Mastodon booms as Twitter enters turbulent time

It’s been strange watching some people go a bit manic as Twitter enters a turbulent time. Many are going across to a new platform and then telegraphing the fact probably hoping that others will go there too and follow them so that they can keep up-to-date with the scintillating content that made Twitter such a hellsite in the first place.

Trump is not the problem and Musk certainly isn’t, but it’s doubly odd to think of a company where the individual stakes of all the participants are considered to be so important that people will go to this much effort – working out how the new technology functions, setting up an account, making a note of the password, tweeting the address – just so that they can abuse others with impunity as they’ve done for the past five years.

Or however long Twitter has been a bonfire of epic proportions.

It’s both sad and amusing to be witness to the mass exodus as people realise that what they’re spent so much time investing in is threatened with disablement or worse: complete annihilation. All those hours sitting in front of the computer screen or staring at the mobile phone, all those “likes”, all those retweets, all that patience exhausted, those yearnings finally rewarded – and then it’s going to be taken away in a flash.

It must be horrible to have put so much of yourself into something that SOMEONE ELSE OWNS in its entirety, your activity discounted because you don’t possess the master sign-on details (or whatever the technical terms is for the main access key).

Your life taken and played with by a hyper-capitalist with a taste for supersonic vehicles. Your life. All those people who follow you and retweet and “like” every tweet you send out filled with your infinite wisdom. All your wit and aggression made subservient to a man you’ll never meet. Parts of you made into an object, a resource (human resources), a statistic, a “handle”.

Though you never got a blue tick.

I can’t really imagine the feelings of such a person because for years I’ve been complaining on a different blog about how Twitter operates to privilege the most extreme expression, the most outrageous words, the most terrible ideas. Surely Musk is only wanting to celebrate this characteristic of the website? Surely he’s making it into the reason for its existence. 

Surely you’d want to be part of that because all of your followers love you for that reason. What is there to complain about if your wishes have finally turned into reality? What more could you possibly want? Do you want to be given the main access key (techno-specialists help me out here)? 

Why not indeed? What else is there to try?

Perhaps Musk can assign control of the platform to a different influencer for a year in turn to see how the site performs with different management. Wouldn’t this be a more democratic solution to the problem of how to manage Twitter? King for a day.

King for a year.

King for the rest of your life, like President Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin. Master of the twitterverse. Sovereign. In control of your own destiny. Wordlord. Moster. God.

While politics becomes more polarised the bush comes to town

When ‘Q and A’ got shuffled off to 8.30 on a Thursday night I felt vindicated. Years before I’d stopped watching this unpleasant show, with its combative political operatives and quasi-debate, its copying of the flame wars found all too often on Twitter and its loud voices intent on just niggling the opposition into further cornfluffle. 

I needed to coin a word for the almost meaningless vociferations that get read by thousands at all times of the day on social media. The carriers of sarcasm, the producers of temporary victory – moments that lead to nothing but a hunger for something to offset the savage pull of the ravenous vacuum – and the bringers of shame to the angels who might, if they moderated their speech, be able to take part in a process they watch enviously from the sidelines.

Meanwhile, farmers are using social media in creative ways to engage with their customers in the cities, both through TikTok videos produced on mobile phones and through the unnumbered cooking shows that grace our screens. Wherever you turn you see a cooking show where there’s a camera capturing a key ingredient – salt, say, or extra virgin olive oil – being added to a frying pan or bowl as show hosts, busy at 4pm helping viewers get through to dinnertime by making a cake or a stir-fry, talk about the produce they rely on. There’s one show where most of the cooking is done on barbeques, in the field, with scenic backdrops adding colour to what is mostly, in fact, simple fare. 

I watch many of them. We seem to harbour an insatiable appetite for content that features food being made, and so farmers should know that consumers take food personally. We’re getting pork belly hamburgers just as we’re getting Master Chef in the umpteenth season to satisfy our hunger for new flavours. Multiculturalism ties in with this dynamic because one of the first ways anyone will experience a foreign culture is through its signature meals. 

PETA demonstration, Pitt St Mall, 1 September

We can express our political affiliation by avoiding dairy and we can even express things about our politics by saying that we like pad see ew or butter chicken. The other day I discovered by talking with an Indian friend that “masala” just means “spice”, and this conversation raised an understanding of a place that I will probably never visit but that is becoming more and more important as the forces of globalisation continue to operate on our fractured world. 

Food gives us access to the Other, to alternative ways of living, and hence it can enrich our lives even if all we do is buy a takeaway that a member of the precariat brings to our front door on his motor scooter. Food is a highway and a forest, both, and farmers who venture to make content aimed at metropolitan audiences might be surprised by what they can achieve. 

It’s not just the immediate financial spin-offs that matter, it’s the way that such engagement can lift the brand and lead to industry-wide profitability. Reputation matters, and it’s not enough to rely on elected representatives to do the PR heavy lifting. People have to do it for themselves.