized and not for profit. I like starting over from scratch. Last thing I ever wanted was to "go viral" so Twitter was always a slantwise fit for me (I muted any tweet that got more than say 10 responses).
Glad I met you though! Both virtually and in person (see also Chris).
Going viral on Twitter sounds like a hellish thing! Nobody really wants to be the main character of the day. (I saw this whole thing of "bringing neighbor food person" the other day and still hope I never find out what that was about.)
Glad we met, too -- and I think it was Chris who connected us at the James Welch festival! The virtual world really does gift us with a lot, but the best of it is that it can eventually lead to real-life connection.
I do have hope for Twitter. The ideal, I think, is to allow everyone to be on Twitter, but to use the algorithm to de-emphasize hate, rather than emphasize it. And even if the rest is a dumpster fire, that at least is happening.
I suppose it will depend on whether they hire back a lot of those engineers. And whether the good ones want to come back. Making those algorithms function is going to take work. But if they want advertisers back they're going to have to make them work!
It’s very common for new business owners to clean house. And they kind of needed to to be profitable! The problem is he’s a very public figure so people liked or hated him going in. It may be a rocky transition because more people left than he was anticipating, but the remaining team seems strong, and he’ll be able to bring in more teams who can dive into the code.
I get the argument for that, but am not persuaded it's true! A good leader would, I'd think, want people loyal to the company rather than to themselves or even their vision. And it's hard to look away from the fact that they tried to rehire a lot of people back, indicating that they didn't really know who they were firing.
And actually it's one of the things about all of this that weirdly gives me hope? My brother-in-law is a Silicon Valley engineer and has worked at a lot of the usual companies, big and small, and given his favorable mindset toward every place he's ever worked, it shouldn't have surprised me how much Twitter people really do love where they work. Like, as many problems as Twitter has had over the years, there's something uplifting about that, that they really believe in the place and its potential to do good.
Oh I didn’t see he tried to hire people back? But yes there are still a lot of loyal people at the company. I just listened to a Twitter space today where he and the team were talking excitedly about all they were planning to do. It was very optimistic!
None of those engineers are going back while he's in charge. Tumblr was already reaching out tohire the whole security team... I'm sure they've been snapped up.
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!
If you mean "things that enrage us on a regular an unmanageable basis" yes 😂 Though also the things that bring solace and joy have a lot of intersection, too 🧡
I don't know whether things will change or not. I'm not super hopeful, but that is because when I think about it I think about how middle class parents respond when you ask them to consider not driving their kid to the front door of the school every day and instead letting them walk a couple blocks. I suppose one difference is that cars are embedded everywhere and it's still early days in social media.
But that's also part of why I can't go back on there. Check my Twitter feed, or go up to the woods and watch some crows and ravens? No brainer. One day I'll be dead and utterly forgotten and I'd like to enjoy the time I've got because it's still really beautiful out there.
On the way home find yourself the darkest spot on the rez, throw a tarp and a blanket in the bed of that shitty pickup of yours, lay down and let the stars wash those "Ikie poos" away. Remember what Peacock sez.
Nia this is such a brilliant and necessary read, I am glad you shared it on River’s post. I didn’t know about your experience on twitter, it’s despicable how those people targeted you. This aligns with our last week conversation about social media and hate crimes. It is evident that as long as you use your voice and platform against extremism, you will get targeted specially if your reach is wider.
I love how you have connected everything back to your book and your father’s experience living under Stalin. Ownership has and will always remain a problem because of specific freaks whose extreme power and need to dominate surpass the basic human compassion and decency.
Swarna, thank you so much for going back to this and reading! It's one I feel I have to pull out again now and then because these questions keep coming up and so often it feels like most people don't understand what's at stake. I'm sorry you understand it, have had experiences that mean you do.
The Twitter thing was awful, but it was really just a manifestation of what my town faced. What really hit me was that it was from someone local. I live in a small town and the stripping away of trust, of not knowing *who*, it really got to me. But for people in the local Jewish community, it was all far, far worse. People's lives were truly ruined. I only faced a tiny part of it -- bad enough but nothing like what some of my friends were up against.
I don't know why people need to be like this.
Nia it pains me to know that these circumstances still exist in your immediate locality. It only reinforces the belief that the light has to shine into these dark crevices of psyche that most of us don’t even know that exists. It brings back the memories of the recent Paris olympics incidents of blatant and open displays of antisemitism. Also proves that hate persists much like irrationality - in places most unexpected and most possibly thought to be hate free.
I strongly feel that way about the western world and its outwardly methods of dealing with racism. For an instance look at the recent UK protests and targeting of muslim immigrants in Britain and northern Ireland. Happens in India too, specially in sectarian states divided over religion based politics. I have so many opinions about it and honestly so tired of it. Why can’t humans put away the past and just be decent with one another? Why do we lack the ability to look at our problems and see the roots of them are not other people but we ourselves? We, as a species, seriously suck at self inquiry and observation of our own cruelty and ignorance.
I tend to get carried away by such discussions. All of these bothers me so much. Anyway, I am so glad to read that your town found a more supportive and collaborative way to tackle such hate. It is heartbreaking to know so many people felt the fear that they felt during that time. After reading this essay, I feel even more honoured to hold you in light of my compassion and friendship Nia, to know that you would stand against such unnecessary perpetuation of suffering, in whatever capacity, with whatever cost. It is because people like you exist that my love for this earth and my hope to work towards a better future for all her children is never lost.
Swarna, you’re not meant to make me cry on a morning when I’m dealing with a messy dog and a family trip to a cabin! But here I am, crying. Because you’re right, you know, what matters is knowing that there are people in the world who WILL stand up against hate. So often what people need is the courage of solidarity, to know they’re not standing up alone (for some reason I’m thinking of all those young female Taylor Swift fans who have been marching in the UK against the white supremacists).
I think about all of this too much, too. It’s so ancient and has taken so many forms. I think all the time about Abdullah Öcalan’s book The Sociology of Freedom and his tracing of these oppressions (which he firmly believes began and has perpetuated through oppression of women) back at least 5000 years to people who wanted to hoard power the way they started to hoard resources. But even that doesn’t quite get into the reality of “otherizing” people. I think about it all the time, including what was I otherize people and how to fight against the reality of their beliefs without dehumanizing them. It’s so, so hard.
Nia, sending you a big, warm hug 🤗
I totally understand how you’re feeling. Isn’t it amazing to know that such wonderful people exist in our world—whether in person or online? The light of solidarity will always outshine the flames of hate. Haven’t we proven that countless times throughout history, in our struggles for justice and noble causes? We have, and we will continue to do so for generations to come.
Your recommendation is spot on, Nia. I’ve added it to my reading list. Oppression is so insidious, constantly shifting forms and finding new ways to target people more precisely. It reminds me of the figure of Ravana, the demon king from the Ramayana, who had 10 heads. The story goes that even if you cut off one of Ravana’s heads, another would grow in its place—making him nearly impossible to defeat. Oppression is like that: it may never fully disappear, but it’s always worth fighting against in our lifetime.
I love that story of Ravana and would love to read more of your writing about that! I was just listening to a conversation between two people who used to do dream therapy, and they talked a lot about Greek myths and the kinds of soul sicknesses they can represent, either individual or communal. I'd never thought of those stories as metaphorical representations of our internal demons and struggles. Maybe a lot of our most important traditional stories are important lessons.
Sending you a big, warm hug right back! 🤗 The fight for a just and better world will not give up.
Yes I think these archetypes do represent the duality of thought and the way of human mind and have always been relevant. Since the conception of these stories itself depicts the need for existence of objects of darkness for meditation and reflection upon that which has the power to destroy. Ravana is very fascinating and grey character Nia. I hope I get some scope in my future research to talk about this archetype.
To the just world and shining our firefly bioluminescence upon it 💜🤗
Speaking of strip-mining data, have you read Shoshana Zuboff's book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism? If you don't have time for yet another book, there are an abundance of conversations and lectures by Dr. Zuboff online.
https://shoshanazuboff.com/book/about/
I should have read it a long time ago but still haven't! I've heard a bunch of interviews with her, though. I'll have to put it on my pile, it's become such a reference for all of these issues.
Brilliant piece! And the photo is nice. I do the crossword every morning to strengthen those neural pathways that make me a sharper person, and then I read your reflection which brings in a whole different element of neural processing. I agree wholeheartedly with you about Twitter, and other forms of social media. And the unfairness and disparities in the world – sad and gross. Back to social media, It is addicting, and I’ve been cutting back- as I’ve been cutting back on the caffeine. Too much stimuli, and a lot of it disruptive.
"It’s like pretending that you can be protected from violent rhetoric simply because you don’t speak the language it’s being spoken in."
Everyone talks about how horrible social media is (and it is, frequently) but the first-order effect is that there are a lotta assholes in this world and social media makes it easy to reach out and fuck with someone.
"Having a billionaire who thinks every line of violent rhetoric is a good joke or “free speech” in charge of a platform is only going to make it worse."
He's just a right-winger, aspiring to rule the world as absolute monarch. (He labelled himself as a Dem when Tesla was in California but that's just marketing.) There are a number of these ultra-wealthy nutjobs (Vladimir Putin is one; Zuckerberg is another) keen to control other people's minds so that they stop saying those nasty (true!) things about thing. (Zuckerberg, in particular, has been clearly aiming at the idea that the Matrix was cool movie, but it would be even cooler if it was real and he was the guy who created and ran the place. Think how much people would suck up to him THEN. Think about how much he could control other people's minds! If only he wasn't a run-of-the-mill upper-class white boy dweeb, with no particular large thoughts about society, just a collection of reactionary impulses and a keen lust for money.)
"but for the fact that the person writing the posts knew my nickname (which I’d almost never shared online before), my phone number (ditto), and my family’s routines. "
The usual suspects collect a lot of data on you so all these folks have to do is to use one of the many databases to access various data. Once they know that, someone can just drive by your house for a day or two and there you are.
"It’s been strip-mined and commodified for years now, at the expense of society and our own agency in ways we don’t even understand."
Yeah, well, the tech/telco corps are total whores, which is hilarious given that they are the R party donor class and they'll mouth all the right words for R-style freedom and liberty they're game. When, say, the Bush administration, asks them to allow them to tap every internet IPX in total contravention of the fourth amendment, the telcos were like, 'Sure, can I get you anything else? Coffee? Sandwich? Foot massage?'
"I loathe all the digital technology. But what I loathe is how it’s been dictated to us. How we’re not allowed to buy devices built without literal slavery and poisonous extraction; how we don’t get to decide how we want to use it, and where, and what role it plays in our societies and individual lives."
They're maximizing economic efficiency, or so I have been told. (Bluetooth is supposed to be an open protocol - it's entirely designed and meant for connecting disparate devices and platforms, so, of course, Apple thinks it's 1988 and their bluetooth on this iPad interoperates with absolutely no other non-Apple devices. This is not considered a manufacturer defect, even though it is exactly a defective implementation, albeit intentional.) There's a lot of shitty stuff about 2010-2020's technology that only exists solely because some idiot is trying to do so monopoly shit to (theoretically) make slightly larger profits even though I am pretty sure this is the tendency that reduces sales over time, not to mention consumer satisfaction.
"This is already monstrously long"
Rock-solid piece, Antonia!
elm
you should right more 'ok, i am cranked off with all this bullshit' stuff, it's good
Thank you, as always, Nia. I am weaning myself off of social media for so many similar reasons, and I appreciate and love your nuanced discussion of your social media journey.
And as usual, on all counts, you are spot on! <3
Not always! I could be wrong about much of this, but it's really so early in this technology it's exactly the time to figure out what we want it for and how it affects our lives.
Clifford Stoll was ahead of his time in his warnings back in 1995 about some of the down sides of digitalization. His book, _Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway_, was prescient.
I've never read that! I follow Douglas Rushkoff and he talks a lot about how his hope from the early days of the internet was destroyed pretty quickly. I wonder if he's read Stoll? Sounds like I should, in any case. Thank you! I didn't have enough books to read 😂
Same here! The tsundoku stacks just seem to grow and grow! :-)
Your writing is as gorgeous as ever. Thank you for articulating so many of the vague thoughts swirling in my head. I’ve also divested of social media and there are some (personal and career) costs but, as you say, I don’t miss being nauseous swimming in a pool of broken eggs and other toxins, paddling towards an omelette that could be a mirage.
Thank you! I love that, "paddling toward an omelette that could be a mirage." Broken egg soup full of micro plastics and toxic chemicals and who knows what else.
After my last attempt getting back on that platform, I've had to make some serious efforts at finding regular ways to remind myself of why I left. It *is* the platform and all the toxicity and how it's built to make us addicted, but it's also not who I want to be ever again. My capacity to be a good person is very much diminished on that kind of platform, with those dynamics.
I wonder what sort of person *could* be good in that environment...
That is an excellent question. Some people manage it.
This quote is soooo true: which I maintain is a type of ownership over our selves—including our future selves, especially for children—that few of us really grasp the power of. It’s been strip-mined and commodified for years now, at the expense of society and our own agency in ways we don’t even understand.
As for myself and social media, after the 2016 campaign in the US, during which I went to war with my awful high school classmates, I said that I was done using social media to discuss anything political or interacting with people who were giving me ulcers. I wasn't changing their minds, but only making myself sick.
Now I mostly use Facebook, some Reddit and some Twitter, but only to engage in either closed groups or on the topic of travel. Otherwise, all I feel like i'm doing is creating even more content for the awful billionaires you mention. As soon as Substack Android has chat, I'll be using that as wll.
Isn't it weird how Reddit is one of the places on the internet where you can find thoughtful and very accurate responses to almost any question, even while it hosts some of the worst toxicity? I had to go into one of the chans to help an acquaintance out when all the neo-Nazi stuff started here, not something I want to do again. But when QAnon was in the news a lot I read so many stories in there from spouses and parents and kids whose loved ones were deep into the conspiracy. To have a place you can go to share that kind of heartbreak is really important. I also learned a whole bunch about crows in another forum.
I seriously can't stand Facebook. It was the first platform I left and I've never missed it. BUT I'm reminded over and over how important those closed groups are for, for example, parents of kids with disabilities. Nobody I know in that or a similar position has found that kind of community anywhere else.
There is so much potential in these platforms! Their incentives are all wrong, which comes down to how commodification works and how capitalism is constructed. It doesn't have to be like that.
Yeah, if Reddit isn't moderated it becomes awful. And I don't put with much BS there, so I don't always feel great after engaging there either...
I carried on reading BECAUSE of the word Twitter. I deleted my Twitter account last week. I felt I had no choice, because of the whole megalomaniac billionaire Melon Husk effect. But oh how I miss my writer friends!
It's a real thing on there, isn't it? I liked seeing those conversations and being part of them. I am pretty sure it won't ever be worth it to me again because I don't want to be that person, but there are plenty of things it makes me sad not to participate in. These platforms do tap into a sense of and need for community -- they just need to nurture it instead of twisting it! Or someone needs to build a usable one that does. I'm sure that's super easy 😂
A friend got me on Twitter. I had never read, but was aware going into it, of The Shallows, and Bowling Alone, and Entertaining Ourselves To Death. It was fun, and addictive, and I poked fun at myself over my compulsive phone-checking, but mostly avoided conflict and bad content, and enjoyed wholesome sunrise and sunset photos from neighbors around Montana.
I throttled it back, not because of toxic personalities, or Muskageddon, or even the phone-checking. I noticed that, more and more, I was starting to frame my thinking in terms of 'posts' and live my life before an invisible audience. In that sense, both in the way it was forming me, and the way it shifted my life's purpose, it was extremely god-like. One of the catch phrases of the Reformation was, "Coram deo," which means "Face of God," implying that we should be aware of God's attention and live accordingly. Without any direction or coercion, by the meer religious practice of using the platform, I was experiencing a sort of Coram Twitter, subtly occupying my attention whether I was on my phone or not.
It is hard enough to know one's mission in life, much less to stay steady and true to it over a lifetime, to let something trivial push you off course.
I really like this perspective, Tait. I haven't met many other people who really think about it in that way, how we start to shape ourselves and how we experience life in terms of posts. I guess it comes up in tech and mental health conversations about Instagram, which was one of the things I didn't like about being on that platform, too.
But it's very true. When I first started thinking about the online self vs. the offline self, it made me look differently at all the other ways I curate a "self." Things as simple as how I dress for volunteering in a 3rd-grade classroom versus giving public comment at a city council meeting. How I am with my sisters versus how I am with a non-profit board I'm on.
So these different ways of being in the world maybe aren't new, but I think there's a way that social media managed to wholesale start swallowing whole selves, as well as communities and societies, in ways that humans haven't experienced before.
This is, as always, delightful and thought-provoking. And Flathead looks splendid!
I'm still on Twitter, for now. There are people I really like on there, plus I've curated my feed to be relevant to me. But it's addictive, and I'm in a class of people that nobody's going to come for. It's a shame, I guess.
I guess we'll have to see how the experience evolves for people. Or devolves. I am confused as to how it's going to keep going simply engineering-wise after all that expertise left or was fired. It just sounds like so many things are going to fall apart in small ways and then big. (My spouse works in cybersecurity and my brother-in-law is a Silicon Valley engineer. I'm not feeling too optimistic about its maintenance.)
Flathead is, truly, a stunning lake. It never fails to delight.
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.
We've never met in the ether Mr. Sowden. Your take here is very well formulated. While a bit preachy, the best bit of advice I ever received when it came to speech was (1) Does it need to be said? (2) Does it need to be said now? (3) Does it need to be said by me? I have found, as I have aged that unless I can GENUINELY answer all three in the affirmative, it is better to pause. These platforms may be wonderful in the abstract. What they provide is the very mechanism we need less of which is the ability to respond with our primitive, impulsive brain rather than our contemplative frontal lobe. Facebook and Twitter cannot realize their revenue needs with contemplation. Hence they build in platform incentives for anger, fear, anxiety, etal. A digital town square is certainly a great idea. I am afraid it just has not been built yet. For me I come closest to this while walking/jogging on a treadmill for about an hour with National Public Radio on in the background. Intentionally NOT VISUAL as that short-circuits our contemplation I believe.
I feel like I've read or heard that advice somewhere before but can't remember where, maybe even in the context of business meetings. It's good!
I WISH I had heard it in my 20s. I am sure it would have led to a different trajectory in all sorts of ways. Glad I do it now.
Yeah, it's stuck with me. Wish I could remember where I first heard it. But it's come up in non-profit board meetings and elsewhere. Maybe even various public comments at city council.
I'll send you a message on back-channel as I know when I first was exposed.
(Yeah, I've never shared those screenshots publicly before. There's more to say about it all but I'm not sure I'll ever want to go into it very fully. Maybe this was enough)
This is all very well said, Mike! I like the point about blogging -- I still have a couple of defunct ones running around somewhere -- and how its DNA can be found in all these different avenues of communication. I'd never thought about it that way, but it's like we keep snapping back to the craving for connection that was answered through blogs. I really like that. Because the success of any social media is absolutely its ability to tap into our need for connection. We'll always have that, and many, many people want it to look healthier, to not be stuck in cycles where everything feels like a shouting match and there's actual dialogue.
And you're right, it's really dependent on humans to make it work. The empathy, that's it right there.
I wonder if there's a nascent version of that in Discord channels? I'm barely in any, only two really and barely participate, but there's a ground-up feel of people trying to work out the norms and expectations -- of a small society, basically.
(I really does sound like between GDPR and EU employment law there's a lot of trouble being run into for Twitter on your side of the pond.)
Thank you Antonia, you have beautiful photos as well, like them sites and your thoughts. Have a good night!
You, too, Alain, and thank you! I like being able to share some of the beauty here.
A great post Antonia and this was one was "in the commons" :) I am of similar opinion to you regarding social media in general and recently left my modest Twitter addiction. Like most things, I thought an experiment would help me decide. About six months ago (1) I removed Twitter from my phone (2) with notifications no longer a factor, I went on it infrequently and EACH TIME reduced my follows. (3) Over the course of the subsequent months I traversed from 250+ follows down to 25. (4) The curious outcome was despite my efforts, the volume of chaff did not really change. I concluded it was similar to Facebook which I put in the rearview mirror more than a decade ago. I disconnected it and am happier for it.
I doubt that my level of being informed has dwindled, less shouting, less unverified dross, and almost no "yeah buts" anymore.
That's really interesting. I like your way of approaching it. I had originally just removed the app from my phone but my addiction to it was sadly too strong. I don't know why Twitter in particular more than any other platform.
When I still had Instagram, I kept trying to pare down my follows but never got very far. The experience degraded after a while, though, with a lot of the stuff Facebook was trying.
I became disenchanted as I was removing the follows. I would hit the refresh (that's addiction) and no matter the frequency it always had 25 more stupid posts that I "needed" to look at. It became a joke that no matter what I did, more nonsense just filled the gap. It was funny but weird. I thought about those fun days at the beach building a sand castle when you just can't keep the tide from undermining your structure :)
I believe (and I used to "enjoy it") is that Twitter gives the illusion that it is news. I genuinely believe that Facebook/Instagram was always different. I always likened it to 365 days a year Christmas letter from your circle. The Newsfeed was always strategized to overwhelm our primitive brain with nonsense, anger, fear and anxiety. In that way I always considered Facebook and its properties to be the worst thing ever invented. While it came after I left, near as I can tell Instagram was a bit of an assault on young girls in a particularly insidious fashion. It was Facebook for adolescents to attack them via their anxieties. I felt different about Twitter. I think Twitter was a dangerous illusion also though. The truth is even the people we love (and hence follow) have differences. Their outlook and who they might follow are simply a little different. On Twitter it is their backwash that inundates you. At least for me it is the exposure to the backwash of people who you love or are friends but nevertheless they follow Jordan Peterson or whatever. It begins to pollute you at an interruption level. It is not "bad enough" to stop following your loved one. I have clearly thought about this a bit too much I am afraid. Sorry again for the long-form comment.
No apologies necessary! I like that we're all able to think out loud about this stuff in a long-form kind of way. It's new and messy and that's why it needs to be talked about openly, before the infrastructures and systems become completely solidified without our input.
This is a good description: " On Twitter it is their backwash that inundates you. At least for me it is the exposure to the backwash of people who you love or are friends but nevertheless they follow Jordan Peterson or whatever. It begins to pollute you at an interruption level."
Also, early in Facebook days whenever it was they started prompting people to congratulate friends on birthdays, a friend commented that "Facebook has turned Happy Birthday to you into Happy Birthday *at* you," and that somehow describes most everything they've done since.
I've shared it before. One of my VERY FIRST NEWSLETTER posts was a meandering four part post "How to Tame Your Lizard". While I intentionally in those days did not share with ANYONE (perhaps 2-3 readers in those days), I think it was one of the better things I ever wrote albeit too long. No links again because bad form. I shared it as a longish letter to the local paper but not printed. I got more traction when I shared with our US Senator Amy Klobuchar. She is focused on "big tech" and I genuinely believe painting with a broad brush is probably not the right plan. I believe there are public goods that result from tech but there are extremely bad outcomes with some of the forms. Your take on Facebook is FUNNY AND UNHEALTHY.
My observation is FB (older) and now IG (adolescents), Twitter (VIRTUE SIGNAL), and now Tik-Tok (PRIOR RECOVERING ADDICTS) are all curated, impossible presentations of self that cause extreme conflict inside our heads as we know we are not perfect and to curate ourselves as otherwise is not healthy. I realize a strong statement but it is what I have come to observe and believe.
I think Substack is a reasonable stab at public square. It is a bit of Catch-22 though as the barrier to entry is reading (condescending comment I fear). I fear it attracts those genuinely attracted to long-form thoughtful but to be relevant and survivable it needs to link to all the legacy nonsense that will inevitably draw the trolls. I have begun to observe the trolls and the foolishness on the platform. I hope it can manage to keep it reasonable.
Many years ago in my work career, I would write longish messages to my team. The joke always was that way near the bottom (or even the middle), I might include a random "so there" just to see if anyone was reading or not. I fear the trolls never get beyond the 2nd paragraph.
Thanks for the inspo to finally deactivate my personal Twitter (still have my work account though). I have wasted So Much Time doomscrolling. I've pretty much got everyone I really love being connected to on one of the other apps, so time to pull the plug.
I am really liking Mastodon. I like that it's decentralized and not for profit. I like starting over from scratch. Last thing I ever wanted was to "go viral" so Twitter was always a slantwise fit for me (I muted any tweet that got more than say 10 responses).
Glad I met you though! Both virtually and in person (see also Chris).
Going viral on Twitter sounds like a hellish thing! Nobody really wants to be the main character of the day. (I saw this whole thing of "bringing neighbor food person" the other day and still hope I never find out what that was about.)
Glad we met, too -- and I think it was Chris who connected us at the James Welch festival! The virtual world really does gift us with a lot, but the best of it is that it can eventually lead to real-life connection.
This was so beautiful.
I do have hope for Twitter. The ideal, I think, is to allow everyone to be on Twitter, but to use the algorithm to de-emphasize hate, rather than emphasize it. And even if the rest is a dumpster fire, that at least is happening.
It’s not the commons, but it’s something.
I suppose it will depend on whether they hire back a lot of those engineers. And whether the good ones want to come back. Making those algorithms function is going to take work. But if they want advertisers back they're going to have to make them work!
It’s very common for new business owners to clean house. And they kind of needed to to be profitable! The problem is he’s a very public figure so people liked or hated him going in. It may be a rocky transition because more people left than he was anticipating, but the remaining team seems strong, and he’ll be able to bring in more teams who can dive into the code.
I get the argument for that, but am not persuaded it's true! A good leader would, I'd think, want people loyal to the company rather than to themselves or even their vision. And it's hard to look away from the fact that they tried to rehire a lot of people back, indicating that they didn't really know who they were firing.
And actually it's one of the things about all of this that weirdly gives me hope? My brother-in-law is a Silicon Valley engineer and has worked at a lot of the usual companies, big and small, and given his favorable mindset toward every place he's ever worked, it shouldn't have surprised me how much Twitter people really do love where they work. Like, as many problems as Twitter has had over the years, there's something uplifting about that, that they really believe in the place and its potential to do good.
Oh I didn’t see he tried to hire people back? But yes there are still a lot of loyal people at the company. I just listened to a Twitter space today where he and the team were talking excitedly about all they were planning to do. It was very optimistic!
None of those engineers are going back while he's in charge. Tumblr was already reaching out tohire the whole security team... I'm sure they've been snapped up.
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.
Chris, you and Antonia were both independent in full rage against the machines mode this week!
We share similar ... interests.
If you mean "things that enrage us on a regular an unmanageable basis" yes 😂 Though also the things that bring solace and joy have a lot of intersection, too 🧡
I'm sorry :(
I don't know whether things will change or not. I'm not super hopeful, but that is because when I think about it I think about how middle class parents respond when you ask them to consider not driving their kid to the front door of the school every day and instead letting them walk a couple blocks. I suppose one difference is that cars are embedded everywhere and it's still early days in social media.
But that's also part of why I can't go back on there. Check my Twitter feed, or go up to the woods and watch some crows and ravens? No brainer. One day I'll be dead and utterly forgotten and I'd like to enjoy the time I've got because it's still really beautiful out there.
Get your ass to the Bison Range asap!
On the way home find yourself the darkest spot on the rez, throw a tarp and a blanket in the bed of that shitty pickup of yours, lay down and let the stars wash those "Ikie poos" away. Remember what Peacock sez.
P.S. Bring a thermos of coffee.