Tag: social media (page 1 of 3)

January 16, 2025

you don’t have to be there

To watch the destruction in Los Angeles through the prism of our fractured social-media ecosystem is to feel acutely disoriented. The country is burning; your friends are going on vacation; next week Donald Trump will be president; the government is setting the fires to stage a “land grab”; a new cannabis-infused drink will help you “crush” Dry January. Mutual-aid posts stand alongside those from climate denialists and doomers. Stay online long enough and it’s easy to get a sense that the world is simultaneously ending and somehow indifferent to that fact. It all feels ridiculous. A viral post suggests that “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.” You scroll some more and learn that the author of that post wrote the line while on the toilet (though the author has since deleted the confession).

Call it doomscrolling, gawking, bearing witness, or whatever you want, but there is an irresistible pull in moments of disaster to consume information. This is coupled with the bone-deep realization that the experience of staring at our devices while others suffer rarely provides the solidarity one might hope. Amanda Hess captured this distinctly modern feeling in a 2023 article about watching footage of dead Gazan children on Instagram: “I am not a survivor or a responder. I’m a witness, or a voyeur. The distress I am feeling is shame.”

The title of Warzel’s article is “Beyond Doomscrolling,” but it’s really about things you can do, useful apps you can download, in addition to doomscrolling.

When Musk started dismantling Twitter, I thought it might be an opportunity for people to discover that “irresistible pull in moments of disaster to consume information” is not in fact “irresistible” — it can be resisted. (Also, you could delete “in moments of disaster” from that sentence: infoconsumption doesn’t go up all that much in times of crisis because so many people are doing it every day — though, perhaps, redescribing every day as a crisis or a disaster to justify their habit.)

People: you don’t have to “watch the destruction in Los Angeles through the prism of our fractured social-media ecosystem.” Nobody is making you. And it doesn’t do you any good to watch.

But when Twitter became intolerable people decamped first for Mastodon and then Threads and then Bluesky, or went all-in on Instagram. The Twitter habit, it seems, will long survive Twitter.

I know I’ve said this many times before, but once more for the late arrivals:

I read news once a week, mainly when the Economist arrives in my mailbox on Monday. If you live in a bigger city than Waco, Texas you’ll get it earlier, but a day or two one way or the other does not matter in the least.
The sites and writers I want to read more regularly I subscribe to in my RSS reader, and that includes a handful of Bluesky and micro.blog accounts. Except in very rare circumstances, I don’t visit bsky.app or micro.blog directly. I don’t have a Twitter account any more, I haven’t had a Facebook account since 2007, and I only visit Instagram once every couple of weeks to see what some friends are up to. (I devoutly wish they were somewhere other than Instagram, but I’m not the boss of them.)
Likewise, RSS is how I read the reporters and columnists I especially value. I read Ross Douthat and David Brooks and Ruth Graham, but I never visit the NYT home page. Ditto with the Atlantic and several other periodicals: read the people you know you want to read and ignore the rest.
There aren’t many worthwhile things on the internet that I can’t get via RSS, and for those I rely on email newsletters.

So: in the morning I go through my RSS feeds and newsletters, and then when I’ve read everything I want to read I’m done. Maybe I check back later in the day, maybe not — I have things to do.

Now, having established these habits, when I read a piece like Warzel’s I think: Why do people live this way? I’d rather pull out my fingernails with a pair of pliers. And I bet if any of you, dear readers, would ditch the doomscrolling habit for three months you’d never go back — you’d wonder why anyone would ever go back.

November 29, 2024

Substack vs. Indie

Power Is Shifting Rapidly to Indie Creators, says Ted Gioia, and maybe that’s true, but it’s important to remember that people on Substack, like Ted, are not “indie creators” in the fullest sense — they’re dependent on a platform that sets the terms of engagement.

Now, to be sure, if I were going to write on any social-media platform it would be Substack. Most people who write there make little or no money, but it’s possible to do very well indeed, and the 90/10 split of the subscription revenue is remarkably generous. (“Remarkably” because if they had chosen 80/20 or even 70/30 — the latter being Apple’s cut for app creators — not many people would have complained.) But:

Substack is not a profitable company. Its CEO says it could be, but those are just words.
Its unprofitability means that it’s still dependent on investment from venture capitalists, and they can put pressure on the people who run the show to change things up — for instance, to take a bigger cut of the revenues.
The same pressure could lead to the introduction of ads.
Their CEO has written that they don’t like the algorithmic determination of content — but also that they’re “not against algorithms” and will use them if that helps their users. What does and does not help their users is for them to determine, and they can change their minds at any time, for any reason or none. (And they already do use an algorithm to feed you what they want you to see in Notes, their version of Twitter or Bluesky, which shows up on your home page and cannot be hidden).
Not only could the founders of Substack change their minds about any of their policies and procedures, and do so at any time, they could also sell the company. Indeed, this would be the norm for Silicon Valley startups.
In short, Substack is as subject to enshittification as any other platform. And for Cory Doctorow, who coined the term, enshittification “is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a ‘two sided market,’ where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.”

If Substack — and Bluesky, another platform getting a lot of love these days — does not enshittify, that would be a miracle on the order of the loaves and fishes. If you’re a creator who wants to avoid enshittification and remain independent, your best bet is to claim your turf on the open web — that is, where we are right now.

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use Substack — Austin Kleon, whom I just linked to, has a great Substack — and what Freddie says is true:

No matter what the usual suspects say, Substack has dramatically expanded the number of people making money as writers and deepened the engagement of a lot of passionate and talented amateurs, and for that I’m grateful. At some point the “own your turf” people have to recognize that the vast majority just aren’t going to roll their own platforms and services, and to insist that they do is simply to insist that a lot of voices aren’t heard anywhere.

No such insistence here! I can easily see why people would choose Substack in preference to what I do here — and indeed, if I had to make my living solely from writing I would almost certainly be using Substack myself. (Also, I would almost certainly be living below the poverty line.) But every Substack user needs to realize that (a) Substack writers are not truly independent, (b) Substack will almost certainly undergo enshittification, and, therefore, (c) anyone using the platform needs an unenshittifiable backup.

P.S. I’ve seen a lot of bad writing both pro and contra Substack lately, but I just had to laugh at this by Sam Kahn:

On this platform, for instance, I’ve been reading and enjoying Jo Paoletti’s diary — which is well-written and insightful and gives me insight into the mind of this person I’ve never met. There simply is no forum, prior to the launch of Substack (or, let’s say, of the blogosphere), that would have given me access to Jo’s diary. No newspaper would have run it — what is the news hook? — no publisher would have printed it unless Jo had gone on to be, like, a head of state or turned out to be a serial killer. A platform like Substack multiplies by some logarithmic absurdity the volume of expression in the written word. It releases founts of creativity that, for decades or centuries, were buried.

That’s a pretty significant parenthetical correction there! It is of course the blog, which preceded Substack by more than two decades, that “releases founts of creativity” etc. Kahn’s argument is not an argument for Substack at all, but rather an argument for blogging.

Let’s be clear about what Substack is: it’s a blogging platform with a paywall — that’s all. And it’s not the first one: Medium, among others, preceded it. Substack is just the one that happened to catch on, largely because it offers the best (i.e. least revenue-extractive, most flexible) deal to writers. But it doesn’t enable any kind of writing that isn’t already enabled by the World Wide Web.

November 2, 2023

ignorance, vincible and invincible

‘Childhood has been rewired’:

[Jonathan Haidt:] ‘TikTok and Twitter are incredibly dangerous for our democracy. I’d say they’re incompatible with the kind of liberal democracy that we’ve developed over the last few hundred years.’ He’s quite emphatic about all of this, almost evangelical. Which makes me think of his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind, in which he argued about the danger of getting too caught up in your own bubble, believing your own spin. Might he be guilty of that here? Might it just be the case, I ask, that there’s less of a stigma around mental health now, so teenagers are far more likely to admit that they have problems?

‘But why is it, then, that right around 2013 all these girls suddenly start checking into psychiatric inpatient units? Or suicide – they’re making many more suicide attempts. The level of self-harm goes up by 200 or 300 per cent, especially for the younger girls aged ten to 14. So no, the idea that it’s just a change in self-report doesn’t hold any water because we see very much the same curves, at the same time, for behaviour. Suicide, certainly, is not a self-report variable. This is real. This is the biggest mental health crisis in all of known history for kids.’

People are absolutely desperate to believe that this isn’t true, but as Jean M. Twenge shows, the alternative explanations are getting less defensible by the day.

One oddity of this: People used to worry desperately about boys being immersed in gaming, but it turns out that gaming is not as bad for young minds as social media, and therefore boys are not being as thoroughly traumatized as girls. The smartphone era is bad for boys, but it’s nightmarish for girls.

My guess is that parents who continue to provide smartphones for their kids are, epistemically speaking, indistinguishable from those who declare that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. They cannot now back down; they have made themselves invincibly ignorant. Their sunk costs are just too great for them to consider evidence. They’ll keep doing what they’re doing, no matter the suffering their children undergo.

Now, these people are not invincibly ignorant in the proper sense of that term: The truly invincibly ignorant are not culpable because they cannot remedy their ignorance. I am using, and perhaps abusing, the term by employing it to describe parents for whom the admission of tragic error is psychologically impossible.

It’s noteworthy, I think, that in his current and forthcoming work Haidt links the smartphone plague with helicopter parenting: the very same parents who fret ceaselessly about their children’s safety, and prevent them from achieving independence, also put those kids in the way of certain dangers by tethering them to social media. Worse and worse!

But: Lenore Skenazy, of Free Range Kids fame/notoreity/infamy, writes on Haidt’s Substack about a new study demonstrating … well, you can put it two different ways. You can say that while parents accept that their kids need to be more independent, their actions don’t reflect that acceptance: they just keep on helicoptering and snowplowing. But today I choose to put the point more hopefully: Though most of them cannot yet break themselves of what they know to be very bad habits — they can’t summon the courage to take away their kids’ smartphones or let them walk to the local library by themselves — at least they know these habits are bad. Which is the necessary first step, after all. Maybe if I meditate on that I’ll become less despairing.

P.S. On the other hand, I’m reading stories about how A.I. + social media = guys using their phones to make deepfake porn videos featuring their female classmates, so maybe parents who don’t take their kids’ smartphones and smash them to pieces should be sent to prison for, like, fifty years.

May 15, 2023

the three paths of micro.blog

I’ve written here from time to time about the excellent service known as micro.blog — and I still want to commend it to those of you who have had enough of the big social-media platforms. You have to pay for it, but you get a lot for your money, including freedom from advertising.

Micro.blog is a highly flexible service with many intriguing features, and it may be hard for new users to decide just which ones are most useful for them. Perhaps it would help if you think of micro.blog as offering three different (though overlapping) paths, and spend some time considering which path best meets your needs.

Path One: Community. For many users, micro.blog is a smallish community of like-minded people — a place to connect with interesting folks, in a much more low-key and undramatic way than what places like Facebook and Twitter (and even Mastodon) offer. If you go to the Discover page you’ll find something that looks like this:

That’s a great way to find people who share your interests.

Path Two: Blog. Micro.blog is also a great blogging platform. It was, as its name suggests, originally designed for small posts, but it scales up to posts of any size. When your post gets longer than 300 characters, you get the option to add a title to the post; then people looking at your timeline will see that title as a link, which they can click on to see the full post. Micro.blog also offers categories that you can use to organize different kinds of posts. Basically, it can replace any of the cruftier and less agile blog platforms, like WordPress — but it has a much more streamlined and elegant UI for posting. Best of both worlds, I think. (For longer posts, like this one, I still use the WordPress-powered blog you’re reading, because I have 15 years of tags here, but for everything else I use micro.blog because it provides such a comfortable environment for writing.)

Path Three: Journal. This has become my primary way to use micro.blog. I mainly post (a) photos, (b) links to what I’ve been reading — micro.blog is definitively the best blogging platform for readers — and listening to, and (c) the occasional brief audio post (AKA microcast). It’s a great way for me to share what I’m up to for folks who may be interested — but also, and for me primarily, to keep a kind of life journal.

Here’s the key takeaway for you: Micro.blog is equally useful for each of these paths. So if you start out using it just for blogging but then decide you want more of an interactive community, you can shift in that direction. It will accommodate your needs. Now, as I have said before, it will — by design — never be a place for you to monetize your brand, troll, shitpost, or become an influencer. But hey, there are plenty of other platforms better suited for that kind of thing. Micro.blog is better suited for the more human and humane paths I have identified here.

April 5, 2023

the Oppenheimer Principle revisited

Eight years ago, I wrote about a dominant and pernicious ideology that features two components:

Component one: that we are living in a administrative regime built on technocratic rationality whose Prime Directive is, unlike the one in the Star Trek universe, one of empowerment rather than restraint. I call it the Oppenheimer Principle, because when the physicist Robert Oppenheimer was having his security clearance re-examined during the McCarthy era, he commented, in response to a question about his motives, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

The topic of that essay was the prosthetic reconstruction of bodies and certain incoherent justifications thereof, so I went on: “We change bodies and restructure child-rearing practices not because all such phenomena are socially constructed but because we can — because it’s ‘technically sweet.’” Then:

My use of the word “we” in that last sentence leads to component two of the ideology under scrutiny here: Those who look forward to a future of increasing technological manipulation of human beings, and of other biological organisms, always imagine themselves as the Controllers, not the controlled; they always identify with the position of power. And so they forget evolutionary history, they forget biology, they forget the disasters that can come from following the Oppenheimer Principle — they forget everything that might serve to remind them of constraints on the power they have … or fondly imagine they have.

In light of current debates about the development of AI – debates that have become more heated in the wake of an open letter pleading with AI researchers to pause their experiments and take some time to think about the implications – the power of the Oppenheimer Principle has become more evident than ever. And it’s important, I think, to understand what in this context is making it so powerful.

Before I go any further, let me note that the term Artificial Intelligence may cover a very broad range of endeavors. Here I am discussing a recently emergent wing of the overall AI enterprise, the wing devoted to imitating or counterfeiting actions that most human beings think of as distinctively human: conversation, image-making (through drawing, painting, or photography), and music-making.

I think what’s happening in the development of these counterfeits – and in the resistance to asking hard questions about them – is the Silicon Valley version of what the great economist Thorstein Veblen called “trained incapacity.” As Robert K. Merton explains in a famous essay on “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality,” Veblen’s phrase describes a phenomenon identified also by John Dewey – though Dewey called it “occupational psychosis” – and by Daniel Warnotte – though Warnotte called it “Déformation professionnelle.” It is curious that this same phenomenon gets described repeatedly by our major social scientists; that suggests that it is a powerful and widespread phenomenon indeed.

Peggy Noonan recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal of the leaders of the major Silicon Valley companies,

I am sure that as individuals they have their own private ethical commitments, their own faiths perhaps. Surely as human beings they have consciences, but consciences have to be formed by something, shaped and made mature. It’s never been clear to me from their actions what shaped theirs. I have come to see them the past 40 years as, speaking generally, morally and ethically shallow—uniquely self-seeking and not at all preoccupied with potential harms done to others through their decisions. Also some are sociopaths.

I want to make a stronger argument: that the distinctive “occupational psychosis” of Silicon Valley is sociopathy – the kind of sociopathy embedded in the Oppenheimer Principle. The people in charge at Google and Meta and (outside Silicon Valley) Microsoft, and at the less well-known companies that are being used by the mega-companies, have been deformed by their profession in ways that prevent them from perceiving, acknowledging, and acting responsibly in relation to the consequences of their research. They have a trained incapacity to think morally. They are by virtue of their narrowly technical education and the strong incentives of their profession moral idiots.

The ignorance of the technocratic moral idiot is exemplified by Sam Altman of OpenAI – an increasingly typical Silicon Valley type, with a thin veneer of moral self-congratulation imperfectly obscuring a thick layer of obedience to perverse incentives. “If you’re making AI, it is potentially very good, potentially very terrible,” but “The way to get it right is to have people engage with it, explore these systems, study them, to learn how to make them safe.” He can’t even imagine that “the way to get it right” might be not to do it at all. (See Scott Alexander on the Safe Uncertainty Fallacy: We have absolutely no idea what will result from this technological development, therefore everything will be fine.) The Oppenheimer Principle trumps all.

These people aren’t going to fix themselves. As Jonathan Haidt (among others) has often pointed out – e.g. here – the big social media companies know just how much damage their platforms are doing, especially to teenage girls, but they do not care. As Justin E. H. Smith has noted, social media platforms are “inhuman by design,” and some of the big companies are tearing off the fig leaf by dissolving their ethics teams. Deepfakes featuring Donald Trump or the Pope are totally cool, but Chairman Xi gets a free pass, because … well, just follow the money.

Decisions about these matters have to be taken out of the hands of avaricious professionally-deformed sociopaths. And that’s why lawsuits like this one matter.

January 27, 2023

the end of the timeline era

Glenn Fleishman:

With Mastodon, you’re not dealing with a giant, faceless company — or a constantly in-your-face CEO — making arbitrary decisions that are often impossible to understand or appeal. Instead, you join a Mastodon server — called an

instance

— run by an individual, company, or organization.

An individual, company, or organization equally free to make arbitrary decisions that are often impossible to understand or appeal. In a related article Fleishman writes,

Each Fediverse instance is its own Little Prince world that can choose to engage with other servers through federation, the interchange of information stored locally with other servers remotely. There’s no one in charge and no single place to go for definitive truth about the network.

“There’s no one in charge” on Mastodon-as-such, because Mastodon-as-such is just some open-source software, but there is very definitely someone in charge on any instance you join, and whoever that is can ban you any time for any reason or none. You can only escape that by creating your own instance of Mastodon, which possibly 0.01% of its users have the chops and resources to do.

Mastodon has certain virtues, at least for some, but let’s not attribute to it powers it does not have. In almost every respect Mastodon functions precisely as Twitter did, with, as I have said before, every single one of Twitter’s perverse incentives. And if you’re not running your own instance you’re not one whit less vulnerable than you were in Elon World.

People who are tempted by Mastodon should at least consider this from Luke: “I’m on Mastodon, but I’m bored of what I call ‘the timeline era.’ Scanning an unending stream of disconnected posts for topics of interest is no longer fun, I prefer deciding what to read based on titles, or topic-based discussion.” There are more things on the internet, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your timeline. And off the internet: far, far more.

December 12, 2022

why liberals should read smart conservatives

Liberals should read smart conservatives not because they need to be convinced by conservative arguments — though let’s face it, sometimes they do — but rather because conservatives frame issues differently than liberals do. They describe the conditions of history, and the circumstances of our debates, in a language that’s strange to liberals. And dealing with these alternative framings can be very clarifying indeed.

An example: in The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties Christopher Caldwell argues that the grief over the assassination of President Kennedy led to more sweeping legislation than JFK himself would have dared to pursue: “A welfare state expanded by Medicare and Medicaid, the vast mobilization of young men to fight the Vietnam War, but, above all, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts — these were all memorials to a slain ruler, resolved in haste over a few months in 1964 and 1965 by a people undergoing a delirium of national grief.” And he then claims that this set in motion a dramatic transformation of the American legal and political order — a transformation that we have inherited:

The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible — and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil rights regime was built out. Much of what we have called “polarization” or “incivility” in recent years is something more grave — it is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail: the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it; or the de facto constitution of 1964, which lacks this traditional kind of legitimacy but commands the near-unanimous endorsement of judicial elites and civic educators and the passionate allegiance of those who received it as a liberation. The increasing necessity that citizens choose between these two orders, and the poisonous conflict into which it ultimately drove the country, is what this book describes.

Now, it is probably true that only someone who questions the wisdom of “the de facto constitution of 1964” would frame our recent history in this way; but it is certainly true that this framing is powerfully illuminating: it yields insight into both the nature and the intensity of our current political differences. You may not interpret or judge those differences as Caldwell does, but even so, he has presented their causes in ways that ought to earn your assent.

Another example: Mary Harrington is not just a conservative, she is a self-described reactionary. But some of her recent work is, like that of Caldwell, extremely useful, especially her argument — in, for instance, this essay, which has many links to her earlier work — that what I have called Left Purity Culture (see the LPC tag at the bottom of this post) operates as a kind of de-personalized and even de-humanized swarm. And in certain recent controversies, especially the ones involving Twitter, that swarm is confronted by a version of what she calls Caesarism:

The Biden administration is fond of talking about “democracy” versus “autocracy”, but it might be more accurate to talk about swarmism and Caesarism. Swarmism is a kind of post-democratic democracy: a mutant form of liberal proceduralism, characterised by collective decision-making in which no one is ever individually accountable. Instead, consequential decisions are as far as possible pushed out to supposedly neutral procedures or even machines. When NGO officials whom you can’t vote out of your political ecosystem talk about “our democracy”, they’re talking about swarmism.

Caesarism, on the other hand, looks substantially the same at lower levels. The main difference is that you get named humans in key decision-making roles — complete with human partiality, eccentricity, and occasional fallibility. Twitter was, until recently, a key vector of elite swarmism. And to swarmists, such rule by a named individual, rather than a collective and some committee-generated “guidelines”, is by definition morally wrong. This core assumption oozes, for example, from this report on the takeover, with its empathetic depiction of the anonymous, collegiate collective of sacked Trust and Safety workers sharply contrasted with the autocratic, erratic individual Elon Musk.

This, like Caldwell’s framing of American history since the 1960s, is not just interesting but useful. It helps me to think about the structure, as it were, of the debates over Twitter. Now, I might prefer a swarm to a Caesar — and Harrington herself doesn’t see anyone to support here: “I’m not cheerleading for Musk as Caesar. Just because I dislike faceless proceduralism doesn’t mean I have much appetite to see political authority gathered into the mercurial hands of a transhumanist billionaire who wants to implant microchips in human brains.” But whether you take the swarm’s side or Caesar’s side or no side at all, this is a very helpful way of describing the conflict, and is a description that neither a a swarmist nor a Caesarist would have been likely to discern.

December 7, 2022

oh, okay, one more post

On these matters. This from Roald Dahl’s story “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” (1952):

“That’s exactly it, Mr Bohlen! That’s where the machine comes in. Listen a minute, sir, while I tell you some more. I’ve got it all worked out. The big magazines are carrying approximately three fiction stories in each issue. Now, take the fifteen most important magazines—the ones paying the most money. A few of them are monthlies, but most of them come out every week. All right. That makes, let us say, around forty big stories being bought each week. That’s forty thousand dollars. So with our machine—when we get it working properly—we can collar nearly the whole of this market!”

“My dear boy, you’re mad!”

“No, sir, honestly, it’s true what I say. Don’t you see that with volume alone we’ll completely overwhelm them! This machine can produce a five-thousand-word story, all typed and ready for dispatch, in thirty seconds. How can the writers compete with that? I ask you, Mr Bohlen, how?”

At that point, Adolph Knipe noticed a slight change in the man’s expression, an extra brightness in the eyes, the nostrils distending, the whole face becoming still, almost rigid. Quickly, he continued. “Nowadays, Mr Bohlen, the hand-made article hasn’t a hope. It can’t possibly compete with mass-production, especially in this country — you know that. Carpets … chairs … shoes … bricks … crockery … anything you like to mention — they’re all made by machinery now. The quality may be inferior, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the cost of production that counts. And stories — well — they’re just another product, like carpets and chairs, and no one cares how you produce them so long as you deliver the goods. We’ll sell them wholesale, Mr Bohlen! We’ll undercut every writer in the country! We’ll corner the market!”

November 9, 2022

Home invasion:

For those of us who have been using Mastodon for a while (I started my own Mastodon server 4 years ago), this week has been overwhelming. I’ve been thinking of metaphors to try to understand why I’ve found it so upsetting. This is supposed to be what we wanted, right? Yet it feels like something else. Like when you’re sitting in a quiet carriage softly chatting with a couple of friends and then an entire platform of football fans get on at Jolimont Station after their team lost. They don’t usually catch trains and don’t know the protocol. They assume everyone on the train was at the game or at least follows football. They crowd the doors and complain about the seat configuration.

It’s not entirely the Twitter people’s fault. They’ve been taught to behave in certain ways. To chase likes and retweets/boosts. To promote themselves. To perform. All of that sort of thing is anathema to most of the people who were on Mastodon a week ago. It was part of the reason many moved to Mastodon in the first place. This means there’s been a jarring culture clash all week as a huge murmuration of tweeters descended onto Mastodon in ever increasing waves each day. To the Twitter people it feels like a confusing new world, whilst they mourn their old life on Twitter. They call themselves “refugees,” but to the Mastodon locals it feels like a busload of Kontiki tourists just arrived, blundering around yelling at each other and complaining that they don’t know how to order room service. We also mourn the world we’re losing.

I’m a bit concerned about micro.blog — I don’t use Mastodon — for just this reason. That’s why I wrote a few months ago, “On micro.blog, you have absolutely no incentive to flex, shitpost, self-promote, or troll. You’re there to post interesting things and/or chat with people. Nothing else makes sense.”

November 7, 2022

audiences

The Struggle With The Audience:

By 2020, [Sam] Carter was a battle-hardened veteran of the music scene. He’d been making records with this group for twelve years, and Architects had had enough success not to worry too much about negative reactions to new material. It was also quickly apparent that Creatures was going to be a big hit. Despite all this, he found the reaction to hard to deal with: “It was doing huge numbers on the streaming services, but all I could see were these horrible comments.” On YouTube and Instagram, the negative reactions become increasingly extreme as people competed to make the most negative comment. “It’s hard, when you’ve put your heart and soul into something, and someone says, ‘I’m never listening to your band again, you’ve ruined it’.”

Carter then makes a striking assertion. If social media had come along earlier, he says, “Sergeant Pepper wouldn’t exist. The most important records of our time wouldn’t exist.”

This whole essay by Ian Leslie is great, and a useful counterpart to my post the other day about the challenges of chasing eyeballs.

However, there’s another side to the story of artists and their audiences. My buddy Austin Kleon wrote last week,

One reason I feel so lucky to be an independent writer with a great audience: I don’t answer to any shareholders but readers. I don’t have to grow my business if I don’t want to. I can do my thing the way I want to do it for the people who want it. And I can do it the way I want to do it.

I think Austin has this attitude because he has never tried to get famous, to go viral, all that crap; he has tried (a) to do good, honest, useful, helpful work that (b) supports his family. Turns out there’s an audience for that! And Austin can call his audience “great” because he has set a tone — a tone of generosity, kindness, thoughtfulness — and they’ve picked up on that. So maybe the lessons here are:

Do your best work.
Be kind and generous to your audience.
When they want to dictate to you, listen … but then do what you have to do to maintain your integrity and your sanity.
Accept the consequences as stoically as you can, and be grateful when those consequences are more positive than negative.

November 6, 2022

eyeballs

Since so many journalists spend most of their time on Twitter, it’s unsurprising to hear the more addicted among them now saying that other people should stay on Twitter too, Musk or no Musk. One of the most common arguments that I’ve seen goes like this: Twitter, for all its flaws, has made otherwise unheard voices of the marginalized audible, and the rest of us should hang around if only to listen to them. To which I respond:

First: Twitter made the voice of Donald Trump, and still nastier figures, even more audible. If the sound level of Black women goes up by 10db but that of Orange Man goes up 50db, I don’t call that a big win for diversity.

Second: Those marginal voices can be heard in many places other than Twitter, for anyone interested, and in some of their venues (articles in newspapers, essays in magazines, books) they articulate their experiences and their understanding of the world in considerably greater depth than they can on Twitter. If you want to become better informed while avoiding doomscrolling, RSS is ready when you are.

Third: About the attention that those marginalized voices get on Twitter — how good is that for them? On Twitter, too often attention = abuse.

Which leads me to what I think is an important question: Is more visibility always good? Is having more eyeballs on your work invariably better for you than having fewer? People reluctant to leave Twitter seem to believe that whatever you have to say or show needs to be seen by as many people as possible; but I don’t agree. One reason I left Twitter is that I was tired of getting responses from people who were (a) incapable of reading, (b) angrily malicious, or (c) both.

Now, one might reply that I could make any number of adjustments to my Twitter preferences to prevent that sort of thing — but in that case, why be on Twitter at all? It’s specifically designed for the amplification of the cruder emotions, so what’s the point of being there if you prefer to avoid the cruder emotions? Wouldn’t it make more sense go find a place to write that isn’t interested in the cruder emotions?

Because here’s the tradeoff: you can have more eyeballs, but they’ll be Sauron-like eyeballs.

“And into this Tweet he poured his cruelty, his malice, and his will to dominate all life.”

If you leave Twitter for less obvious places, fewer eyeballs will see your work; but if people have to make a bit of an effort to find what you write, they’re far more likely to be intelligent and receptive readers than the average Twitter user.

We all need to stop thinking arithmetically. For good and for ill, the people who make the most significant impact on the world are those who pursue what Milton called “fit audience though few.” Very few people have read Wang Huning’s academic writings, but he directs the ideological program of the Chinese Communist Party. A far more positive example, from Eno: “The first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years. Yet … everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.”

Eno brings home the import of his comment in the sentence that follows that extremely famous one I just quoted: “Some things generate their rewards in second-hand ways.” (Some of the most important things always do.) If you realize the truth of this, then maybe you won’t be quite so desperate for eyeballs.

Blogs don’t have the important place on the internet today that they once had; I know that perfectly well, and I don’t care. Those who are genuinely interested in what I have to say can find me here on the open web. Those who aren’t willing to leave Twitter to find good writing … well, God bless them. But I won’t be trying to flag them down.

May 16, 2022

reification and metaphysical capitalism

I’ve written occasionally here about what I call “metaphysical capitalism” — see the relevant tag at the bottom of this post — but one thing I have neglected to note is that one of the most powerful elements of the Marxist critique of capitalism has been the argument that it is the nature of modern capitalism to extend its understanding of the world into the personal, the emotional, the spiritual — in general the metaphysical realm.

A key text here is George Lukács’s famous essay on “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” where he writes of “the split between the worker’s labour-power and his personality, its metamorphosis into a thing, an object that he sells on the market.” This happens in varying ways in the varying professions of the capitalism world; for instance, in any bureaucracy:

The specific type of bureaucratic ‘conscientiousness’ and impartiality, the individual bureaucrat’s inevitable total subjection to a system of relations between the things to which he is exposed, the idea that it is precisely his ‘honour’ and his ‘sense of responsibility’ that exact this total submission all this points to the fact that the division of labour which in the case of Taylorism invaded the psyche, here invades the realm of ethics.

And when Taylorism conquers both the psyche and ethics, we get self-Taylorizing — the complete internalization of metaphysical capitalism and the consequent redescription of a condition of enslavement as a condition of self-making. People come to believe that they’re expressing themselves on social media when in fact they’re doing Mark Zuckerberg’s bidding for free. They’re like Eloi thinking that they’re the masters of the Morlocks when in fact they’re merely food.

What I found especially interesting in my re-read of Lukács (for the first time in many years) is his demonstration that this commodification of the human person goes back a long way, much longer than we might typically think. For instance, he notes that in the Metaphysics of Morals (1797) Kant defines sex and marriage in the most commodified way imaginable: “Sexual community is the reciprocal use made by one person of the sexual organs and faculties of another,” while marriage “is the union of two people of different sexes with a view to the mutual possession of each other’s sexual attributes for the duration of their lives.” Lukács comments, “This rationalisation of the world appears to be complete, it seems to penetrate the very depths of man’s physical and psychic nature.” It’s capitalism all the way down.

I am anything but a Marxist, but it’s important for me to realize (however belatedly) that some of my own recent arguments were anticipated by Marxist thinkers a hundred years ago. I should probably be making better use of that critique — if not of their suggestions for what should replace capitalism.

May 3, 2022

the glazing of eyes

The older I get, the more common this experience becomes: finding that I am simply unable to read essays and articles on certain topics. I may, out of a sense of duty, begin to read something on these topics, but almost immediately my eyes begin to wander, or to glaze over. I strive to refocus; I re-read the same few sentences; but before long my mind has wandered elsewhere. Eventually I give up.

I used to be able to read about some of these things, but the way The Discourse asymptotically approaches the point of absolute stupidity — a stupidity than which no stupider can be conceived — has now rendered my brain dysfunctional w/r/t the following:

Critical race theory
Trans issues
Productivity
Burnout
The New Right
Denominational break-ups and church splits
Elon Musk
And, now of course, abortion (The Discourse around which has always been brain-dead, but was usually avoidable)

That is of course only a partial list, but it seems to cover about 90% of what I’m seeing in news periodicals these days.

One nice feature of Feedbin is the ability to create actions based on filters. So, for instance, I have just created an action to set any new article that contains the word “abortion” as read; that way it won’t show up in my “unread” feed, which is the only feed I look at. A couple of weeks ago I created a similar action for the term “Elon Musk”; I had already targeted posts that have “Burnout” or “Productivity” in their titles — if the Bad Words are not in the actual title then maybe their use in the text is innocuous. We’ll see how it goes; I’ll adjust as necessary. Keeping my sanity requires constant vigilance — unless I want to go offline altogether, which, believe me, I often consider.

On the other side, things I find that I want to read more about these days:

China, present and past, especially religion in China
Daoism
Anarchism
Infrastructure
Materials science
Scientific innovation, especially regarding climate-change mitigation
Water, and places where it is (a) scarce or (b) overabundant
Late antiquity in the West
… and one more topic I’ll talk about in a future post.

Mainly, though, I want to read more novels.

[I thought I had this post scheduled to go out tomorrow, but obviously I messed up. Consider this, then, a proleptic disclosure of the eschaton.]