Honestly, i suspect news of twitter’s death is greatly exaggerated. Whatever damage Musk has inflicted to it, it will probably hobble on, too useful a site of advertising and propaganda to be allowed to fail completely. Either Musk will finally force something to work despite his culls, or he’ll sell and some conglomerate will operate a greatly reduced service semi-indefinitely.
But at minimum, the man has achieved what he set out to. At least one of his stated aims was to ‘restore free speech’ to twitter. We all know ‘free speech’ doesn’t really mean anything in contemporary debates. It’s just a euphemism for normalising reactionary talking points and disorganising progressive positions. And the mass panic and partial exodus from twitter over the past week or so demonstrate that he’s succeeded in that. But then again, many of us felt long ago that twitter had ceased to be hospitable to us, if it ever had been.
But what else is there? None of the existing platforms will recreate the kinds of open public forum that twitter has made for many people, and it’s not like going cold turkey is really an option at the collective level. For some individual needs, it could work. i noticed recently that a friend of mine, who doesn’t use social media, is almost always listening to the radio or a podcast when she’s by herself, and i realised this is probably how I’ve been using a lot of these sites. But it’s not everything. i basically do believe it’s good that people at a mass level can make their thoughts and feelings heard (even when those thoughts and feelings are insufferable). And many of us have made connections on these sites it would be hard if not impossible to recreate or even sustain at the same level anywhere else.
In the 90s, some people thought the internet could be our salvation. The forms of connection it made possible, the forms of communication and planning, combined with the computation skills of digital technology, could be the basis for a new society, based on cybernetically-lubricated empathy and problem solving. We were all gonna be Neo in the final act of the Matrix, making communism with our minds. Of course what happened is that the Treasury now have a discord server, the local council are making mastodon accounts (yes, really), and the CIA are losing their biggest free operation because nepotism baby thinks he can run a business on pure command. The internet is owned by the same people the real world is owned by, and the real world cops are happy to prosecute for digital misdemeanours - as the latest news on the founders of Z-Library confirms. But there’s still something to be learnt from the dream, something that repeats itself when uprisings coordinate themselves through the diffusion of news outside established channels, or when people fragmented and isolated from support systems find friends and other ways to make it via these crappy websites designed for data mining. Of course, this also means they’re data mining the uprisings too.
In his film Perfumed Nightmare, Kidlat Tahimik portrays a semi-autobiographical Filipino taxi driver, who dreams of moving to America and becoming an astronaut. Working for an American expat in Paris quickly cools these dreams, however. At the opening of a new supermarket, he asks himself
If the small chimneys work, why the super chimneys?
If the small markets work, why supermarkets?
If small airplanes work... Why super flying machines?
Back home, the taxi cabs he drove were repurposed from American jeeps, abandoned there after the war, re-assembled and fixed up by hand. As the film ends, Kidlat climbs into the giant plastic chimney, built by the supermarket to burn the masses of modern urban waste, and flies away.
I declare myself independent from those who would build bridges to the stars.
Where is your truest friend, Kidlat? Where is your real strength? The sleeping typhoon must learn to blow again.
I am Kidlat Tahimik. I choose my vehicle. I choose my bridge. When the typhoon blows off its cocoon, the butterfly embraces the sun.
We need another internet. We need other kinds of public forum and diffuse communication. But do you think i know how to code? Do you think i’m gonna learn? i don’t know what’s next.
Tonight, me and my butch are having friends round for Shabbat. i met these friends, you guessed it, on twitter, years before we ended up in the same city. It’s a lucky coincidence. The internet is part of our lives now, stitched in like arteries, and we can’t just rip it out. It’s just like our workplaces and our rented homes and our health system and our public spaces; we’re just scavenging together some way of living through the collapse. Mostly it’s bearable. Sometimes, it’s beautiful. But mostly, it’s bearable.
i’m gonna try and write something more on here soon. Until then,
Ignatz Maria x
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