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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6 Responses
It seems a heckuva lot easier to generate tension and crisis from pessimism. Or maybe it is a reflection of the general pessimism of our time — we are deeper into technological evolution (the knee of the exponential curve, if you will) and have already been shown that no amount of technological showmanship brings us any closer to Utopia.
Oh, I agree. But at the same time as we are showing that utopia can't be grasped, the same technology is making clear that there is much to applaud about our future: cures for terrible ailments, new amazing technologies, etc.
But pessimism is easier for creating tension, in some respects. I think there's an element of that which is weakened by that ease, though.
Technology and the world is showing us that there isn't much to be happy about. I think that the way our world is turning out that the technology is advancing but the human condition is decaying. Most authors are seeing this and writing accordingly.
Jodi: I don't see technology as negative…I see nature as negative, but not technology. There's a lot of awesome in tech right now.
But you're probably right about the decay of the human condition, particularly now.
Perhaps it is easier – I can believe that – but if so, it must be proof of laziness on the part of writers, since hope could be injected with a little more effort on their parts. Maybe they're all a bit depressed themselves 😛
Grace: Oh, well writers usually are emotionally unstable, even if they think they are the opposite. We're all screwed up…