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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4 Responses
*LOL* He is a classic 🙂 Have you read any of his books too?
I haven’t, but I’m familiar with his work :P. Just a note: Mr. Wheaton isn’t dead, which is why anyone wandering in here needs to click the link I put in the post. You’ll understand the point of the title when you go there :.
He’s pretty smart when it comes to geek culture, which I like. He doesn’t attempt to treat it either too seriously or with any derision. He is a geek, after all :P.
As you already know, his writings are honest & humorous. I have his first 2 and need to get “Happiest Days of Our Lives”. I keep thinking it’d be cool to see him at a Con too since he keeps going.
Hmmm … hadn’t I recommend his site a while back?! 😛 WWdN & WISB are on my links toolbar since they’re favorites. Now I’m trying to keep quiet what the death really is since I had read it last week; meaning others have to actually click the link to find out.
Great Post!
Ha! I should read his books at some point. Consider them on my long and ever growing “to read” pile.