Somewhere over the blue sky

You ever have that dream where you’re doing something relatively anodyne — making a sandwich, playing a pickup game of football, going to a movie — and the entire cast of characters of a previous portion of your life shows up? Maybe it’s the staff of the office from two jobs ago; maybe it’s your whole third-year class from college.

Anyway, that’s what Bluesky felt like last week.

When Bluesky got started I mostly accepted the (then, exclusive!) invite to the platform in order to secure my own handle. I was (as I recall) about six months out of Twitter, which I left in November of 2022 when Elon made clear that his project for the platform was to make it an anti-trans, pro-alt*-right paradise.

*Does the “alt” still apply? Is this an outdated term? Is there anything alt about them anymore?

And as I’ve recounted previously, I was pretty happy post-Twitter. Ok, that first month or two was neurologically weird — it turns out, eleven years spent crafting every stray thought in your head into 140-, and then 280-, character bullets takes a bit of conscious deprogramming — but once I got that framework out of my system, the woolly lie of social media (and the core truth it contains, on which more in a moment) revealed itself in full. Posting on socials is, no matter how or where you do it, a damned silly use of one’s time. Period, full stop.

Now to the core truth: the reason any of this works at all — at least, if you’re a normal person, and not a professional rage-farmer whose efforts to overwhelm Twitter have, hilariously, maybe led to the demise of the platform’s relevance — is that it is gamifying and monetizing something we all share, which is a yearning for some kind of social connection. Should that yearning have been platformed on the internet in various gumball-coloured apps on the supercomputers we carry around in our pockets? No, probably not; and no matter where we stand on the utility of social media, we all owe ourselves a regular practive of remembering the gamifying and monetizing element, both of which are crucial to these platforms’ design, and both of which have significant downstream implications.

But yeah, after Twitter, I felt lonely. I combatted this by spending more time with my friends and going on longer walks; and turning my pithy brain-blasts into longer, more nourishing journal entries. It got better. It also got easier to see the other design flaw of nearly all of these environments, which is their baseline presumption that anyone in the world gives a fuck what I think (or, in turn, that I give a fuck what they think). As soon as you’re hitting reply and typing out the word “actually,” you’ve fallen right into the trap.

My post-Twitter use of social is much more specific. If Twitter was (or wanted to be) the Everything App, all the platforms I use now have much narrower uses. To wit:

• Bluesky: I (still) absolutely refuse to take this app seriously. I follow a maximum of 101 people and unfollow/block with reckless abandon. I use it less than 5 minutes a day. Chaotic
• Threads: This site is for the Star Wars girlies. When Skeleton Crew starts, this is where I’ll be. Better than Instagram so long as you follow exactly zero people you actually know.
• Instagram: oldschool social networking; friends & family, and hobbies (toys). Deeply unironic.
• TikTok: I am become lurker, watcher of vids. The algorithm thinks I’m into chiropracty, queer joy, children doing superhuman things, recipe porn, and bike lane content. Addictive (I have a setting that kicks me out after 20 minutes)
• Letterboxd: the only one that really matters; protect her. Beautiful

Again, it was hard to break the mental muscle memory that retrofitted all of the things that happen in a given day into something short that can be uploaded into one of the above matrices. Now when I come across someone on any of these platforms whose “mode of being alive” seems to be “post through it,” it’s a pretty fast block or unfollow. I’m fine with whatever anyone’s doing to manage their life and their varying neurodivergences, but my wariness of parasocial relationships (and even, half-valuable in-person relationships) has been growing by leaps and bounds in the past few years. The scales have fallen. The internet is good for community-building up to a point — after that, it has a lot to answer for.

Ding Dong Merrily

Thanks for indulging me on two long(ish) reads in the past couple of weeks; and now I’m tumbling straight into December with all the requisite year-end wrap-up posts, which should carry us to 2025. (Madness!)

In the meantime, here’s some stuff for you to read:

• Speaking of Bluesky chaos, here’s an “embroidery tips page that forgot to close its H3 tags” (Wayback Machine)
• You know I love a colour theory post. One of my subscribers posted this in the comments to the Agatha/Death piece. (Shot Zero)
• The post-9/11 cohort of young men, and what they’re like. (LA Review of Books)
• Rhyming nicely with all of the above (except maybe the sewing machine thing), here’s my friend Malcolm on the post-election world. (Strategy For Life)
• Vera Blossom asks: what is your relationship to pain? (How To Fuck Like A Girl)
• Like everyone last weekend, I got Glicked down good. Get yourselves out there for at least one of these films (at a theatre near you)