Month: November 2022

So now we are exploring the next wave of social media life. Twitter is about three weeks from going full $8chan. Instagram remains as compromised as ever by Facebook’s ongoing attempt to cram it full of ripoffs of everything they couldn’t buy. And yet, when most people announce the diminution of their Twitter presence, they point to Insta to find them. Not Facebook or Snapchat, not Mastodon, not any other legacy service or quickly-promoted alternative. And it drives home the point that six years ago, as I recoiled from the arrival of revanchist Confederacy, Insta was the only social medium that felt safe or desirable.

The problem is, now it’s a junk heap. Way too many ads, algorithmic timeline, a constant effort to force their TikTok ripoff on you now that they’ve given up on trying to make their YouTube ripoff happen and their Snapchat ripoff has become table stakes for everybody…and honestly, that ripoff as table stakes in Signal has inadvertently created just what I wanted. Cross-platform, ephemeral, no ads or algorithms, just stuff from your friends…the only problem becomes getting your friends to install Signal and then to use the Stories feature. So far, I think I have maybe two other people posting to Stories and at most maybe three or four more even looking at it.

This is the problem: we use social media for different things. Thing one is to keep up with friends – the group chats in macro. This is what Stories is for, what original recipe Insta did better than anything, and once you limit it to friends and not influencers or celebrities or what have you, it can still do the job. So could Signal, or maybe even Pixelfed, or iCloud Photo Sharing, or…the problem, as always, is getting all your friends to that one thing, and it’s been a decade since it was possible to get everyone on something new. But let’s put a pin in that and come back.

Second thing is entities you don’t know but want to follow. I’m thinking mainly of sports teams here, and not big ones – the San Jose Giants or Santa Cruz Warriors, or my second division Scottish football club (Mon Ye Ton!), or the community of Vanderbilt fandom that I fell into a decade ago. It’s almost the sort of thing you could replace by piping their Twitter feed into RSS, because you don’t necessarily interact as such…but then, you don’t want to open your phone on Saturday lunchtime and be hit with 120 unread tweets in your RSS either.

Then there’s the news. Like it or not, the media lives for Twitter and as such, it’s the first stop for rip-and-read on anything that’s happening. Sometimes this is amazingly fun, especially when it’s of the “from the jaws of Hell will we get these jokes off” variety. Sometimes it’s just depressing AF. And it can go from one to the other very quickly (e.g. the Best Of Dying Twitter account) but rarely goes the other way.

And this is where I run into the problem with Mastodon: it’s way too much of door number 3, none of door number 2, and not nearly enough of door number 1. My friends aren’t there. Oh, some of them have accounts, and some even post, but they aren’t there as the primary social media outlet. There are some people I could keep up with in a satisfactory fashion just from Twitter, or just from Insta, or even just from Signal (barely) but right now, maybe one person I know is pig-committed to Mastodon, and that’s not enough.

Thing is, the ship has sailed on Twitter. I wasn’t kidding about s4ep5 of Man In The High Castle: the war is over. We lost. The Nazis are in control, and they literally own the battle space. The only question left on Twitter is how bad it has to get for you to leave for good, and I guess we’ll find out in the next few weeks. But in the meantime…who’s going where? Tumblr is owned by the same folks as WordPress and more people have it than remember, although I haven’t posted there in literally years and I don’t know if ActivityFed would be enough to make it viable again (maybe? It always seemed like the natural replacement for LiveJournal, with options for long form text or quick posts or pictures or all manner of microblogging). Instagram is mostly almost viable if you go through a browser rather than the app, although it’s a pain in the ass to post that way. I’m spreading the good news of Signal to almost no avail, and I’m still too old for TikTok or Snapchat…

I guess at some point I need to make a list of who I really need to keep up with, where they are, draw the flowchart, and then try to press people into just a couple of things. It might be a fool’s errand, but then we have established what kind of fool I am.

If anything, it’s gone just about as stupidly as one could imagine. That might be a good way of predicting the course Phony Stark will take, much like his political equivalent: assume the stupidest possible outcome commensurate with the facts.

Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter, accomplished at great expense, has resulted in massive personnel losses that have exposed him to technical debt and legal liability in multiple companies. His decisions on who should be allowed on the platform – coupled with his own 14-year-old brain – have caused advertisers to flee in their droves, while the Usual Suspects chortle and lavish praise on their ham-faced god. Things have not utterly collapsed, but there is a sense that the whole thing is held together with bailing wire and bubble gum and that it would only take one mighty blow to cripple everything.

And there are many directions it could come from. EU regulation. US copyright law. Criminal investigation of the financing in search of foreign influence. Or Apple could just decide that the risk is too great and kick it off the App Store, much as they failed to do with Uber when they had the ability to kill a dickhead VC baby and failed. It’s a good thing everyone’s TWTR was bought out on generous terms, because one can only imagine it would be sinking like TSLA.

Oh by the way – the CEO of Twitter is ostensibly the CEO of Tesla, which has hemorrhaged literally tens of billions of dollars of market cap. He is also the CEO of SpaceX, a company that has the federal government as its primary customer. Neither is a business that will do better for having a mercurial adolescent as CEO – although the consolation might be that Twitter is enough of a honeypot that Musk might leave SpaceX to Gwynne Shotwell’s leadership in all but name (which many commenters think has already happened) and let someone else do the boring work at Tesla (which many commentators have clamored after for years).

Elon Musk is not a genius. He is not even particularly bright. He is a fortunate investor who is good at playing a credulous media like a fiddle, and who is aspirational to the armies of the mentally and emotionally defective created by indifferent parenting, unlimited internet access, and absolutely no paradigm for what it means to be a man in the 21st century. And Twitter is now their shit-flinging playground. It’s not going to be a place worth sticking around.

The moral of the story is that anyone who has money enough to buy Twitter isn’t paying enough taxes. It would be remarkable what would be possible in this country with confiscatory levies on unearned wealth.

“Director By Night” is a documentary about composer Michael Giacchino’s Werewolf By Night, the first Marvel Special Presentation. It’s a fine enough bit of entertainment, a sort of grayscale Twilight Zone episode that stands as proof of what Marvel’s willing to try in the post-Snap era with a whole streaming service to play around with.

The thing about “Director By Night” is that it’s filmed by Anthony Giacchino, Michael’s brother, and includes some truly hilarious and relatable footage of his parents not understanding what the MCU even is (“Batman’s not in it?”). it also includes a lot of old footage of the childhood movies they made with their friends – because they were making films, doing stop-motion animation, laboriously scratching 8mm film with an XACTO knife to make “laser blasts” for the action movies they shot on the loading dock of what’s now apparently a mall.

And I saw all this after watching Light and Magic, the story of ILM, and…it’s no wonder we got Star Wars and the films that captivated GenX. Because these guys were out there making their own movies with handheld cameras, special effects one frame at a time, trying to figure out how to make squibs out of firecrackers and a block of wood and a packet of ketchup. Your average person can take an iPhone they bought on the $32 a month plan and make far, far, far more convincing movies at higher quality than these guys were wishing together out of chicken wire and M-80s. But they wanted to make movies that badly. And when they got the chance…well, we get what we have now.

In some ways, the Disney empire feels like the belated triumph of GenX – we won’t ever have political power, we won’t ever be catered to the way the Boomers or Millenials were, but by damn, cometh the hour, cometh the nostalgia, and we’re going to turn Spider-Man and the X-Men and Star Wars into billion-dollar properties that drown out everything else and YOU WILL SIT THERE AND TAKE IT, BOOMER. Back when you only got a Star Wars movie every three years, you’d watch any old load of crap. Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, old Space:1999 episodes, just trying to get a buzz. now we have an embarrassment of riches, especially since Star Wars is finally getting some distance from the Skywalkers and telling the stories of the rest of the galaxy.

But the big thing these documentaries have done is make me feel like I missed out. I didn’t go to school in my home town, never did. I didn’t know any kids in my neighborhood. I didn’t have the feral childhood celebrated in Stranger Things; I only started to come into my own once I had a driver’s license and was not at the mercy of being able to get a ride (and I lived so far the wrong direction, there was no opportunity to hitch a ride with a friend). And once I could do that, I finally started to blossom.

The Internet has been a mixed bag. Social media was clearly a terrible idea. But the opportunity to keep up with your friends at a distance, to collaborate and do things without having to rely on physical proximity – there’s something there that really matters, even if it’s been tarnished by how easy the Internet made it for the worst people in the world to link up and multiply their influence.

Of which more later, as the shaggy herd trumpets (toots?) in the distance…

One thing I have learned in the last few years is that whenever I blurt out “so tired” to myself, it is actually my way of saying “I am unhappy with the state of my existence in this world as currently constituted.” Could be depression, could be anxiety – although I think we have established that my problem is more anxiety than anything else.Specifically, the reaction to a nebulous threat that I cannot see or effectively game against.

To wit: I expect that the Democrats will lose formal control of at least one house of Congress this coming week. To lose control of the House is more likely and probably to be expected, and while losing formal control of the Senate is bad, the combination of the filibuster and the intransigence of two specific “Democrats” makes as little difference as can be imagined. The bigger issue, honestly, is that loss of either house increases the odds of a default on the national debt, thanks to the Republican willingness to hold the debt ceiling hostage (as exemplified in the near miss of 2011, which cost the country its AAA rating).

The problem is, the Republicans are fundamentally a stupid party. Theirs is a cult that worships stupidity. Hooked up to a lie detector and shot full of sodium pentathol, Mitch McConnell would probably freely admit that a default from debt ceiling failure would be a disaster for the American economy, but the majority of his party does not understand and does not care, and if they did, would probably be confident that it could be pinned on Biden. And the sad thing is, with the incompetent catamites of the press, they are probably correct.

We are at war. We have been at war for eight years now, ever since GamerGate. We are at war with the kleptocracy, we are at war with the Jackpot, we are at war with the manifold arms of international Neo-fascism whether in Brazil, Russia, Israel, the UK or the Deep South and Middle West. We need to be on a wartime footing, economically as well as morally and ethically. We have one party in this country that is an avowed foe of democracy as a concept, and the only moral position is to oppose them at all costs. Maybe it means you have to accept higher taxes. Maybe it means you don’t get a public option for national health insurance. The only thing that matters at this point is that we not lose our democracy to a minoritarian force of bigots defending unbridled wealth.

Losing Twitter is a bit on the nose. A system in which an apartheid trustafarian can simply buy out a major social network is not a healthy system – although it looks like he’s already sinking under the weight of his own incompetence and indifference to law. Would that others of his ilk could be similarly encumbered- the big question of the next two years will be “are we willing to let criminals slide because it would look political to prosecute them.”

It’s a lot to deal with, even in a world where unexpected threats and troubles aren’t waiting to step backward out of the fourth dimension without notice to try to slit your throat. I can hardly be forgiven for experimenting with CBD (which as it turns out is no help whatsoever) and meditative deep breathing (which only works for as long as you keep doing it). Better to try to focus into escape – into Lego Star Wars Castaways, into Watched Walker, into anyplace where reality can be shut out for an hour or four and you can imagine yourself in a world without an unpleasant surprise around every corner.

And yet…Mastodon is taking off. Signal will release Stories publicly within a week or so. Christmas is on the way. The cool and damp and dark of winter are upon us, and for three or four months it will be possible to go into a bar and not worry about still being daylight when you come back out. If I can just hang on until I turn 51, somehow, maybe there will be some hope at the next checkpoint.

Wouldn’t that be something.