There and back again

So this is where we're @

You could probably stay on for a little while, but you know you’ll have to go at some point and that it’ll be sooner rather than later.

It’s mostly the same old catalogue of tedious domestic problems. There are termites in the supporting beams. There’s rising damp in the basement. The landlord is a billionaire who’s started waterboarding you with disinformation, hoping either to radicalise you or exhaust you so that you numb out and stop trying to figure out if you’re looking at something worthwhile or just the latest tweak of the mind-control machine.

You know. The usual.

In fact, it’s all become so familiar that a part of you wonders if this might simply be How Things Are now, and that the social engineering schemes of dangerous men are, like microplastics, just something we end up swallowing whether we want to or not.

Notably, however, the neighbours have also started saying that it’s time to go, to get out ahead of this urban blight of the soul: most recently it was friends in academia telling me about how their professional networks are trying to find ways to keep in touch and keep airing their work far away from the lobotomy machines of the tech oligarchs, and how difficult the move is proving to be.

To be fair, I have found it very easy to drift away from Twitter/X. There are still some brilliant, funny, clever people using Elon Musk’s chaotic experiment in reactionary conformism, but for a columnist trying to share columns stuck behind a paywall, or, worse, an author trying to tell readers about their books, it is almost unrivalled in its pointlessness.

That’s not its fault, of course. It has always said what it is, right there on the box: a distraction for people who want to read no more than 140 characters, and who want to read those 140 characters for free. Once I realised I was trying deliver a talk on natural history to people in the mosh pit at a Rammstein concernt, everything made a lot more sense.

Facebook will be harder to leave, not least because I’ve been there for almost 20 years and it remains my only point of contact with some acquaintances, as well as some very funny people I haven’t met in person but who have taught me that the curation of dissemination of memes is an art in itself. There is also less conflict on Facebook, largely by design: where Twitter has moved towards the “town square” model of a single space where everybody yells at everybody else, Facebook has reportedly chosen a more siloed approach, separating users into smaller, more isolated groups. (What could go wrong?)

Then there’s the question of where one goes, especially after being trained for so many years to boop the dopamine button over at the far end of the cage.

When I went across to Bluesky a couple of months ago, firm in my resolve to leave the snark, zingers and doom-scrolling behind on X, I found that tranquility and equanimity quickly started looking an awful lot like dullness. I still have a deep aversion to replicating the X experience on Bluesky, but I am sometimes reminded of Withnail’s panic over having gone on holiday by mistake. And this is to say nothing of Bluesky’s fundamental vulnerability: anything owned by venture capitalists must, at some point, either fall apart quickly and quietly, or go the way of X and Facebook and fall apart slowly and extremely loudly.

All of which brings me back to this platform (flawed as it is), and the link it creates between you and me, courtesy of one of the least glamorous – yet increasingly powerful – technologies: email.

Who knew that the old-fashioned, much maligned email would stand up so strongly and proudly, offering a connection between writer and reader that is (at least for now) safe from the whims and tantrums of oligarchs and propagandists? Who could have guessed that the humble @, a symbol dating back centuries, would be helping us weather the storms of the present moment in such a peculiar and potent way?

I know that we’re not supposed to say “I hope this email finds you well” any more. But when it comes to the people who subscribe to this page I can at the very least think “I hope this this email finds you” and be fairly confident that it will, regardless of what else is happening in the world, and who owns which platform, and to what devious ends.

And so let me end with a sentence I never, ever thought I’d write: thank heavens for email.

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