I can’t promise what’s happening with Twitter is just the public meltdown of a malignant narcissist. I can’t promise it’s not more practice. Twitter is much bigger, much more influential, and much more ingrained into the fabric of modern society than Livejournal ever was. It’s a big bite to swallow. But it’s happened before. We know governmental entities with vested interests in eliminating avenues of effective dissent and the dissemination of truth (Saudi Arabia, China, others) provided funding for Musk to complete his purchase when he couldn’t otherwise pull it off. We see him, barely months at the helm, take off any remaining mask of progressivism or moral purpose and speed-run a descent into radicalization while working day and night, not even to make money, but to change anything that might smack of mercy or kindness or acceptance of others. To welcome monsters and ban journalists. To get people who’ve managed not to fall into the right-wing oubliette to turn against Ukraine, turn against vaccines, turn against Jews, turn against LGBTQ+ community but especially gender-nonconforming human fucking beings, turn against fact-checking, turn against economic aid packages meant to benefit them and not him, turn against liberal democracy, turn against each other.
Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop talking to each other and start hurting each other.
Hurting each other is just ever so much more useful than talking and connecting. Leaving people alone doesn’t produce narcissistic supply. It doesn’t feed the need to control and force that some humans, it seems, have always been and always will be born with.
And look, I’m not going to sit here and go full anti-capitalist vision quest on you. I understand these sites aren’t free to run. Servers, bandwidth, coders, mods, everything costs. We all have to eat and the costs involved in the operation of these kinds of networks can get unreal and unwieldy. And until we achieve post-scarcity, all these things must be done by people who also need to eat and live. I surely don’t expect to be handed mature social networks all run by Andrews out of the good of their hearts and the pleasure of making little things.
And I also understand that we are the generation who has to go through this part of it. We’re the ones born in time to be forced to make the rules and defend them. To say hey maybe one guy shouldn’t be able to own the village square. Because it was never remotely possible before. It’s all new and we have to figure it out. To agitate and legislate and be constantly vigilant. Maybe it’ll all seem so obvious and settled in 50 years, but those are our 50 years and no one else is going to have to be the first to have these conversations and try to make policy out of them. That’s us, it’s our lot, and it sucks ass, but this technology is the singularity we geeks have been talking about, and it turns out it’s not just impossible to imagine life on the other side of it before it happens, but it’s really fucking hard to figure out life on the other side of it once you get there, too. This is our actual Oregon Trail. We have to walk it on foot. We have to be the ones who fuck up and we have to be the ones who fix it. We have to be the ones who learn the lessons the hard way and write it all down so someday people get to just hop in a plane and sleep for five hours rather than die in the snow wrapped around our shivering children, praying for a dawn that is far too distant to help us now.
And we’ve seen very clearly this year that even progress that seems obvious and settled 50 years down the track is always vulnerable to people who confuse the ignorance of their own childhoods with the absence of societal problems. (...)
There isn’t enough money printed to change who they are. Elon Musk is (or was) the richest man on Earth. He’s losing money like a teenage nosebleed every time he goes further to the right. This is just the shape of his soul, it’s not a feint for profit. It’s not just about making enough money to keep the servers going and buy everyone in the office a house, it’s not even about making shareholders rich, it’s fundamentally about the yawning, salivating need to control and hurt. To express power not by what you can give, but by what you can take away. And deeper still, this strange compulsion of conservatism to force other humans to be just like you. To clone their particular set of neuroses and fears and revulsions and nostalgias and convictions and traumas so that they never have to experience anything but themselves, copied and pasted unto the end of time. A kind of viral solipsism that cannot bear the presence of anything other than its own undifferentiated self, propagating not by convincing or seduction or debate, but by the eradication of any other option.
And I’m so tired of it. I’m so tired of running from that Nothing, that creeping enforced sameness, that self-programming grey goo of empty fear of the Other. Running from oasis to oasis in a desert of uncaring where empathy never wets the sand.
I’m so tired of just harmlessly getting together with other weird geeks and going to what amounts to a digital pub after work and waking up one day to find every pint poisoned. Over and over again. Like the poison wants us specifically. Like it knows we will always make its favorite food: vulnerability, connection, difference. I’m so tired of lunch photos and fanfic and stupid jokes and keeping in touch with family across time zones and making friends and starting cottage industries and pursuing hobbies and meeting soulmates and expressing thoughts and creating identities and loving TV shows and reading books and getting to know a few of your heroes and raising kids and making bookshelves and knitting and painting and fixing sinks and first dates and homemade jam and, yes, figuring out what Buffy characters we are, listening and learning and hoping and just fucking talking to each other weaponized against us. Having our enthusiasm over the smallest joys of everyday life invaded by people who long ago forgot their value and turned into fodder for the death of thought, the burial of love. (...)
I’m just so angry.
by Catherynne M. Valente, Welcome To Garbagetown | Read more:
[ed. See also: What the fediverse (does/n't) solve (Pluralistic).]
