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
A few important works are coming out in 2011, such as Book 2 of the Kingkiller Chronicles and Book 5 of a Song of Ice and Fire. The only one I'm excited about at this point is Embassytown by Mieville. I don't think SF/F will have a year like 2010.
Embassytown will definitely be a book to pay attention to!
Hells yes, SF/F will have a GREAT year in 2011! I think we'll get massive cross-pollination by the SOFI series coming out – look what True Blood and (ergh) the Meyer movies have done to Paranormal romance.
HBO and other American TV series are doing an ever-increasingly-great job of popularising SF/F, as people realise it's significantly more entertaining than things constrained to the 'normal' world.
Plus, geeks get older and hit their second (and third!) generations. I have a copy of Dune on my desk that my grandfather gave me. People are growing up now writing, having had a full generation of precedent-setting authors blazing trails for them.
I am slavering in anticipation of 2011s goodies.
– Pip
Well, someone is enthusiastic :P.
I hope SF TV will be good this year. I really need a strong replacement for BSG…so far, there have been close calls, but nothing that made me obsessed.
I said yes, I wasn't even thinking in TV terms, but A Game of Thrones looks like creating some waves, but bookswise it really depends on if a few long awaited big releases actually do come out.
A lot of good shows got canned in fall, though, Elfy. Who knows what will fill their places, and if they'll be genre shows :(.