Antisocial

I’ve been nudged by several friends recently: so, are you leaving Twitter? Because leaving Twitter has suddenly become a big thing. I mean…lots of people leaving Twitter. Users. Some high profile users. Advertisers. Probably most of the people working there. Anyone staying except the weasels?

Just in case this needs some context if someone reads this blog post years from now: Elon Musk has bought Twitter, and he’s just found himself on the receiving end of one of the most swindle-riffic tech valuations in history. He splashed out $44,000,000,000 for it, and almost certainly quickly found that it’s not actually bringing in the kind of money that warrants a $44,000,000,000 valuation. So it’s panic time, and, in today’s news specifically, mass layoff time (which may also be violation-of-federal-labor-laws time, keep an eye on the news). Musk, being the self-styled wanna-be lord of the libertarian dudebros, is responding to all this the only way he knows how: by beating the “free speech is back” drum, proving that we really need to bolster civics education (especially where the First Amendment is concerned), tweeting insipid things like “comedy is legal on Twitter again”, and personally harassing public figures who question his motivations for buying Twitter in the first place. One thing that’s become apparent very quickly is: you’re not allowed to argue with Elon in Elon’s world.

This is where we get to the “users leaving in droves and advertisers pausing their ad buys, which means Twitter is now making even less money” point.

Where does all of this lead? Honestly, if Musk was as smart as he hopes everyone else thinks he is, he’d just pull the plug on the thing and start investigating how to claim it as yet another massive tax write-off. But the problem is: Musk loves Twitter too much. It has, up until now, allowed him to deliver his hot takes with no consequence, because it was Jack Dorsey’s platform and not Elon’s. But now he owns it. As he’s already learning, if his latest hot take pisses off the wrong crowd, then you have a user exodus, and then there are less people to see the paid ads, so now why are advertisers sticking around to watch this circus? And then Musk is hemorrhaging money as well, which is not something he’s going to put up with indefinitely, though he’s got a lot more runway than the rest of us have to sit around, eat some popcorn, and watch the numbers drop. He can lose more money in a day without breaking a sweat than the rest of us can in a lifetime.

So, are you leaving Twitter? (or Facebook, or social media in general?)

On a purely practical level: I can’t. One of my jobs is that I’m technical director of podcasts that promote themselves on Twitter, and a weekly livestream that broadcasts to Twitter and an annual charity event that broadcasts via Twitter (as well as other social platforms). I promote my own stuff there as well, though if you’re reading this, you’re probably already in the know on that stuff via theLogBook’s Discord or what have you. On that level, no, I really can’t leave. I can’t shut down my account in protest.

On another level, I’m so tired of what’s starting to seem like a constant state of digital diaspora. It’s exhausting. In the latest Don’t Give This Tape To Earl, I was marveling at how quickly a pleasant and supportive little community has sprung up just because I started a Discord to pick up where the site’s forums left off – sadly put into stasis because I needed to vacate Dreamhost’s servers – and that is really cool. But if everyone takes that route, starts their own handpicked community, then we’ve all curated our own little personalized bubble. Which doesn’t really help matters. But faced with having to establish a presence on Tribal, or Mastodon, or… wherever? Honestly, I’m much more likely to retreat to my lovely little relatively obscure web site and its Discord community and call it done. I am now officially a little old hermit who lives with his cat. I can do that digitally and in real life. It has a certain appeal.

I don’t know what the answer is, to be honest. We’ve gone from talking about politics being a full-contact sport to talking about anything being a full-contact sport. It’s tiring.

What are your thoughts?

AI art prompts: “Weasels in a data center” (header image), “Weasel using a laptop” (body image), both generated by Stable Diffusion and upscaled.