Today turned out to be the day for the Twitter stuff. While it has vaguely been in my mind for actual years, the impetus was listening to too much Stratechery and Dithering and all the renewed hubbub over Twitter lately. I locked it down last year—or earlier maybe even—but definitely once the election season started and I really didn’t want to be held accountable for the (accurately) hateful things I was going to say about vile people.
Over the last year—with Rona and the election—I’ve gotten to see middle-of-the-fence liberals mortified their white friends and family are such garbage, even though it was obvious for years.
Okay, to clarify, I’m not unlocking the Twitter and being that minuscule amount more outward facing just because I want to tease even the most casually awakened liberals to the reality of the disaster drowning the actual species. Not many things get to destroy a species. Western capitalism though… going to do it. Neat.
The final Twitter thought was something Ben Thompson said about Twitter as ephemeral. There are plugins for Twitter to delete old tweets—they usually come up in conversation about people whose old ableist, transphobic, racist, fatphobic, homophobic, classist garbage tweets come up to “haunt” them, and then everyone forgets about the plugins. They’ve gotten sophisticated enough they can do rolling deletes. So nothing you can have it clear out everything older than, say, two weeks every… three weeks.
Also to clarify… the reason I’m enthused about clearing out old tweets isn’t so I can say terrible things and delete them—I have the alt for half of that—but because it changes the Twitter use case a bit. It lessens the investment. One of the things I learned last summer when all-consumed with the book and The Stop Button crashed (my one Wordpress lesson continues to be stick with the dotcom, but if I have a runner-up, it’s don’t buy self-updating themes), bits and bytes living on servers around the world are hard to care about when you’re busy and you’re not getting paid to care about it. Stop Button had a silly “backup” system too so I wasn’t too worried, but it’s impossible to think about Stop Button posts as “content.” The book was going to be content, it was going to be the focus. I was actually going to edit the book.
Anyway.
Big micro.