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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From Plato’s The Republic, excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism:
‘If people are going to revere the gods, revere their parents, and not belittle friendship with one another, then apparently those are the kinds of stories they should and shouldn’t hear about the gods, from childhood onwards.’
I had to go with definitions because the closest book of mine was actually a dictionary. So, the fifth word down is:
Armageddon .är-mƏ-‘ged-Ən n : A final conclusive battle between the forces of good and evil: also : the site or time of this
(The Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
This was an odd one for me, because I am not a believer in Biblical Armageddon (a misnomer, as there isn’t an Armageddon in–or predicted by–the Bible) and that’s the first thing that came to mind when I saw the word.
The next two closest books were tied:
Is that how he’s going to establish himself in the world, with a child’s name?
(The Complete Book of Baby Names by Lesley Bolton)
And:
Dhulin turned in her saddle to follow the direction of his gaze.
(The Sleeping God by Violette Malan)