The past week of the trip has been a whirl of dogs and raptors and art and friends; a wonderful few days. What’s been sticking in my mind is a conversation I had with RKO’C – we ranged all over the place, but talked especially about s*cial m*dia. I’m embarrassed to admit it but I don’t remember exactly how R and I first connected; it might have been via a third person’s blog, but I’d put money on Twitter being the channel. On top of that, we’d just eaten an incredibly delicious meal that had been, in large part, generated by a Facebook post and some actual phone calls (it’s Rebecca’s story, it’s great, and I will let her tell it). In spite of all the backstory, we spent a lot of time being sad about what the two big platforms have become. IMHO Facebook is just an evil company – lacking any compelling reason to stay I deleted my account last winter. And Twitter, where I’ve established some of the most important relationships of my (current) life, has become a slough of bile and stress. People who are very important to me are active on Twitter, so I need to make my peace with the platform, but I have noticed that not spending much time there as I ride has done wonders for my mental health. Not being able to obsessively refresh news sites to keep abreast of the latest torrent in the Trumpian shit maelstrom might be a contributing factor, too! I’ll leave the ‘why’ behind social media suckiness to smarter people, but lots of internet history suggests that unmoderated, “freedom of speech” defaults on platforms enable the folks with the most power and/or the least amount of give a shit as regards behavioral norms. “We can’t censor (except when we do).” is a ridiculously weak position, but it’s inexpensive for the platform – hate speech as an externality: pollution that the community has to absorb.
I checked Instagram the morning after we talked about all this to find that Olivia Laing had just published a piece in the Observer titled ‘I was hooked and my drug was Twitter’. To state the obvious, Olivia was way ahead of me in understanding what’s going on on a personal level with s*cial m*dia. And, duh, R & I are not the only people wrestling with wanting a broader community but being daunted by platforms’ toxicity.
As further proof that talking with friends over Mexican beer and tequila gives one UNIQUE INSIGHT into the state of the world, we also discussed human/machine integration and the next morning Alexa read us a headline about implantable gadgets. We marveled at Laurence Fishburne as Cowboy Curtis and the next afternoon as I rode the Pacific Electric bike trail I passed a fellow riding a beautiful replica of the bike from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.
Travelogue follows…
