I’m not usually sensitive to vibe shifts the conviviality corner of twitter picks up on, but both and twitter takes struck a chord this morning. Recommend both since they’re a different category of take.
robinsloan.com/lab/lost-threa
theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/on-twitter-b
Conversation
There’s a distinct vibe shift away from some a public/communal/mutualist (whether you call it town square or football stadium) towards something like a very large royal court. Elon’s presence on here has gone from “World’s Second Largest Gadfly” to “Odin presiding over Valhalla”
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Probably a function of my corner of being tech heavy, but it already feels like being in the house of an oppressively enthusiastic and powerful host where I’m a guest. Not like a public space where I’m hanging out on my own terms. I’m now thinking like a guest.
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Though Musk is pleasanter and more interesting than Trump, there’s no denying he sucks the air out of any space he’s in, much like Trump. No amount of muting, blocking, unfollowing will neutralize the reality distortion field. Too much attention orients towards him.
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The looming political “neutrality” doesn’t bother me, since I can navigate it and still have fun (though I’m disappointed at his reductive view of twitter as a 1-d US political space)
But the vibe neutrality is gone. There is now a privileged True North: vibe with Elon.
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Even giving him the benefit of doubt of best intentions, Elon exerts far too much highly opinionated social gravity to hold space for the not-Elon part of reality. Whatever the faults of previous management eras of twitter, they didn’t have this problem.
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Replying to
Anyhow, color me newly pessimistic this will end well. My best case now is that he installs Jack, backs off from active management, and presides over a slow, graceful decline that may or may not be self-disrupted by bluesky. While preventing contamination of Tesla/SpaceX.
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I think I'm increasingly persuaded by the *analytical* lens the convivial tech people bring to the problem of social media design, but I'm still not convinced they have any good ideas about alternatives. Robin Sloan teases a thing he's building. We'll see.
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Of the various attempts to construct things based on alt principles, I'd say Discord is the only thing that actually works in any sense of the word. Everything else seems like idealistic performance art pretending to be media. Mastodon "works" by simply ceding the ground.
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