Price shot me an invite for Bluesky and I joined (fuckos, I had been on that waiting list for months!). All this turned out opportune, timingwise, because Meta’s threads thing launched, I think, a day and a half later or something. I joined that too — my cold war against the other tedericks require that I lock down that u-name on pretty much every platform as quickly as I can — and then I went back to Bluesky and watched the Blueskysters (sp.?) hem and haw about whether the (blue) sky was falling, which, arguably, it is. Threads is ugly and bad and besotted with brands and the most irony-averse, therefore-uninteresting user base on the planet, and is thereby absolutely destined to succeed, based on every single thing we know about everything.
On Bluesky, I noodled around, followed some people I knew from the Twitter days and did not follow some other people I knew from the Twitter days, because new social media is good in a lot of ways but one of the best ways is getting to do a revised draft of what kind of timeline you even want to have, in the first place. Not really about avoiding people I don’t like, by the way, so much as just curating the sorts of inputs I want flowing through. In that regard, though, I clearly failed: even in a barebones format, the only thing Bluesky reminds me of today is my Twitter feed, and the corollary realization that I don’t miss Twitter a single fucking bit.
I don’t just mean the end-stage Twitter where the lunatic billionaire manboy was slandering pandemic first-responders and transgender people in the same breath; I don’t even really mean any of the many and various ways in which Twitter was fundamentally bad, over the decade that it was at least interesting. I mean the medium as a mode of discourse itself: boy, seeing something that even vaguely approximated it, on Bluesky, made me feel immediately like that whole way of dialoguing is just old, and used up. And that was before the racists showed up on Bluesky, which they inevitably did, about a day and a half after Threads launched. (Coincidence? Je ne sais pas.)
Now, none of this necessarily means anything; Bluesky could have its Titan Sub moment (i.e., the groundswell event that turns it on for me as a social platform, like what happened with TikTok and the Titanic a few weeks ago, as I wrote about) and the feed could become essential to me in a different way I’m not expecting. Or Bluesky could fail to solve the racism thing and be gone by this time next week, like what happened with Hive in the winter, when they couldn’t figure out data security fast enough to get ahead of their own bad press. The decentralized premise, applied to social networks, means that something like Bluesky could eventually break through by Galapagos Islandsing itself into something genuinely unique and unusual (or just awesome at shitposting) in a way that, for all its nods towards decentralization, Threads will probably never be. Dunno if I need it, though. Dunno if this — being Twitteresque social discourse — was ever as central to the thinking in my life as I thought it was; or if it was just a distracting bulletin board that pretended to give me insight and access, but was actually more about my own smugness and ego.
One Way Out
“Fuck Around / Find Out” summer continues; the SAG-AFTRA strike obviously has nothing to do with my own private experiments in enforcing “find out” on those who fuck around, but, sometimes it does feel hilariously connected. Or at least, I spent a lot of yesterday bursting into completely inappropriate cackles. A lot.
So, in a miracle of timing, I’ll be bridging my huge semi-retirement gift to myself — a trip to Disneyland with my brother to visit Galaxy’s Edge — with a bit of light picketing at, yup, Disney. I’ve had about my fill this year of generally-pretty-smart people acting like absolute fucking morons, and besides, this is a kind of all-threads-meet-in-the-middle moment, for the entertainment industry as a whole, that feels like a once or twice in a lifetime type thing. At my most dire, even six months ago, could I have predicted that the Streaming Wars, generative A.I., late-stage capitlism, hostility towards organized labour, billionaire worship, and the frickin’ Nanny would coalesce into a red-carpet-free Lido and Festival Street? No, I could fucking not!