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… ↩
Like this:
Like Loading...
3 Responses
I haven't had that exact experience, but I've had similar.
Characters taking over and character "autonomy" are not new, and you are in good company. In 1986 Analytic Press published psychologist Mary Watkins' book Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues. Watkins demonstrates the value of imaginal others in shamanism, various therapies, and conditions such as multiple personality disorder. Her chapter "The Characters Speak Because They Want to Speak": The Autonomy of the Imaginal Other explores the role of imaginal others in writing.
Watkins quotes from poet Marina Tsvetaeva and authors Enid Blyton, Henry James, Flannery O'Connor, and Alice Walker. I've included excerpts here, along with a bit of my own process.
This happens to me all the time – especially during my acting/actor days, I'd pace around the house ad-libbing lines "in character", but hell if I could recapture it on stage.
And that's the thing, when that happens, when you're brain is free to wander and 100% naturally sift through the essences of any particular dialogue and/or character, it never looks or reads right when you try to write it down later, or remember the details. Like dreams, man: it's a one-time/this-very-moment thing. Traces remain and inspire, but you'd have to pull a Daniel Day Lewis style immersion to make it last.
e_journeys: So…I may very well be insane?
Dave: And you're saying I'm not insane…My solution will be to have my digital recorder by me at all times for just such occasions.