Double Winstead

About two months ago, I wrote a bit about why those lingering on Twitter should finally up sticks and leave. I had spotted the phenomena of good people lingering in a bad place - generally for good reasons, too. They mostly wanted to make sure they weren’t abandoning the other, lingering good people. That phenomenon where no one will eat the last cookie at the office party.

(Yes, I’m using a D&D-style alignment shorthand here, and squashing things into a good/evil binary is deeply problematic. Oh well.)

There’s are also plenty of institutions that feel stuck on Twitter. Businesses, government, brands, non-personal bodies stay put. These accounts aren’t people, so the negatives of Twitter don’t impact them personally. They’re not part of a community, and their interactions are filtered through tools and interns. It is a lot easier for a fast food chain to shrug off a pervasive fug of pornbots and hate speech than for some kid in Georgia to do the same. A brand stays because there’s a sunk cost, it is cheaper to stay than to leave, and nobody wants to be the one to explain to the COO what an ‘incel’ is. Plus, maybe if we keep punting our team’s carefully-crafted memes into the void, one of those Russian bots will supersize its next meal!

Anyway, my whole spiel (again, two months ago, when this was a merely a cold take and not a frozen one) was based on the fact that Twitter is no longer a ‘contested’ space. In PVE work, you’ve got three broad types of space: safe, hostile, contested. The first two are pretty obvious. A safe space is moderated and secure, and that moderation and security is supportive of positive social norms. An unsafe space is one that’s similarly guarded and guided, but in a way that reinforces negative social norms (misogyny, hate speech, violent extremism, etc).

A contested space is one where you have clashing sets of norms. It may be moderated or unmoderated - or simply moderated badly or weakly. But the key attribute is that the norms aren’t established or fixed. Maybe some people think hate speech is fine while others people find it abhorrent. Some bully for the lolz; some find it horrifying. And they’re all crowded around the same (real or virtual) table. A safe space is a youth club, an unsafe space is the proverbial Nazi bar, the contested space is an awkward Thanksgiving dinner.

Twitter is no longer contested. It has gone from a moderated space with vaguely decent norms to an aggressively unmoderated space (Community Notes do not make up for sacking the whole safety team) to a site that is being actively moderated towards negative social norms. Previously banned users are unbanned and promoted. Rudimentary safety features like blocking have been removed to aid trolls and stalkers. When you log in to find Musk messages about ‘woke AI’ and transphobic conspiracy theories fixed to the top of your feed as mandatory reading, it sets a clear statement of intent and an injunctive social norm. It tells you what this place is about, and how you are supposed to behave. To be clear, this isn’t even about Elon’s connection to Trump, or the site’s attempt to be the home of (a very specific and hateful type of) ‘right wing’ politics: Twitter is a cesspit of conspiracy theories, disinformation and violent hate speech that no reputable political body should touch with a barge pole.

Contested spaces are spaces you can, and should, fight for - that’s where you do your best to keep the light shining. An unsafe space: you build firebreaks instead. And what you don’t do is endorse it - even tacitly, by your presence. Don’t be there fighting the good fight. Get the hell out of do(d)ge.

Again - all of this rant was pretty well-trodden territory a few months ago. Now, it is old news. Post-election, Musk can no longer be dismissed as the world’s most expensive Lex Luthor cosplay, as he has demonstrated a meaningful impact on society. Folks - individuals and institutions - are leaving. (I suppose what’s most frustrating is that official American government bodies [now] won’t be leaving it any time soon, which is somewhat of a lost opportunity.) Better late than never, I suppose.

Not that anyone asked, but, no, I do not have a Bluesky account. I’m enjoying not being on social media. I have Instagram, which I use to swap cat videos with Anne. I have LinkedIn, which I use as a Rolodex. (I also have a Rolodex!) I have Discord, which I use to chat with small circles of actual friends. For book recommendations, Chiefs and stories of outrageous customers, I use reddit. And I get a lot of newsletters. (The annual January bonfire is going to be brutal this year.) End of list.

I don’t miss the public square. My last days of Twitter were all about coping mechanisms: the internal checklists I had to run through before I spoke or replied or liked or tweeted. Is this a good thing? Am I sure contributing won’t make trouble for me? Do I really care about this topic? Do I have time to respond to the inevitable response? Am I actually adding anything of value here? Would I be better off walking away and patting the cat instead? Generally speaking, the answers were always no, no, no, no, no, and yes. The pat the cat metric is a good one, it turns out.

It was, at the time, a genuinely difficult transition to go from swimming in the river to standing on the shore, feeling like I was watching everyone and everything drift by me. I understand why people stay on the shouty parts of the internet, and I don’t judge them for it. But I’ve dug my own little pond to splash around in, and that’s what works for me.

Speaking of ponds… …. no, that doesn’t connect at all. But a big thanks to SF/F heavyweights Locus and File 770 for the kind mentions of Shelfies.

We’re now 10 (11!) shelfies in, and going strong. I’m sorry that beehiiv’s design options are a bit limited, but I am anjoying the way that all the shelfies are starting to come together as one big chaotic MegaShelf on the home page.

Matt Muir’s web curios is a newsletter favourite, and one of the few that I read end to end. It is the best and worst of the internet, curated with a snarky humour that is well up my street. Web Curios is a seemingly haphazard collection of stuff, but after reading a few million words of it, I’ve noticed a trend: Muir tends to highlight projects that do one thing well.

My grandfather would approve. One of his many rules of thumb was ‘never eat at a restaurant with a menu longer than a page’. They clearly didn’t know what they were good at. He appreciated people that did a thing, and did it well. There’s magic in a really good fried chicken shop that knows it is a fried chicken shop and doesn’t try to cater to all tastes and shapes and sizes. Be the best at your one thing.

Muir’s Tiny Awards embodies this ethos: bitty parts of the internet that have a singular focus. Whether that’s ‘make a Lego street’ or ‘find a fire hydrant’, these are websites that 100% are exactly what they are. These are also things that are things. Want to talk about SMART objectives? Here’s a website that exists to tick a million checkboxes. (KPI achieved!)

Muir - and my grandfather - seem to be bucking a broader internet trend, which is, in a nutshell, ‘mission creep’. Newsletters add social media. Social media adds ecommerce. Streamers adds gaming. Games add new modes. Someone out there is always finding a way to bolt on audio sharing. Always keep swimming; always keep expanding.

My natural instinct is to think, well, these companies all need to attract new people, all the time. Share prices are based on growth, and growth means adding more things for more people. The more they offer - the more new users they appeal to. However my suspicion is that it is increasingly about retention, not attraction. We’re hitting digital capacity: a finite number of humans, screens, minutes in the day, attentions spans, monthly subscriptions, you name it. Don’t leave! We have a new feature! Please don’t go - we’ll eat you up, we love you so!

It may be my general existential angst speaking, but it does feel like a bubble - one that has been further inflated by the immense crap-generation potential of LLMs. The reverse is still my dream: a quieter internet filled with crafted content, curated feeds, and interest-led communities. I realise I’m wholly shouting at clouds here, but the fluffy bastards had it coming.

I think I’ll save the cold takes on The Kitschies for a future write-up, but I didn’t want it to go unmentioned:

The Kitschies has been a really fantastic (pun intended) endeavour, and I’m really proud of what Anne, Leila, Glen and I managed to accomplish - with the help of many, many, many other people, of course. The last shortlists are brilliant, and the prize is definitely going out with a bang. Please do check out the finalists; they’re brilliant.

Speaking of menus, the Buttolph collection at the NYPL is genuinely amazing - and wholly the world of one incredible individual. Miss Frank E Buttolph (1850 - 1924) collected over 25,000 of them by placing advertisements, writing restaurants, and often just marching in and demanding one. She’s the hero that Gotham deserves. (This NYPL project has transcribed over 1 million dishes, but still has tens of thousands of menus to go.)