Loneliness and skepticism about Big Tech is why I quit Bluesky Social Media
// Why anyone quits Bluesky is the same reason they quit Twitter: the acute alienation and loneliness experienced by being repeatedly exposed to its boring, empty and repetitive digital blandscape. That, and the sneaking suspicions they have about Big Tech.
Within seconds of joining Blusky social media platform, I knew I'd made some kind of large philosophical mistake, and had disgraced my ancient honorable Taoist masters at the Wu Tang temple. Basically I saw the same old shit I'd witnessed on the Hellsite 'X'. Endless braindead cat pics that that for the life of me I just can't quite seem to give a flying shit about. Giant, horribly hairy men with fat cucumber dicks (good god man, put away - it's big, but not clever.) Crazed purple furries in advanced sexual poses, oddly reminding one of ancient Indian friezes. Indie devs in poverty, logging the ongoing development-crunch of their six year pixellated Wholesome Game darling they'll still get death threats for selling on Itch.io for a measly dollar - hoping some obnoxious screaming influencer weasel will play it for ten minutes before discarding it and the gamedev utterly (ie. all sociopolitical notions of the ongoing financial instability and mental hearth of the artist.)
Heck, the copypasta Bluesky interface even looks like Twitter. I couldn't search posts, but there were endless shitty feeds to subscribe to - something I found tedious and ineffective. To be honest / stupid, I just wanted Twitter back - ie. my old romantic idea of Twitter - all the synthetic passion, weapons-grade irreverence and shitposting without all the foul, everyday right wing realities that it was never really without. That is, all the buzz and excitement I thought I felt on Hellsite X (but which were really nothing more than just another collective marketing hallucination on the part of its nameless consumer meat-mass.) "Everyone's here - therefore this site must be exciting, dynamic, hot n' happening, right? Anyone?"
No. I felt like some old sad bald git - which I am in fact - who'd accidentally won a ticket to some large and loud public event, but which wasn't aware of precisely 'what the deal was'. What exactly were the unwritten (but iron) social rules regarding the 'correct' way to interpret what was happening there, and what it all was supposed to mean. Instead, I felt nothing but the old post-Marxist Alienation rising in me. A sense that this place wasn't really for humans, but rather for those poor unfortunates Capitalism was repeatedly forcing to become like brainless, soulless droids. Social media, not as some value neutral, friendly platform for free self expression, but rather merely a squalid little hole one falls into, forcing its users to mutate and devolve into totally square digital peg. To paraphrase writer Douglas Adams, it's just ♬ "Your Plastic Pal It's Shit To Be With!"
I didn't know what the virtual hell I was expecting going on there, which only proves to what extent I was acting the part of the dangerously naive schmuck. Did I honestly imagine I was going to make friends and influence people? Join in the celebration - meaningfully take part in the bullshit 'digital town square'? I got two random likes for posts about rando dumb shit, which at the time made me feel uh, something, I guess? "I mean it's better than nothing, right? Right?" (ala Anakin & Padmé meme.) But the whole goddamn platform is a silent, howling virtual electronic nothing, Bob! Sigh. Ffs, wake up, man.
In short: to consider Bluesky and the rest of them an inherent, super aggressive cosmic scale waste of time and natural resources. Time which was in fact stolen from us first by evil, stupid, ultra rich white Capitalist bastards - even before we 'decided' to waste our time there. Spitting that loose jive out the side of our neck about jack shit that just don't matter. Desperately trying to convince ourselves and others that THIS IS THE PLACE TO BE. Perhaps - but where the fuck is it, exactly? Social Media is only ever really in fact a nonspace of Technological Whiteness. A bleached void where nothing can grow - it can only endlessly circulate, hypercorporate deoderized turds swirling in a giant, fully automated shit processing plant run by depressed robots. Burning fossil fuels long into the lonely, overheated night.
I quickly managed to figure out that it wasn't remotely enough to be merely content with endlessly scrolling down, down into the smooth and featureless electronic darkness forever. Continually strung along like a tired donkey on an endless virtual beach by the vague threat of a tasty digital carrot. Some at-least moderately interesting, fragmentary and inherently decontextualizing microblog post about.. whatever. A screenshot of some cool videogame being developed. Someone with something (anything) genuinely intelligent and insightful to say. If I never see another picture of your fucking bird eviscerating cat it will be too soon.
All of I.T leaves me cold, deeply unsatisfied (in the Buddhist sense of "Dukkha".) There's no live out here in the matrix - only souless data. Truth, love and beauty lie Elsewhere. Far outside the Net. No shit, I kid you not, I'm thinking of getting off the internets for good and retreating even further into my own empty skull / up my own arts - as far away as possible from these Internet Dead Lands. The 'one secret you're not being told' about the Internet? It's not where it's at. I.T. is not it. If the Internet is The Answer, then sorry to hit you up with the plain, unadorned truth but you're asking the wrong motherfucking question. Try harder; question your first unchallenged premises about Technology.
I.T. seems more about the stupid-evil expression of power and control, and infinitely less about the direct free expression of those positive and humane qualities we have as a species of idiot space monkeys that we already had, long before shiny technology arrives on the scene to 'amuse us to undeath' and befuddle with tall, self-mythic tales of its apparently endless 'benefits' and 'evolutionary advances'. I just don't fucking buy it anymore. I'm fast becoming deeply skeptical about where all this oh-so-apparently clever Tech has (literally) led us. Up shit creek with nothing but a convenient rented digital paddle. Consider the whole of modern Technology as nothing but a giant advert for itself; that amazingly tacky giant MSG eyeball in Las Vegas. A violent tautology, which only ever answers its own calls. That exists for no real or decent reason other to tell itself how impressive its gaudy spectacle is. A cursed mechanism - a megastructural Gordian labyrinth of wires and circuits we're all been desperately trying to slice through and cut away from for ages now (despite what we and it tell ourselves.)
The whole situation is thoroughly depressing, but it's not inevitable - and the shrill cries and unceasing whining of 'techfuencers' *vomits lightly in mouth* that the world has no choice but to lovingly embrace our A.I. overlords is nothing but a vibrating five speed internet-wired butt plug up their ass, paid for in advance by their technocratic owners, sponsors and right wing political benefactors. They can all go continuing to willingly fuck themselves into inhuman irrelevance. The rampant self-consumerism of social media on a distant alien planet whose entire future survival is being existentially challenged is a form of normalized collective insanity. To 'look up' from one's sweatshop manufactured phone is to be awake; aware. Sensitive to the potential for positive collective change. As Lord Sauron would of said, "There is no life in the electronic void. Only furry cat dick pics."
Hmm. Maybe I'd be willing at at least consider fully 'selling out to Social' if white billionaire techbro utopian snake oil salesmen like Jack Dorsey gave me a shoulder massage on Twitch and promises a guaranteed basic income covering rent, rising costs of living and health insurance for every artist who uses Bluesky. Otherwise, sorry but you can forget it. Much like this naff nowhere blog: zero engagement, zero interest (see below) - and the only money to be made is for the owners. (Quelle fucking surprise.) The is a unique kind of poverty and sadness being expressed on social media. For the life of me, I gotta get offline more and Touch Grass..
Robert What
// how to play big science
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