Tweetle-dee, tootle-dum

Goodbye to Muskian Twitter. Hello to ... what?

Read time: about 9 minutes This week: Twitter twaddle, social media, non-things. I’m tooting in polite company, too. Abundant links at the end, by the way. Next week: Surveillance, of course.

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Last week, I wavered on plans for this week’s post. “Actually, I’m not entirely sure yet,” I wrote in last week’s post header about this week’s post. The week had already undulated as far as social media goes, and that continues as I write this. Heightened anxiety about US elections also played with my thinking, too. Despite such a roiling backdrop, a topic arose from the surer firmament of our living room couch and a book amidst the piles of magazines, papers, and journals precariously stacked on a glass coffee table. I was thinking about our “non-thing” life, especially as it’s lived through the small screens of our phones. And, of course, I was thinking — or maybe trying not to think — about Twitter post Musk.

Now, I run among circles of people who hardly represent the majority, but I’ve noticed that several recently abandoned Twitter as the fires of its Hell rose. I, too, had quickly left the building, and still the exit may be crowded. Each one who passes through to Twitter-free life can choose from many justifications and motivations. There’s plenty to flee. There may be more to find beyond its gates.

Where those who departed end up is another question.

Casualties and options, including “bailing out”

I’m not entirely convinced that a digital alternative is a great idea, especially if it just reframes a version of exchange like Twitter or if it resets the stage for another billionaire takeover. Musk is very much the south end of a north-bound horse, and much of the Twitter exodus is bound up with his persona. Once is enough, I’d say. Can something like Twitter happen without a lot of baggage?

“Maria” (perhaps Maria Ferrell) lists the losers in the Twitter mess of the past few days in a perceptive post on Crooked Timber. Last among them — though she says that she’s considered them “in no particular order” — are caged “superusers,” “thought-leader types”:

There are now tens of thousands of journalists, policymakers, academics and various other thought-leader types who viscerally get what it is to be trapped inside a monopolistic tech platform, and for it to be costly and painful to leave. I’ve seen people who never thought about this stuff before plaintively ask ‘but what about interoperability?’ or say surely there’s some way to bring their followers with them elsewhere? A week ago, almost none of Twitter’s elite had ever thought about platform lock-in or federated social spaces or decentralisation.

Now, Twitter’s elite are thinking about the exits if they haven’t already passed through them, even if that means leaving others behind. James Fallows, who admits he’s “in the least vulnerable position, as an ‘established’ (old) white man,” has for now chosen to stick with Twitter and is completely ready to give up his blue check. His Substack post neatly summarizes the Twitter “carnage” with the kind of perspective that being old and established provides:

Twitter Is Our Future

The title of Fallows’ post may mislead those of us who are generally optimistic about other directions. Twitter’s future may be in the dustbin; I hope ours is not.

Fallows recognizes the dislocation, the regret, and maybe the fear of losing touch. But he also says this is an already told story of media decay and demise. He’s lived it, and Twitter is retelling the story — embellished, of course — like a “time-lapse video of changes in the media, compressing into a few days changes that have been underway for years.” Twitter also has a “bellwether status for much larger groups of people who will need to find new media ‘homes,’ as they’re driven from existing ones.” The trouble is

there are “many” possible replacements for parts of the positive functions Twitter has offered. But there is no one clear, obvious, easily available, broadly comparable other place to go. It’s not like saying, “Oh, just get an Android” if you’re unhappy with Apple or iPhones. It’s more like saying: “We’re building a dam, so everyone has to move out of this town before the water gets too deep. Good luck staying in touch after each of you settles someplace else.”

Fallows notes options — Mastodon, Substack (you’re there!), others listed by Heather Kelly in the Washington Post, and a final option that feels knee-jerky but may be the best: “just bailing out” even if there are no options, “[w]hich will mean the tedious work of creating and promoting something new. Destruction can be quick and easy.” Fallows quotes The Great Gatsby, “They were careless people. Reinvention is hard and slow.” (Fallows quotes an article by Harold Meyerson, too; see link below.)

Mastodon seems to be a primary destination. After my own Twitter exit, I got stuck in the crowd and was pulled along into Mastodon, too. I looked at the interface, figured I could understand most of it, and somewhat reluctantly signed up. I may just lurk on occasion, but at least I’ve got a “placeholder,” @mrdelong@mastodon.online. It’s likely that I’ll be but an occasional “tooter” — Good God! Can’t they find a better word than that!

Maybe journalists have a real need for a Twitter-like presence. I honestly doubt its essential for most academics, though. How about: a little less digital, a little more real.

I think many just want to live a more real life.

More real life, IRL. My idle hope for Twitter redemption.

That sounds like a natural statement: “more real life.” I wonder, though, whether it would have sounded odd in my parents’ ears, or in my grandparents’. It implies a certain artifice, even fakery. How can you have a more real life, unless the life you’re living is somehow, maybe even just a bit, not real.

That’s a question that occupies the mind of the writer of a certain book on my coffee table, Byung-Chul Han’s Non-Things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld. The title, I should add, seems a bit slavish to the original German. English readers might puzzle about the word lifeworld, but it feels more natural in the German Lebenswelt. That’s a quibble, of course.

The book seems timely because we’re confronting “non-things” — essentially information and data-fied streams that compromise and maybe even obliterate the world of “things,” where we “possess” and make and that provides a certain consistency of experience. Han thinks we’ve made a home of non-things. “We are now in the habit of perceiving reality in terms of attraction and surprise,” he writes in the preface (in perhaps the clearest expression of his topic). “As information hunters, we are becoming blind to still, inconspicuous things, to what is common, the incidental and the customary — the things that do not attract us but ground us in being” (Han’s emphasis). He repeats Hannah Arendt’s oft-quoted observation that “men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table.”

Perhaps we are the peripheral, the accessory, to the smartphone. The phone arrives and announces “I’m here!” From a delivery box for a replacement phone supplied by Asurion.

In an online digital world of attraction and surprise, no chairs and tables furnish a sustained sense of ourselves or reinforce a culture. Perhaps a Twitter exodus can help us sit at a table for a change. Perhaps we can reclaim a real place, a magic, of a truer “public square” (which, nefariously appropriate to the Twitter-as-public-square analogy, has also historically been a place for executions and public humiliations). Many may have left Twitter because they were pissed off at Elon Musk and his thoughtless gazillionaire antics — or just the fact that Twitter had become a toy of the richest and noisiest man alive.

Han wrote, “What is so ruinous about digital communication is that it means we no longer have time to close our eyes. The eyes are forced into a ‘continuous voracity’ They lose the capacity for stillness, for deep attentiveness. The soul no longer prays.” Han’s use of the word prays is not necessarily religious (though I think Han is a devout Christian). The word does add intensity to its meaning: “deep attentiveness.”

In Real Life, I’ll try to close my eyes, to hear, to touch hands together, to be aware and quiet. What happens may be better than a “Like” or a “Retweet.”

Got comments? Yell really loud so we can hear you from wherever we are, or leave a comment by pushing this non-thing button:

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Tags: non-things, social media, twitter, mastodon, journalists, distributed systems, federation, Elonian Twitter

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Links, cited and not, some just interesting

Maybe Elon bought Twitter just in time to watch it become irrelevant, like other social media. Broderick, Ryan. “The Great Unbundling Has Already Begun.” Substack newsletter. Garbage Day, November 2, 2022. https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-great-unbundling-is-already-happening

The losers, from financial backers to superusers. [Ferrell], Maria. “Twitter Consequences; Not Just for Little People.” Crooked Timber, November 4, 2022. https://crookedtimber.org/2022/11/04/whither-twitter/.

Journalists seem particularly screwed. Bell, Emily. “Elon Musk’s Twitter: What Does It Mean for Journalists?” Columbia Journalism Review, November 2, 2022. https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/elon-musks-twitter-what-does-it-mean-for-journalists.php.

Twitter-ler On the Roof. Where to go when the village is raided. Doctorow, Cory. “How to Leave Dying Social Media Platforms.” Medium (blog), October 30, 2022. https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf. “We don’t leave because we don’t want to lose them [i.e., our friends and followers]. They don’t leave because they don’t want to lose us. It’s a hostage situation, and we’re all holding each other hostage.”

Twitter options. Kelly, Heather. “You’ve Decided to Quit Twitter. Here’s What You Can Use to Replace It.” Washington Post, October 30, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/29/twitter-alternatives/.

Han, Byung-Chul. Non-Things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld. Translated by Daniel Steuer. English edition. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2022. I should say that I’m not entirely convinced by Han’s argument. In fact, the book doesn’t really have a plodding argument and laying out of ideas, linked and ordered in place. Rather, much of the work feels like grouped and like-themed assertions. I’ll give it a closer look, because I think Han’s general idea is valid and important — namely, that we are increasingly living in a world of “non-things” and this will fundamentally change what it means to be human.

In German, but there’s Google Translate. The process of giving your child a smartphone, wisely told by Matthias Heinrich. Heinrich, Matthias. “Nur mit Handy bist du candy.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 1, 2022. https://blogs.faz.net/schlaflos/2022/11/01/nur-mit-handy-bist-du-candy-10839/.

One of many, many such articles: Capelouto, J. D. “Elon Musk Has Laid off Entire Teams at Twitter, Employees Say.” Semafor, November 4, 2022. https://www.semafor.com/article/11/04/2022/twitter-layoffs-elon-musk-reportedly-lays-off-entire-teams.

James Fallows cites the last paragraph. Meyerson admits he doesn’t use Twitter much. Meyerson, Harold. “Fellow Journalists (and Our Academic Friends), It’s Time to Leave Twitter.” The American Prospect, November 1, 2022. https://prospect.org/api/content/62564d86-5a1b-11ed-8180-12274efc5439/.

#31: The End is the Beginning

So long and thanks for all the Tweets

And, in the past week’s daily missives:

• Hu, Margaret. “Small Data Surveillance v. Big Data Cybersurveillance.” Pepperdine Law Review 42, no. 4 (2015): 773–844.

• Deck, Andrew. “AI-Generated Art Sparks Furious Backlash from Japan’s Anime Community.” Nieman Lab (blog), November 1, 2022. https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/ai-generated-art-sparks-furious-backlash-from-japans-anime-community/.

• WRAL.com. “Duke Asks That Patient Privacy Suit Be Thrown Out,” November 8, 2022. https://www.wral.com/duke-asks-that-patient-privacy-suit-be-thrown-out/20564304/.

• Adegbuyi, Fadeke. “An AI Might Have Written This.” Every, October 18, 2022. https://every.to/cybernaut/an-ai-might-have-written-this.

• “The Infinite Conversation.” Accessed November 9, 2022.

  https://infiniteconversation.com/

• Restrepo, Manuela López. “Does Your Rewards Card Know If You’re Pregnant? Privacy Experts Sound the Alarm.” NPR, August 13, 2022, sec. Technology. https://www.npr.org/2022/08/13/1115414467/consumer-data-abortion-roe-wade-pregnancy-test-rewards-card-target-walgreens.