a third of a life

This blog turns 17 on Friday, which means I have officially chronicled the last third of my life on here. And the sad thing is, the more I think about it, it’s hard not to think of the early days of this blog as a high-water mark. I was 34, everyone around us was alive and in reasonably good health. A lot of bad things hadn’t happened yet. I wasn’t years removed from DC, the 4Ps was still open and alive, we had plenty of local friends, we were moved into our new house. I was still happy to be at Apple (and with an office of my own!), and while the government was still a Republican trifecta, it was obvious to everyone that it was taking on water and the pleasant surprise of flipping both houses in November would mean a spike in hope for the future.

Sure, 2007 would be a bad one, made worse by bad decisions, and then…well, time would happen. It’s not that it’s been unending misery since 2006, because it hasn’t, and I’ve achieved things and found things that would have been inconceivable back then (iPhones? The MCU? An electric car parked in the driveway of our house with a yard that’s walking distance to the local beer-and-burger spot? Three weeks in London and adding two new continents to my resume?) – but we are also hitting the age where life starts taking away things it gave you. And when one of those things is democracy…that’s unsettling.

I can’t really think about this post for next year. I think there’s a real chance I will be on meds, curled into a ball and unable to function for the last two months of the campaign, unless Biden is healthy and sitting on about a 10 point lead. I need a 1996-style “outcome never in doubt” situation, and I don’t even know if that’s possible any more. As soon as Trump won at all, even with fewer votes and a loophole, the minute it was possible for him to lose fewer than 49 states is the moment at which you could stop pretending things would ever be OK again without constant vigilance.

Because the Adversary is so big, so amorphous. There’s all the traditional backbone of private-business-owners who want to be lords of the manor in their podunk Midwestern towns, all the realtors and car dealers who managed not to be arrested on January 6. There’s all the Wallace voters who swear they vote for the man (always a man), not the party – but always the same party somehow. There’s the libertarian tech-holes of Silly Con Valley, the bros who don’t think the government should be able to do anything that interferes with their self-actualization or ability to remain fourteen years old forever. And of course there’s the stochastic terrorists, the message board warriors who go out with an AR-15 to shoot up the gays and the colored and anyone who committed the horrific indecency of being different from them.

My biggest fear is that Biden will drop dead, because there’s no way America will put itself behind a woman of color at the top of the ticket when there’s a white man on the other side. My second biggest fear is that Trump will drop dead, and be elevated as a martyr while someone just as bad takes his spot and the media falls about themselves to say “Trump is dead, why you bringing up old shit” while someone with the identical positions coasts to victory. I know worry means you suffer twice, and fear is just another way of dying before your time, but we live on the edge of a cliff, and it is very difficult to go about your business with a blithe whistle while the cliff crumbles a little every day out of the corner of your eye.

There are fixes, and reasonable ones. We have gotten so hung up on how things used to be and the idea that our ways are set in stone that we won’t even adjust to other people. Are they breaking the unwritten rules that the President should be the person who gets the most votes? How about we expand the House of Representatives for the first time in a century? There’s no reason we couldn’t have an elected legislative body of 3600 Representatives, each one representing only 100,000 people and thus closer to the people they represent. Gerrymandering becomes impractical, the prospect of multi-ethnic representation goes way up, we have the technology to make it work in ways we didn’t in the First World Way era, and it would basically destroy any possibility of the Electoral College being an issue again once the population advantage of small states was shattered. Hell, start allocating EC votes by individual district like Nebraska or Maine, and you’ve probably guaranteed it.

The old ways are broken. You can’t go back. You have to make the best of what you have in front of you, and make the changes necessary to continue to survive and thrive going forward rather than being tethered and drowning under the weight of trying to keep things the way they used to be.

Year 18. Onward.

the accent problem

So a couple months ago I was down the pub, minding my business, and suddenly I hear a loud guffaw in an accent I know all too well. Sure enough, there’s a couple of guys down at the other end of the bar and one of them is braying away in The Accent. You know the one. The hard-R Southern accent. Not the Foghorn Leghorn-Howell Heflin accent, the “economically anxious” one.

I have a big problem hearing my native accent out here. I shouldn’t. God knows I sound like a bowl of grits drenched in Jack Daniel’s, especially on third down, so it is a Hell of a thing to say for me to say that the Southern accent is like nails on a chalkboard and makes me think a stranger is immediately suspect.

But when you think about it, that’s the shibboleth. The South has become an affirmative indicator in red land, a signifier that you are on Their Side. Just look at the guy who whipped up a quick bigoted ditty and got propped up on Twitter overnight – just paint yourself as a pore ol’ rural white man being oppressed by the existence of all them Others and there’s gold in them thar downloads. Hell, the entire sport of college football is currently being reduced to basically the SEC and Ohio State because that’s what ESPN and Fox are willing to pay to broadcast, and if you’re west of the Rockies you’re gonna have to hitch a ride with the rednecks.

I’ve said it before and I stand by it: the only place I’ve ever experienced people making assumptions about my racial and political attitudes as a white guy with a trace Alabama accent is in…the South. Because in my experience, the rural white South assumes anyone who sounds like them is like them. Which, writ large, is how a Queens property hustler who cites things like “Two Corinthians” gets to be held up as God’s miracle plan for America. He thinks a wishbone is something you get out of a turkey and couldn’t distinguish sweet potato pie from sweet potato casserole, but he’s right about What Really Matters, and that is that he hates the same people they do.

And so, I turned my earbuds up as loud as they would go without damaging anything and tried to lose myself in SomaFM Thistle Radio. But there it was, an annoying buzz underneath all night. Finally, after hearing the mention of Arkansas, I stopped by on the way out the door with a “Woo Pig” and passed a small amount of conversation. He was an electrician, out on a job with his buddy from Colorado. And, sure enough and sadly enough, he was exactly as his accent pegged him.

the implosion

It’s all the fault of Texas, really. Once the Big 12 insisted on treating them as the most special boys with the biggest share of money and their own cable TV network, everyone else began looking for a way out. For Texas A&M and Missouri, it was the SEC. For Nebraska, it was the Big 10. And for Colorado, it was the PAC-12, where they finished above .500 in football twice before choosing last week to flee back to a Big 12 that had the dual advantages of no more Texas and a TV deal in hand to the tune of $31 million a year.

Because Texas decamped for the SEC. Which then gave the B1G room to do a deal with U$C and UCLA to keep up with the 16-team standard, and made the Big 12 more attractive to Colorado – and now the Big 12 is at 13 and eyeing Utah and both Arizonas to reach that new magic number of 16. And all of sudden, the PAC-12 is the PAC-9 and the wolves are at the door, and the commissioner doesn’t have a better TV offer than a streaming deal with Apple.

The problem now is that the ESPN-Fox duopoly already has everybody. They are already paying for all the football, and there’s not something out there that will compel them to offer more money (witness the foolishness of Florida State, trying to get the ACC to give them a Texas free-roll when their media rights are tied up through 2036 and all the places they’d go are already ESPN leagues – why would ESPN pay out an extra $40 million a year for the same thing they already have?) – right now, the peril is that the PAC-9 has no TV deal and no obvious dance partner, and a lot of schools that are leveraged to the hilt.

I’m obviously most concerned for Cal, whose best days in football are a decade behind them and who can’t seem to crack the 8-win plateau after wasting years in the cul-de-sac of a Sonny Dykes Air Raid pastiche. How Golden Bears fans don’t climb Sather Tower with a high-powered rifle I’ll never know – first the burden of $300 million to stay on campus in their own stadium, then two years’ delays by filthy hippies, then economic collapse, then footballing futility and a decade of not getting over on Furd, then the pandemic and its aftershocks, and now, to add insult to injury, the warrior poets of the B1G extend the life raft to the SoCal schools and then Oregon and Washington.

But it’s not just the sturdy golden bear in a pinch here. Stanfurd’s longtime sugar daddy is deceased, and the Arillaga money every year may or may not be replaced by a young donor base more consumed with crypto and NFTs and AI startups than the fate of the Axe. And spare a thought for Oregon State and Washington State, which basically everyone has consigned not to the Big 12, but to the WAC or Mountain West alongside the Boise States and Colorado States of the world. And now if you go through and do the math, we are getting perilously close to the 64 teams-and-pull-the-ladder-up for the Super League – or worse yet, a weird mutant relegation system with the SEC and B1G as the Super League and the ACC and Big 12 one step below as a sort of second division, then everyone else scrambling, and promotion and relegation determined every five years by what kind of TV deal you can do.

Spencer Hall famously made it clear in “God’s Away On Business”: there is no one in charge in college football and there likely never will be. That’s why we have the professionalization of NIL and wide-open transfer without any sort of salary cap, salary floor, cost controls or (most important) player unionization, just free market narcocapitalism. Vanderbilt played for decades as the one stripper actually putting herself through college, only to find out that suddenly the club is twice as big and there’s a price list on the wall and they’re bringing in donkeys and if you don’t like it, the Sun Belt is over there. Geography is meaningless in a league where UCLA will play Maryland. Tradition is meaningless in a league that somehow combines Boston College, Pitt, Miami and Louisville. A third of the “original” Big 12, including the one no one wanted to be around, has been inexplicably grafted onto the SEC, because somehow Texas and Oklahoma are valuable brands to draw eyeballs and not because they are materially better at football than programs like TCU or (spit) Stanford that have turned out superior results in the same interval.

And now, because of a decade of chasing some kind of golden goose of casual fan eyeballs, the wheels are coming off. Now your options as a college football program are basically 1) be Alabama, 2) be willing to pay the money and make the compromises to pursue Alabama, even at the expense of other sports or the mission of your institution, or 3) go play intramurals. And if you are not a member of a conference that is shelling out $60 million a year in TV revenue, 2) may not be open to you no matter what you’re willing to do. Nothing that happened before has any value any longer. And that is toxic, because the value of what happened before is what separates college football from the XFL. It’s the tradition, it’s the rivalries, it’s the family connections, it’s Eli Gold on the radio or Keith Jackson on the game of the week, it’s names that don’t mean anything to anyone else but can take you back decades, and the play flashes before your eyes at the mention of “Van Tiffin” or “Thomas Rayam” or “George Teague” or “Patton Robinette”.

College football was the original and greatest form of the sport because of all the things you couldn’t put a price on. It will die, and die badly, and die ugly, because someone tried to put a price on them anyway.

flashback, part 115 of n

In some ways, 1997 was the last summer. I had finished school in May and had nothing lined up before September at the earliest. I took a job, then lost that job by spending a month and change in Ohio waiting for a different job to happen. It was the last time there was an open-ended period of summer without the daily obligation of doing something.

It was a transitional state, not unlike the summer of 1990, which in a way was even more thoroughly the last summer. I didn’t have a job that summer, because I was content to live off my graduation money (especially once I got my car stereo installed) and I was just killing time until the dream began when I started college. The big difference was that in 1990, I had an open-ended future full of possibility to dream of. In 1997, I was confused and bewildered and clinging to a thin reed of hope that the guy I kinda-sorta knew from the Internet would throw me a lifeline.

In retrospect, it feels like I must have been insane. I was flat broke, twelve hours drive from home, biding my time until I could hear back from my one job application in a completely different career field in a completely different city. I could no more do that now than I could fly to the moon under my own power, for all sorts of reasons – mostly revolving around the requirements of a mortgage and an unwillingness to abandon 26 years of experience to start from scratch in something else. But back then, with the entire past fallen down the chasm behind me and nothing to lose as the ground crumbled under my feet, I was willing to close my eyes and leap.

I guess that’s the problem. Everyone knows I hate my job, but I have reconciled myself to it. Or rather, had. Now they want me in the office again, and have offered no concessions on the prospect of five days a week – not the flexibility of a couple of work from home days that we had prior to the onset of COVID, not the possibility of relocating to an office that actually has people I routinely collaborate with and would profit by proximity to, and no sign whatsoever that my work is even noticed, let alone valued. It’s a one size fits all setting, and I’m the wrong size.

But what are the alternatives? Find a remote job somewhere else? No one in this valley is hiring people to do what I do, as far as I can tell, and the ones that are want to hire remote workers all right – in Seattle, or Atlanta or Dallas or somewhere considerably cheaper. Which means finding a remote job in another part of the world is going to mean a pay cut that I can’t really afford. So either way, stay or go, it means back to an office and a commute.

And then we’re back to my oldest friend, the devil I know — and the fact that right now I still know how to do the job, have institutional knowledge, and still get enough vacation to try to live the life I want outside the office. And maybe I can use the downtime and the slow days stuck in a cube to actually study and pursue other work, instead of distracting myself with the laundry and the dishes and the trash and recycling and the occasional errands.

I don’t know. The dream of wiring remote goes back to the very beginning of my career, on a drive through New England when it occurred to me that the combination of home broadband and UNIX might make it possible to work from home somehow. Work from home was a key desire by ten years later, and last year, it caused me to turn down a contract offer that would have paid more money even though the daily commute was barely ten miles round trip. I’m not fool enough to count on the possibility of retirement, but for the last three years, I’ve been able to get close enough that I can live with it.

So much in this life is open-ended uncertainty. I’m waiting to hear back on the recall of my car. I’m waiting to hear back on the part for the new hot tub we’ve never been able to use. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop on a legal matter that has been in limbo for eight months with no prospect of closing the book. We might not even live in a democracy by this time two years from now. All I want is the basic assurance that I have been doing a good job for the last three and a half years, and will be allowed to continue doing it as I have done on the condition that I keep doing a good job. That doesn’t strike me as an exceptional, outrageous, privileged or extravagant ask.

But that’s not how the world works any more.

ding dong

I supposed the witch is dead, for what it’s worth. After twenty-five years, Dan Snyder – the boy wonder who took a heritage NFL franchise and reduced a 30-year waiting list for season tickets to dead last in attendance, who never managed to luckbox into 11 wins in a season once in a quarter century of modern NFL parity scheduling, who took the one thing that bound the DMV together and make it into a laughingstock leavened with criminality – that son of a bitch is gone, and $5 billion richer for the investment.

Thieves get rich and saints get shot and God don’t answer prayers a lot, as the saying goes.

I don’t think I’ve done a ridearound since the onset of the pandemic. Sonny Sam and Frank are long gone, and the broadcast team that succeeded Sonny Sam and Frank are all gone now, and the team doesn’t even have the same name – the problem wasn’t that they changed from an old name, it’s that they changed to a stupid XFL-assed name when they had the quiet badassery of just Washington Football Team and the slogan “NO NAME BUT TEAM”. Never mind that the NFL is slick garbage, one giant foaming slop bucket of Narrative and performative jingoism. The only professional football I’ve watched a full quarter of in the last five years is the Birmingham Stallions of the USFL.

For that matter, the last college football game I watched all the way through was probably Army-Navy the year Army broke the streak, and that was on DVR delay. Football is starting to seem like the problem – basketball is quicker, baseball is more relaxing, soccer is at least different. George Will’s slur about “violence interrupted by committee meetings” has never been more apt. But that’s not the thing that grates on me the worst.

It’s that it used to be a tie to the old days, a common thread to that old Saturn cruising down Old Georgetown Pike with two large Dr Peppers and a double bacon Whopper, windows down, cigar between my fingers and good ol’ Sonny Sam and Frank calling the action. The days when everything on autumn Mondays depended on the results of the day before, and the homeless guy was high-fiving the 2-star general who was high-fiving the GWU co-ed on the Orange line because we beat Philly or Dallas. It was enough to get me out the door at 9 AM on a Sunday on the bus to Dan Brown’s Lounge, where I’d repose under a painting of Sonny Jurgensen and drink with Bobby Mitchell’s son and despair of whether Jim Zorn was any kind of replacement for Gibbs 2.0. It was that happy moment of being parked on the street with the game on the radio, furiously Tweeting and texting everyone as RG3 completed the last truly exciting season and made us feel like there was a future.

It’s been a long, long time since it felt like there was a better future coming. I am finding more and more than after 50, it’s mostly about figuring out how to keep most of what you have, minimizing the steady loss and just learning to live without what you lost. Getting rid of that Shetland asshole is less about making “Commanders” football something I can live with again and more about settling accounts, about proving that there’s some kind of judgement for wrongdoing – even if it’s the kind of wrongdoing that lets you walk away to live in London with $5 billion in the bank. They punished the little bastard by giving him all I ever wanted. Which I guess is just how America is, now.

the breathtaking blue

Our gal in Oslo came through for me this morning, and I entered and successfully created a Bluesky account. It’s been months since I first added my name to the wait list, and I suspect there’s a real chance a code got eaten by the spam trap, but we’re going to overlook how long it took me to get onboard and celebrate that I arrived.

It feels like a throwback – not least because I immediately connected with the various denizens of the EDSBS Cinematic Universe, most of whom I have had very little contact with since 2016 and the dissolution of my main public Twitter account in the aftermath of the election. It’s not lost on me that I may be letting myself in for a rough year next year, but we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it. Not only did I see a bunch of those folks again, I found a surprising number of people have already made the jump.

On paper, this is a step in the right direction, because it is being what Mastodon cannot and Threads won’t: a drop-in replacement for Twitter. No algorithmic timeline, no ads, no auto populated firehose of influencer and celeb accounts. It has some interesting features: self-verification via a domain name as account handle, customizable algorithmic feeds to make sure you surface material relevant to you without forcing it into your chrono timeline, and the prospect of federation and account migration in future.

Unfortunately, it also seems to have failed to go to school on some of the simplest practices of moderation and safety. The fact that they hadn’t established deny-listing of racial slurs in user names suggests a fairly privileged group of developers who failed to ask the first question for any new product in 2023: “how will Nazis abuse this?” I got the impression they may be speed-running the steps to get to a better solution, but they don’t have Instagram’s existing moderation apparatus. Of course, neither does Mastodon, and until this morning everything I heard suggested Bluesky has been a superior experience for nonwhite users. So who knows. It may be that you just have to pick the level of unpleasantness you can live with.

And right now, Bluesky has some obvious advantages. Unlike Threads, it is not “what if Twitter but Instagram” and I am not being force-fed a diet of influencer bullshit and journalistic self-importance. Unlike Mastodon, it has people I know on it and they are willing to use it. And unlike Twitter, it’s not owned by a ham-faced racist yarpie who should be ground into meatloaf for the homeless and his assets liquidated as a down payment on reparations. These are all nontrivial advantages.

Not to mention…Twitter is kind of dying. There are maybe half a dozen people there for whom I have no other way of following them. Brands and teams can be had via Threads, and hopefully followed from my private Mastodon account before long, which would complete the realignment. Threads accounts for reading, Bluesky for socializing, Signal for private chat and personal contact, with special use cases for Slack and iMessage.

Of such things is our new social world built. But tonight, I have a functional social media outlet that isn’t in hock to Phony Stark or the Zuckbot 3000, and that is a blessing I have long looked forward to.

running away from the cops speed

Sometime overnight, Threads broke one hundred million users. This was always going to be a possibility – the advantage of an existing login and friends list is so overwhelming that Threads hasn’t even launched in the EU because those advantages open it to stupefyingly huge fines for anticompetitive behavior – but the fact that it has hit 50% of Twitter’s MAU in under a week is significant.

How it is? Well, Threads shows you exactly why I only log into Instagram through a browser rather than using the app: it’s optimized for the same endless streams of meme-tastic shitposting that originally made Facebook unusable, and if your friends don’t post enough, you’re going to just end up in an endless scroll of algorithmic garbage. But that said, being in the gunsights for their misconduct over the last seven years has made them sufficiently gun-shy that the kind of alt-right garbage for which Twitter is currently optimized has not got traction.

Algorithmic pink slime firehose notwithstanding, Threads does have some things that make it less of a hassle than Twitter. No trending topics prevents giving a megaphone to bad stuff, no DMs cuts down on a major vector of harassment, and there seems to be a conscious effort among the user base that it’s going to be different this time. Of course, that means the same sort of middle-of-the-road Minion-inspirational NBC prime time mediocre bullshit in carload lots, but it’s better than outright fascists, racists, and tech bros just riding Elon’s nuts.

And nuts is apparently just what Elon is going, which is a delight to watch. This fool literally proposed a dick-measuring contest with Zuckerberg. I sure hope for her own sake that Linda Yaccorino got paid up front and in cash, and if she didn’t, well, that’s her own goddamn fault. Facebook, currently trading as Meta, is not your friend and is not to be trusted and has no future for me – but as someone wisely said on Threads, “you may not like Godzilla but you need him to fight Mechagodzilla.” Threads only has to be out there long enough to torch Twitter, and then it’s off to Mastodon or Bluesky or wherever.

Because to all accounts, I may be only ten days or so away from possibly getting a Bluesky invite. Despite their slow-crawl invitation system, they’ve still built out a user base comparable to Mastodon’s, and the buzz elsewhere is that non-white and non-tech folk are having a better time there than on the ‘Don (which is not surprising; as I’ve said before, Mastodon was never meant to be a drop-in replacement for Twitter and what it does is not exactly suitable for people who are not running a specialized community of interest). I’m following about a hundred people on Twitter, but only a dozen or so post routinely. Similarly, I’m following 67 on Threads, but only 28 follow me and it’s too soon to see how many people are posting routinely. I don’t have a problem following three times as many people as follow me, as long as those people are putting up stuff I want to read. I actually have just over 200 followed and followers alike on my main Mastodon account, but fewer than half a dozen are people I actually know, and none are sports teams with updates or the fistful of celebs I actually want to keep track of.

The dream scenario at this point, honestly, is a Tapbots app that can feed both federation protocols, and being able to follow the SJ Giants or Greenock Morton on Threads via ActivityPub in a Mastodon account while keeping my friends on Bluesky and still seeing the ones who just settle on Threads and call it a day. It might take a while for all this to come together – I genuinely don’t know that Threads will ever adopt ActivityPub, especially if it can grow to nine figures in a week all by itself and has no obvious way to monetize federation (and the Fediverse does not want them there, plainly) – but after three or four years of “the hottest new social network of the afternoon,” we finally have something exciting happening in the space, and not a moment too soon. Now that ham-faced yarpie son of a bitch climbed up there, it’s a Hell of a lot higher than he thought, ain’t it?

was that fast? I thought that was fast

Three days later, we’re live. Threads officially launched for public consumption about five hours ago, give or take, and already has over two million users. Clearly it’s easier to get people to sign up for something new when they already have an account and a friends list.

Some thoughts, in no particular order:

* The default timeline when you first sign on is an avalanche of shitposters, clout chasers, and the sort of algorithmic garbage you get when you use the Instagram app. Which is hardly surprising, but the Instagram app has the option to flip to a list of the people you follow. THIS DOES NOT EXIST IN THREADS. There is no way to confine your view to just the people you asked to see, and if you have the misfortune of refreshing your timeline while looking at a post from a friend, it will vanish and be replaced with more pink slime content.

* That, coupled with the fact that you can mute or block someone and still see more of their posts, gives the distinct impression that Threads didn’t ship because it was ready, it shipped because Twitter had a really bad weekend and Bluesky has hit an inflection point on mindshare in the last seven to ten days. It’s not available in the EU, because they can’t clear GDPR, and it’s missing some fairly rudimentary functionality, which suggests that the last six months have basically been “how do we fit the Insta authentication system into the Mastodon code?”

* I mean, maybe? God knows that until Phony Stark rolled up, Mastodon was famous mostly for furries and for having its codebase used to bootstrap far-right websites. What else would you call Facebook? Not to mention…

* By adding a text update posting service to an Instagram app which contains everything else they’ve ripped off in the last decade, the Facebook machine has now produced a laundered New Facebook which is just two or three apps in a trench coat and doesn’t have the stink of your Trump aunt’s racist Minions memes on it. It took forever, but they finally have all the bits in place.

* Here’s the thing: all I want, all I *ever* wanted, was Twitter from 2012 and maybe Instagram from the same time. No Snapchat, no TikTok, no ripping off YouTube, none of that. Right now, based on what I’m hearing, the best shot I have of that is Bluesky. There are already lots of people there I would follow, it doesn’t have a firehouse of algorithmic shit to all accounts, and while it does have that hipster dumb fuck Dorsey on the board, it’s not in hock to a Big Five Or Six tech company and it’s produced at least as viable a product as Mastodon or Threads.

* Is it harsh to be judging a product on its first five hours? Not this product. They’ve had six months and all the resources of Facebook to make this pop off, and it’s being held up as the great challenge to Twitter. So no, it’s not unfair in the least, and miss me with that lil-ol-Clemson bullshit, when you add two million users in the first four hours you better be ready to play in the big leagues.

* As of the end of last year, Twitter had somewhere under 400 million users, and Instagram had three times that. Insta’s MAU is quadruple Twitter’s, and that was before the assorted shenanigans by which Donald Frunk has chosen to sandbag his investment over the past six months (capped by this weekend’s rate limiting). It will not take very much at all for Threads to be a viable alternative to Twitter for a whole lot of people, because if your friends go, there’s no reason not to.

* There is a scenario whereby Threads replaces Twitter, but thanks to ActivityPub, I can base myself in my Mastodon account and still follow the people I want to follow (and the entities like the SJ Giants or Greenock Morton who are statistically unlikely to ever show up on Mastodon). That would be a very agreeable state of affairs for me personally, but it would require Facebook to commit to building out ActivityPub support in Threads, which (surprise surprise) did not make the 1.0 release. I guess we’ll see what happens.

* Musk is Trump, but Zuckerberg is George W. Bush: it’s his damn fault we got to this point in the first place. I have no problem leveraging the lesser of two evils, but I thrill to the prospect of being able to kick them both to the curb for good.

sky blue

Eight months into the Muskening, Twitter has finally started to break down in a meaningful way. Apparently, there is a need to move off Google’s cloud services, either for non-payment or god knows why, and and in the course of either not paying or trying to circumvent the need to pay, Twitter implemented a log-in-only approach and then broke the ability to load in such a way that it became necessary to rate-limit accounts in order to prevent DDOS-ing themselves.

Twitter is experiencing bankruptcy Hemingway-style: slowly, then quickly. The technical debt has accrued to the point where the failures are becoming more frequent, more obvious, and harder to remediate. More to the point, though, an alternative seems to be emerging: Bluesky, which began as a spitball project at Twitter trying to somehow crossbreed blockchain with distributed federation. It was supposed to be some kind of Web3 gimmick from the defective mind of Jack Dorsey. While he remains on the board (and has naturally gravitated to an even more crypto-moron product called nostr), Bluesky seems to be having a moment – signups have reached a point where they had to shut down new enrollments because of the traffic load.

This is even more significant because Bluesky is in beta and requires an invitation to get on. Which creates artificial scarcity, that thing that humans covet more than any other: let me in the exclusive place. And yet, for whatever reason, if you look at the people I most wanted to be on Twitter to follow because I like their content and don’t have another easy way to do it: they’re going toward Bluesky. Not Mastodon, not whatever else is on offer.

Which is not surprising. I stand by what I said about Mastodon not being a drop-in Twitter replacement, because it’s not meant to be. But it’s also suffering from the curse of desktop Linux: “this is free and open source and you can use it however you want NOT LIKE THAT.” Setting aside the fact that the biggest pre-Elon uptake of the Mastodon codebase was as a way for far-right freeze-peach Twitter alternatives like Gab or Truth to bootstrap themselves, the fact of the matter is: when you put something out in the wild for free, you can’t really govern what people will do with it. And as currently constituted, Mastodon is not a good replacement for Twitter, for the same reason Linux never took over the desktop and no one actually compiles their own Android for their device: Ed Earl Brown just wants to do the thing he wants to do, not build his own tools to do that thing, and fuck you Andy Rubin, nobody cares if it’s “open.”

The only way Mastodon beats out a dying Twitter is if there is no alternative, and if the anarchy of roll-your-own can be made easier than just hanging in there with a ham-faced yarpie bigot having your social media by the nuts. Bluesky is, on paper, what most of us wanted: Twitter from 2012 with someone else in charge. The old EDSBS commentariat is rapturing itself to the best of their ability. Random friends and people I only really know online are announcing their migration. For whatever reason, Bluesky might have cracked the secret sauce to be the next thing – because that’s where everyone’s going. That’s what they finally settled on as an acceptable alternative.

This doesn’t account for Threads, the product of the P92/Barcelona project over at Facebook, which will basically be “Twitter but using your existing Instagram ID”. At long last, you gotta make Facebook’s need to rip off everything else and cram in into Instagram work for you. It’s entirely possible that making a new Twitter off the back of something everyone already has an account for using will be the glide path, because there’s nothing new to sign up for: you have a user name and a friends list and an existing relationship, and the fact that Insta was the only safe social media for me in 2017 is not lost on me.

Two possibilities, two options that promise to have some substantial uptake (one already has), and the possibility of departing Twitter and keeping some of what I had, and the important bits at that? Let’s fly away into the breathtaking blue. Of which.

exit, smelling

The Supreme [sic] Court ended its term today with the capper on two days of predictable rulings. Affirmative action in college admissions (for people who aren’t donors or legacies or athletes): gone. The Biden administration’s attempt to make it easier on people who had to take out loans to get through college: gone. The right to discriminate against someone just because you say it’s your religion: enshrined, based on what turned out to be a fictional scenario.

After decades of decrying the Warren Court as some sort of unelected superlegislature for daring to enforce the law as it was written, the Roberts Court – which is really the Alioto/Thomas Court – is merrily shredding the entire concept of stare decisis and wiping their ass with the fragments. The Warren Court established over and over that the power of government cannot be used to shit on people who are different than you, and the R/A/T court has established that the government has no power to prevent private institutions from shitting on people who are different than them. Soft secession again: the Confederacy re-established without giving up the federal sugar tit, and California and New York will foot the bill for Tennessee and Florida to maintain white supremacy in perpetuity. That’s the plan.

But then, that’s the legacy of having handed over the reins to a racist criminal because the people were too stupid and indifferent to prevent it. Utter shamelessness is no longer disqualifying. Criminality is not disqualifying. Demonstrated fraud and falsehood is no longer disqualifying. Outright racism is no longer disqualifying. And the fact that none of those things is disqualifying means that the value system of this country is broken beyond repair, and broken by the people who cried crocodile tears longest and loudest over “values.” In the end, the only thing they valued was keeping power from anyone unlike them. And it shows. Because now the goal isn’t to get more people to vote for you, it’s to disenfranchise and disempower anyone who won’t.

Every election is now about containment. Hold the boomers at bay until they die, and re-write the world without them. And then, take the power from the rednecks and the car dealers and the venture capitalists until they accept that everyone has to pay the freight and everyone has to be allowed in.

We might not get away with this one.