John, I appreciate you staying on Twitter and doing a Leonidas thing...it's very noble! But think of it like this...these folks broil themselves if they stay too long on a site without those awful liberals. So by decamping to Bluesky you entice them to follow you, they then run into a killzone of actual blocking, moderation, and no algorithm. They can then form a circle, hold hands, and sing charming little songs about the snowflakes and safe spaces. It's a win - win. :-)
I do want to advocate for bluesky. It is certainly more liberal even than 2012-twitter, but less so even than a month ago. Now there's lots of random drama and cat pictures and sports talk. And the old Twitter is dead, and clearly not coming back -- we need somewhere else anyway.
I think the bigger divide than Bluesky being more liberal is sincerity vs irony. The vibe on Bluesky is very earnest, from people John likes a lot (eg Bouie) to those he doesn't. The grumpy, ironic, soi-distant vibe of many parts of Twitter isn't there so much.
no one is immune to a constant deluge of psychotic propaganda, even leftwing academics confident in their cognitive resilience. exiting birdchan is both the right strategic move and vital to one's intellectual wellbeing
it's not a coincidence that berniebro academia and the anti-anti-fascist left has remained for so long and their takes have gotten increasingly worse as their brains slowly pickled
took a few weeks off twitter, and realized that there's no other place online like it-- it really is the public square. this dramatically increased my contempt for musk, which i didn't think was possible; it's like he bought his favorite dive bar and then turned it into a dave and buster's (with nazi banners).
The opening of the Clash song “Lightning Strikes (Not Once but Twice)" comes to mind where Joe Strummer calls into WBAI and says to the stoned and garrulous DJ: “Yeah, I’d just like to say, let’s have some music.”
My Twitter (X) feed is also a flood of street fights and soft-core porn. It can't be good for the soul to see that stuff over and over. Talk about defining deviancy down.
Any brand advertiser will want to stay as far away as possible. And the site must be hemorrhaging users—notwithstanding the addictive quality of the garbage they are feeding us. Still, as you astutely noted at the time of purchase, this was a political investment and not a typical business one. Put out the vilest propaganda imaginable with plausible deniability for the owner of the site (Musk), of course.
When eeeew Musk took over I packed up almost immediately. I don’t judge if anyone stays or continues to have a presence. I like Bluesky more than Twitter. No algos. No Bluechecks. I block some of the big lib accounts. I make lists of people with a particular expertise. It’s pretty chill. I can tune out the latest outrage (Biden pardon) and move on to other stuff. I also dumped the Post and subscribe to FT and the Times now. I really enjoy European politics now being front and center in my life. Not to say that what’s coming here does not freak me out. So I think I’m done with the post-mortem punditry. Jan 20 is happening for sure. Looking forward to more, John.
"My conclusion, of course, is the obvious Marxist one: the problem is that public goods are privately owned and then no longer serve a social function. Here is the most cartoonish depiction of the evils of capitalist ownership of the means of production: you don’t even need to talk about the irrationality of competition and the market, the inevitable crises in production and distribution they create, it’s just, “What if a bad rich guy bought a big factory and started using it to pump out toxic waste?” Well, what if! You’d want the government to step in right? Well, what if he controlled the government?"
cool, so you're just gonna post through it, i guess? but no resist libs, ew.
sorry, love most of your stuff, but this just seems way late, resigned, and possibly even pandering to parts of your readership who is sticking around on twitter for the lolz.
How was it way late when I predicted this in 2022? I have a bluesky account already, I'm just using it to share links. And this is why I don't like it, because people are very defensive about what it says about their identity for some reason and get offended when people criticize it.
it's the second sentence in your reply. as your piece expresses current twitter having little to significant negative value, you seem to think it's still preferable to a place where people aren't being constantly harassed and bombarded? i'm not trying to shame you into using bluesky more, but i do suspect the things you miss about twitter are coalescing there.
and, heh, identity? we seem to be at a "you're the idpol, idpol" impasse. that's ok. after this election it feels as if most of the online personal polarization of the last decade is in the process of being dissolved due to system shock. we shall see.
If I had to choose between NPR and a neo-Nazi forum, I know which one I'd pick, just for the sake of my own mental health. What's the value of sticking around a public square that's turned into a bar dominated by Nazis, especially if it now has direct ties to the Trump administration?
While I've heard a lot of his purchase being a political move. I think the simpler answer is the correct one.
An absurdly wealthy man, to whom the idea of touching grass is repellent, offered a large sum based on a weed joke on a lark, and got locked in even after going to court to back out. Then once he owned it he got the usual brain worms of people who spend too much time on twitter and is lost in the sauce.
Musk is just a tech fan who has vaguely political ideas, no real current tech knowledge, spent way too much time online, and was pulled into becoming an internet forum nazi. Same story has happened thousands of times over the last 30 years, this time the "spamming 13/50 for the lolz" guy has a trillion dollars.
Obviously he was primed for it being a Afrikaaner, an oligarch, too online, and resentful of his trans daughter, but I think this is brain worms writ large rather than a grand plan.
"I also think it’s bad to just abandon a platform that has functioned for better or worse as a proxy for the public sphere itself. That’s what they are trying to destroy!"
I think this is an unanswered question for both Bluesky and X. It may be the case that sticking around on X gives persuadable people access to good politics that they won't have if everyone decamps; it may be that it just puts you in a corner of a Nazi bar, talking to your friends while fending off Nazis. It may be that if everyone decamps the site will fizzle out and won't reach any persuadables; it may be that they will win substantial gains by commandeering a semi-functional public sphere. I'd love to know how you think you can tell!
I'm glad you answered the question about Bluesky vs Twitter and I think your take is a reasonable one.
One thing I will say is I think your read of Bluesky is not correct because it is limited to journalism/people who talk about politics. Even then, its not really just resist libs - its a gamut of people from the center to left of American politics.
There are important communities who have essentially wholesale left twitter for bluesky that aren't a part of this milieu and who aren't visible to those in this commentariat. I'm thinking here of groups like the trans community, sex workers, the kind of people who used to be on tumblr etc. . (ok sort of left/liberal coded, but not really), which gives the site a much grittier/"after dark" feel.
The resist libs love to fill up the timeline with the same idiotic memes posted hundreds of times (have these people never heard of retweets?), and they're artificially boosted because there's 10,000 of them who all follow each other, but once you mute enough of them or subscribe to moderation lists designed to filter them out it's a perfectly decent place for discussion.
It used to be on twitter that you could customize your feed through what you liked and followed. Bluesky is now the same. There is even a blue anon block list if you don’t want the more inflammatory lefties (although Bill Kristol is on the list). The trolls have tried to infiltrate, but through the power of blocks you never even know they’re there. I can’t imagine staying on twitter when there is a reasonable option, and it’s no longer possible to get news there. Many news organizations have left; more will follow. You do you, but it’s a Cassandra project imo. Fyi sports BlueSky is gaining a following, so you don’t even need twitter for that.
"My conclusion, of course, is the obvious Marxist one: the problem is that public goods are privately owned and then no longer serve a social function."
I guess you mean that X is, or should be, a public good. But it isn't. It is private, like Substack. And the problem, I think, is not that public goods are privately owned but that they are publicly owned, if by public we mean some government agency, and they are not as well managed or supported as are assets privately owned. That is a great problem. We don't have enough investment in public goods and those we do have are in the main poorly run. Galbraith had all this in the 1950s, and not much has changed.
I think one of the great challenges of a post neoliberal order is to find ways to improve the workings of public goods, and if we can do that, we can have more of them.
I left Twitter in Nov 2022 after sensing an uptick in bigotry, harassment, and general toxicity. That was in the wake of the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs, and the wave of anti-LGBTQ+ vitriol on my FYP just made me feel like civil society was done. It became clear that Twitter, always consisting of just a tiny subset of humans, no longer represented the public square, and I think that to use that rationale as a reason to stay on "X" is weaker than ever. From the outside, I don't see journalists or institutions or anyone else pointing to it much anymore as any kind of reference point or zeitgeist.
catering to right wing freaks may be the default outcome of any large website or online community, just because they spend so much time on the computer.
exceptions would be if you start with a core of left/liberal people who repel the right (BlueSky), or if you have a thumb on the scale to be mainstream respectable like old Twitter did or YouTube partially does now.
I think it is possible to wind up where X is now just by optimizing for engagement in a facially neutral way. I think Musk probably predicted and intended this outcome, just it probably required little or no explicit boosting of right-wing content.
John, I appreciate you staying on Twitter and doing a Leonidas thing...it's very noble! But think of it like this...these folks broil themselves if they stay too long on a site without those awful liberals. So by decamping to Bluesky you entice them to follow you, they then run into a killzone of actual blocking, moderation, and no algorithm. They can then form a circle, hold hands, and sing charming little songs about the snowflakes and safe spaces. It's a win - win. :-)
I do want to advocate for bluesky. It is certainly more liberal even than 2012-twitter, but less so even than a month ago. Now there's lots of random drama and cat pictures and sports talk. And the old Twitter is dead, and clearly not coming back -- we need somewhere else anyway.
I think the bigger divide than Bluesky being more liberal is sincerity vs irony. The vibe on Bluesky is very earnest, from people John likes a lot (eg Bouie) to those he doesn't. The grumpy, ironic, soi-distant vibe of many parts of Twitter isn't there so much.
I'm not sure I agree with this. I think it depends who you are following.
no one is immune to a constant deluge of psychotic propaganda, even leftwing academics confident in their cognitive resilience. exiting birdchan is both the right strategic move and vital to one's intellectual wellbeing
it's not a coincidence that berniebro academia and the anti-anti-fascist left has remained for so long and their takes have gotten increasingly worse as their brains slowly pickled
took a few weeks off twitter, and realized that there's no other place online like it-- it really is the public square. this dramatically increased my contempt for musk, which i didn't think was possible; it's like he bought his favorite dive bar and then turned it into a dave and buster's (with nazi banners).
Radio Goebbels or NPR. Uggh. God help us.
The opening of the Clash song “Lightning Strikes (Not Once but Twice)" comes to mind where Joe Strummer calls into WBAI and says to the stoned and garrulous DJ: “Yeah, I’d just like to say, let’s have some music.”
My Twitter (X) feed is also a flood of street fights and soft-core porn. It can't be good for the soul to see that stuff over and over. Talk about defining deviancy down.
Any brand advertiser will want to stay as far away as possible. And the site must be hemorrhaging users—notwithstanding the addictive quality of the garbage they are feeding us. Still, as you astutely noted at the time of purchase, this was a political investment and not a typical business one. Put out the vilest propaganda imaginable with plausible deniability for the owner of the site (Musk), of course.
When eeeew Musk took over I packed up almost immediately. I don’t judge if anyone stays or continues to have a presence. I like Bluesky more than Twitter. No algos. No Bluechecks. I block some of the big lib accounts. I make lists of people with a particular expertise. It’s pretty chill. I can tune out the latest outrage (Biden pardon) and move on to other stuff. I also dumped the Post and subscribe to FT and the Times now. I really enjoy European politics now being front and center in my life. Not to say that what’s coming here does not freak me out. So I think I’m done with the post-mortem punditry. Jan 20 is happening for sure. Looking forward to more, John.
"My conclusion, of course, is the obvious Marxist one: the problem is that public goods are privately owned and then no longer serve a social function. Here is the most cartoonish depiction of the evils of capitalist ownership of the means of production: you don’t even need to talk about the irrationality of competition and the market, the inevitable crises in production and distribution they create, it’s just, “What if a bad rich guy bought a big factory and started using it to pump out toxic waste?” Well, what if! You’d want the government to step in right? Well, what if he controlled the government?"
cool, so you're just gonna post through it, i guess? but no resist libs, ew.
sorry, love most of your stuff, but this just seems way late, resigned, and possibly even pandering to parts of your readership who is sticking around on twitter for the lolz.
How was it way late when I predicted this in 2022? I have a bluesky account already, I'm just using it to share links. And this is why I don't like it, because people are very defensive about what it says about their identity for some reason and get offended when people criticize it.
At least in my case I’d like to see you on Bluesky because I’m interested in your thinking but I won’t use Twitter.
Also some proper curmudgeonlyness would help with the NPR vibe. Come do your part!
it's the second sentence in your reply. as your piece expresses current twitter having little to significant negative value, you seem to think it's still preferable to a place where people aren't being constantly harassed and bombarded? i'm not trying to shame you into using bluesky more, but i do suspect the things you miss about twitter are coalescing there.
and, heh, identity? we seem to be at a "you're the idpol, idpol" impasse. that's ok. after this election it feels as if most of the online personal polarization of the last decade is in the process of being dissolved due to system shock. we shall see.
anyway, sincerely, thank you for the reply.
It really is easy to screen out the people you don’t like for any reason. I mute a lot.
If I had to choose between NPR and a neo-Nazi forum, I know which one I'd pick, just for the sake of my own mental health. What's the value of sticking around a public square that's turned into a bar dominated by Nazis, especially if it now has direct ties to the Trump administration?
While I've heard a lot of his purchase being a political move. I think the simpler answer is the correct one.
An absurdly wealthy man, to whom the idea of touching grass is repellent, offered a large sum based on a weed joke on a lark, and got locked in even after going to court to back out. Then once he owned it he got the usual brain worms of people who spend too much time on twitter and is lost in the sauce.
Musk is just a tech fan who has vaguely political ideas, no real current tech knowledge, spent way too much time online, and was pulled into becoming an internet forum nazi. Same story has happened thousands of times over the last 30 years, this time the "spamming 13/50 for the lolz" guy has a trillion dollars.
Obviously he was primed for it being a Afrikaaner, an oligarch, too online, and resentful of his trans daughter, but I think this is brain worms writ large rather than a grand plan.
Maybe it was not a political move but, brain worms. Did brain worms also buy him the a right hand at the Presidency?
"low IQ autist goes online, turns into a nazi" is our era's "dog bites man"
"I also think it’s bad to just abandon a platform that has functioned for better or worse as a proxy for the public sphere itself. That’s what they are trying to destroy!"
I think this is an unanswered question for both Bluesky and X. It may be the case that sticking around on X gives persuadable people access to good politics that they won't have if everyone decamps; it may be that it just puts you in a corner of a Nazi bar, talking to your friends while fending off Nazis. It may be that if everyone decamps the site will fizzle out and won't reach any persuadables; it may be that they will win substantial gains by commandeering a semi-functional public sphere. I'd love to know how you think you can tell!
I'm glad you answered the question about Bluesky vs Twitter and I think your take is a reasonable one.
One thing I will say is I think your read of Bluesky is not correct because it is limited to journalism/people who talk about politics. Even then, its not really just resist libs - its a gamut of people from the center to left of American politics.
There are important communities who have essentially wholesale left twitter for bluesky that aren't a part of this milieu and who aren't visible to those in this commentariat. I'm thinking here of groups like the trans community, sex workers, the kind of people who used to be on tumblr etc. . (ok sort of left/liberal coded, but not really), which gives the site a much grittier/"after dark" feel.
The resist libs love to fill up the timeline with the same idiotic memes posted hundreds of times (have these people never heard of retweets?), and they're artificially boosted because there's 10,000 of them who all follow each other, but once you mute enough of them or subscribe to moderation lists designed to filter them out it's a perfectly decent place for discussion.
It used to be on twitter that you could customize your feed through what you liked and followed. Bluesky is now the same. There is even a blue anon block list if you don’t want the more inflammatory lefties (although Bill Kristol is on the list). The trolls have tried to infiltrate, but through the power of blocks you never even know they’re there. I can’t imagine staying on twitter when there is a reasonable option, and it’s no longer possible to get news there. Many news organizations have left; more will follow. You do you, but it’s a Cassandra project imo. Fyi sports BlueSky is gaining a following, so you don’t even need twitter for that.
"My conclusion, of course, is the obvious Marxist one: the problem is that public goods are privately owned and then no longer serve a social function."
I guess you mean that X is, or should be, a public good. But it isn't. It is private, like Substack. And the problem, I think, is not that public goods are privately owned but that they are publicly owned, if by public we mean some government agency, and they are not as well managed or supported as are assets privately owned. That is a great problem. We don't have enough investment in public goods and those we do have are in the main poorly run. Galbraith had all this in the 1950s, and not much has changed.
I think one of the great challenges of a post neoliberal order is to find ways to improve the workings of public goods, and if we can do that, we can have more of them.
I left Twitter in Nov 2022 after sensing an uptick in bigotry, harassment, and general toxicity. That was in the wake of the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs, and the wave of anti-LGBTQ+ vitriol on my FYP just made me feel like civil society was done. It became clear that Twitter, always consisting of just a tiny subset of humans, no longer represented the public square, and I think that to use that rationale as a reason to stay on "X" is weaker than ever. From the outside, I don't see journalists or institutions or anyone else pointing to it much anymore as any kind of reference point or zeitgeist.
catering to right wing freaks may be the default outcome of any large website or online community, just because they spend so much time on the computer.
exceptions would be if you start with a core of left/liberal people who repel the right (BlueSky), or if you have a thumb on the scale to be mainstream respectable like old Twitter did or YouTube partially does now.
I think it is possible to wind up where X is now just by optimizing for engagement in a facially neutral way. I think Musk probably predicted and intended this outcome, just it probably required little or no explicit boosting of right-wing content.