Found on Twitter: this photograph of the late, great architect Zaha Hadid. She is notable for squeezing some beauty out of brutalism. The photo is notable for the Iskra ETA 85 telephone resting on the coffee table — part of most Yugoslav households last century, including my childhood home.

“I rob banks because that’s where the money is.”

This is what the bank robber Willie Sutton may or may not have once said in an interview. Regardless of source, it applies equally well to social networks and people.

I consider myself a fairly rational creature, and yet…

• Mastodon out of the box: An eye sore! Unusable! What is this, Discord? Because I hate Discord!
• Mastodon with Light theme and advanced web interface on: Where have you been all my life?

Found on Mastodon via @m_clem@econtwitter.net, a passage from The Enchiridion by Epictetus, translated by Elizabeth Carter in 1758.

What a lovely sentiment to have, and not only with regards to social media.

There is a good overview of the two ways Micro.blog can interact with Mastodon, from @pmcconnell. I much prefer the full integration (Option 2 in the text), but it looks like only Option 1 completely matches the formatting. Is that a bug or a technical limitation?

David Simon on Twitter:

The worst and most cancerous campaigns on the internet are not to be outreasoned or debated. Doing so grants credibility where none should exist. And Twitter has never truly come to terms with the asymmetrical dynamic.

Dangerous thing, asymmetry is.

When all is said and done, Twitter will have been a net negative for humanity regardless of leadership.

Because it combined flat social interactions with costless message amplification, it led to too many pile-ups of tens of thousands-to-one, too much reality distortion that pushed people into doomscrolling, too deep of an insight into often anonymous but always scarred psyches which we would subconsciously mirror.

Most people remember the precise moment when they realized how dangerous these dynamics are. My own came on the night of January 3, 2021, after the public flagellation of one John Roderick, known henceforth as “Bean Dad". Note that this is a link to an article in Forbes, of all places, which I found the most in line with my own thinking. This is how social media radicalizes you. I wasn’t exactly Robert Oppenheimer reciting from the Bhagavad Gita, but a sense of Twitter being a psycho-nuclear weapon formed, and why would I want to spend too much time around it?

And now a billionaire wants to mold Twitter into the human hive-mind, or the everything app, or a bank. To overuse an analogy: this is very much like Edward Teller — a real-life mad scientist and an overall horrible human being — proposing to use his brainchild, the hydrogen bomb, to terraform Alaska, extract oil from tar sands, and control hurricanes. There’s so much power there, don’t you just want to use it?

No. Just stop.

So it is with giddiness and delight that I follow the flourishing of micro.blog, and wt.social, and even the overcomplicated for its own good Mastodon, and most of all what Dave Winer is doing with FeedLand, because there is an alternative timeline out there where Google never shut down the Reader and RSS is the dominant language of social networks and whatever foibles of that other world may be — the 2012–2020 Romney administration, the complete and utter dominance of webOS, mere existence of the DC cinematic universe — at least we’d have known it got on-line social interactions right.

Nick Maggiulli:

But the desperate quest for attention hasn’t been limited to YouTubers. I recently tweeted about how Twitter has become an endless stream of threads and I’ve seen others note this as well (see here, here, and here). The sad thing is that these cheap engagement tactics actually work to grow your Twitter audience.

Just start a blog, says Nick. I concur. His is a good one.

Gurwinder:

My brand image is, admittedly, diffuse and weak. My Twitter bio is “saboteur of narratives,” and few people can say for sure what I’m about, other than vague things like “thinker” or “dumb fuck.” And that’s how I like it. My vagueness makes me hard to pigeonhole, predict, and capture.

For this same reason, I’m suspicious of those with strong, sharply delineated brands. Human beings are capricious and largely formless storms of idiosyncrasies, so a human only develops a clear and distinct identity through the artifice of performance.

Try watching the transformation of Nikocado Avocado without extrapolating it to everyone on social media.

Twitter doesn’t lend itself to nuanced arguments. But here are a few arguments that don’t require nuance, because one side is so obviously right.

• The best beer in the world comes from Belgium.
• But Italy is the best country in Europe, by any definition.
• The average European is more racist than the average American, and by a lot.
• The main, often only, reason some European countries seem better-run than the US is that they are small and no one cares about what’s going on there.
• There is no good use case for cryptocurrencies, and bitcoin is Amway for men.
• Silicon Valley won’t “solve” healthcare, it will at best make it bad in a different way.
• The original Iron Man is still the best Marvel movie.
• Gravity Falls is the best general-audience cartoon series ever made.
• Christopher Nolan made some good Batman movies but ruined the DC franchise.
• Hans Zimmer is to movie soundtracks what Johny Ive is to industrial design: too much of a thing that is not even that good.
• You don’t need to have made a movie to know whether one is well-made.
• You don’t need to have designed a clinical trial to know whether one is well-designed.
• Having said that, nobody likes a self-appointed critic, unless they are also self-effacing.
• Randomized controlled trials are the best — and often only — way to find out whether a medical intervention works.
• It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. (Upton Sinclair)