I’ve been thinking a lot about social media lately; what I get out of it, what I think is valuable about it and what isn’t, why I’m on it at all. Primarily, this concerns Bluesky, though it’s true in my personal life, too. Every day, the firehose news feed contains stories about Trump, or about Musk, or all of the terrible things happening in this country under their leadership. Sometimes, it contains interesting or even exciting news about something I enjoy — a new movie or television show, or a new record from a band I like, or just good news from someone I like or know or respect.
But, mostly, I just feel bored and demoralized.
Bluesky has managed to replicate an awful lot of the same left-liberal/left-leftist fights that dominated Twitter by the time I noped out. I’ve literally seen some of the exact same people having the exact same arguments they were having years ago on Twitter, and their positions do not appear to have been even slightly changed by the intervening years. These are frequently old fights, small and petty, and never-ending. It’s a little like going to see a band you’ve seen in the last couple of years and realizing they’re playing the exact same set you saw the last time they came through town. There’s some comfort to it, but it’s mostly just a drag.
As an example, let’s take primary discourse, e.g., discussions about which democratic congressional representatives should face a primary, and why. It’s not that I think none of them should face a primary; there are plenty of bad democratic members of congress, and there are plenty more who are simply not very effective. But the discussion about this always ends up polarizing people who, in reality, share more political DNA than human siblings share. It’s the narcissism of small differences, and, for reasons I don’t really understand, the short-form, microblogging nature of websites like Twitter or Bluesky really turbocharges it. It turns minor arguments about Representative Hal Nobody from New York’s 8th district into all-out bloodbaths between two or more combatants who do not live in New York’s 8th district and who, if they lived in the same district, would almost certainly vote identically. What makes all of this worse, at least for me, is that these are frequently fights I know I have seen the same combatants engaged in years ago. They’re usually proxy battles about something else, frozen in amber, that go on as if nothing’s changed in the last several years, even though everything has changed in the last several years.
I don’t really know what to do about it. There’s increasingly a gnawing feeling at the back of my mind that there just isn’t anything to be done about it, that this is just the nature of social media, specifically, social media in the political sphere. I’d like to think that, over the years, I’ve become less ready to personally attack people, less willing to engage in petty fights, more interested in actual discussion and ideas, more willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t know if that’s true, it’s a hard thing to gauge about yourself. I certainly think about all this more often than I used to, but I don’t know if that translates into better behavior. I want to enjoy talking to my friends in the little black computer in my hand, but it all feels very stale, all the songs sound the same. That’s probably a sign that I, personally, need to spend a lot less time looking into the scroll and a lot more time doing literally anything else.
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE 