We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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Okay Dr. Duke 🙂 I loved the meme’s & it seems you had a good time with it. Awesome goals to have and I look forward to seeing them come true for ya.
I am working on my freedom with expenses also & it appears I may be closer towards that with some good job opportunities in the Twin Cities area. We’re moving soon & life has been totally crazy, but all good.
I am glad I was able to get caught up on your posts & chapters.
Best of luck with the critque group. If I was an actually writer instead of working in IT, I would join up. However, I prommise to spare ya 🙂
Take Care!
Oh, yay! This is going to be super!
The frequency of new material: it really depends on how many people join. The more members, the more crits we’ll have to give, which probably means less frequency. CC has that whole tit-for-tat system, which I think would be a good system to follow. Where is a member starts owing other members critiques, it means you should hold back on submitting stuff and start critiquing more.
A name? Preferably something fantasy-related. It’s really your decision; you’re paying the money, so I think you should decide. I don’t really mind what it’s called.
Limit: six people sounds good.
I’m looking forward to to reading and critting your stuff!