Good morning! Hello! Happy Friday! How are you? Happy Taylor Swift Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) to all that celebrate. I have it all queued up in Spotify for listening today after my (useless) Release Radar, but I am holding out a bit because I did get my shipping notification on the vinyl a few days ago, and Taylor’s e-commerce operation is legit so I expect it’ll be here presently. And then I can make my third TikTok ever, continuing my series of explorations of the tissue paper stars in the packaging of TAYLOR SWIFT records. Also for some reason my autocorrect is auto-capitalizing TAYLOR SWIFT and I do not know why. That is weird. Anyway I figure the Chinese should really know about Taylor’s legit attention to e-commerce detail.
If you want to know more about the saga of the “Taylor’s Version” versions of Taylor’s records, you can read this informative article I wrote for the Why is this Interesting newsletter on the occasion of the release of Red (Taylor’s Version).
And if you are not a TAYLOR SWIFT supporter, I would like to send you glad tidings upon the release day of the new PJ HARVEY album (I have capitalized this manually in solidarity). I wonder what that’s going to be like. Crazy. Crazy. Also new Anohni (which I listened to yesterday and it is marvelous) and Jim O’Rourke. What a day.
All right, so Threads day 2. Where are we. Well. We have a bunch of people pretending Threads is going to fail because they — quite reasonably — want it to fail. They are pointing out its flaws and shortcomings, and they’re not technically wrong. They are practically wrong, however. Right now it seems that in the great Twitter Replacement Wars, Threads is the clear and away front runner and I feel like they could have this wrapped up by next week. This is not good news, I am as annoyed as Ed Zitron or Damon Krukowski etc about this. But it is the reality and it is someone depressing to me that people don’t want to face up to that bad news but whatever.
There’s a lot of weird cognitive fuzziness in these Twitter replacement wars that make them endlessly interesting. We all can’t put our finger on it. We’re trying to apply old models of the internet to this new period and none of them quite work. Threads feels different than Notes or Bluesky or Mastodon and its hard to put your finger on why.
Part of it is, I think, that non-tech normies are signing up to Threads in a way they haven’t with the other platforms. Again, this is a circumstance of Facebook’s unfair competition, but it is a huge advantage. The thing about 90% of the social web these days is that it sucks because the friends you love and want to hear from are often — mostly — not there. What you get instead are the friends who love to post a lot. And this is not the same thing.
There is a song on the new Swans album with the best title. It is titled “Why Can't I Have What I Want Anytime That I Want?” This is relevant to our conversation on two levels: one, most people want this. Two, most people think in these very simple, straight ahead terms. Yet most Tweets, Skeets, Toots, whatever are not like this. They are people trying, trying so, so hard to be clever, profound. Just like with song titles. Most people title their songs some poetic thing like “The Lotus Eaters” or “My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross,” but not something simple and direct and utterly relatable like “Why Can't I Have What I Want Anytime That I Want?” This is how most people want to Tweet, but they can’t, because they have to look smart, and it is so fucking boring trying to come up with zingers. So tedious. Of course some people are good at being really zippy and clever on Twitter and other platforms so they are deeply invested in this paradigm and they go for it. And we all enjoy them sometimes.
But we also enjoy a nice wholesome Tweet from a close friend. And we don’t get that anywhere on the social web these days. And for one brief shining moment, right now, it feels like you might get this, can get this, from Threads. This is kryptonite and, whether it’s Facebook or not, it’s probably the most powerful weapon in this post-Twitter wars. Even Ed Zitron and Damon Krukowski have an old college friend they miss viscerally and will do whatever they can to hear from them even if it’s “I got a new cat.”
Threads does, however, suffer from the same problems all of these replacements do. Sometime, years ago, I switched some setting in Twitter to turn off seeing replies from friends, or something like that, I don’t remember. But the net result is that on Twitter you don’t have to see posts that are from strangers but that have one reply from a friend on them. I hate this so much. I hate the way Bluesky ends up force-feeding you long, impenetrable arguments you have no care about, because someone you follow is replying a lot. It is just sad.
And it’s just sad watching some account you follow try over and over to get some celebrity’s attention. And it’s just sad watching someone try to make zingers go viral, over and over. And because all of these platforms are too scared to stop showing you shit when you’re done, they show you this stuff. Yetch.
I mean, yes. I am old. I am not the target audience of these things anymore. There is a risk of me applying my feelings and experience to the larger market. But I follow enough teenagers from the hood, or children of friends, to know that earnestness is still universal and there’s a reason Instagram is still a behemoth.
Here’s what I want from social media: I want human connections and insights from people I care about, even if they are not Very Online. Friends that mostly don’t use the internet much, that have a healthy relationship to their phones. I want accurate information from obscure sources like charities and artists I care about. This, unfortunately, is all still on Twitter, but Threads has a chance because of its Instagram connection and I’m already seeing way more charities and artists than I ever saw on Mastodon or Bluesky.
And I want accurate, timely news of breaking events. Which is still on Twitter and is probably going to stay on Twitter for a while. Because if you go to Twitter now, 90% of the remaining posters on my timeline are orgs and people too deeply entrenched in Twitter to leave. And they will not leave until someone else has clearly won. Which is sad: the people and orgs that made Twitter are giving up their king-making power, and they will simply be followers. The media is going to come to everyone else instead of everyone else going to the platform for the media.
Bring on earnest internet. Earnest internet rules. Which is why I write this GMHHAY thing, and why you guys write me back, and it’s all so lovely and non-zingery and slow and human.
Look how non-zingery this shit is:
Oh also, before I move on, yesterday Bluesky raised $8MM, and it turns out it’s not a non-profit at all, I should have know. Tech bros don’t actually start real non-profits. It’s a Benefits Corp, which is cool, but changeable. And man, they are so lucky that round closed when it did, because another day or two and I’m pretty sure a few people would have backed out.
Oh and also Elon got all but hurt about Threads and threatened to sue. He whined about Meta hiring ex employees, whom he fired, who are bound any severance agreements saying they can’t share trade secrets, except he hasn’t paid any of them their severance so hard to see how anyone is bound to do anything post-employment. Hoist by his own petard and all that.
Once again, evidence that Elon is not that smart, because if he were, he would have gone with an unfair competition angle, since that is more or less an open and shut case, and mana from heaven to the FTC right now. So many angles. BUT I did think of a pretty easy angle to get the conservative “where is the market” judges to buy in to an anti-competition argument. It seems clear to me that Meta is not going to monetize Threads until they’ve killed off the competition. Which means that this impacts the dollars-and-cents internet advertising market. Which is a real market the courts care about. It’s not exactly perfect for Mastodon or Bluesky, but I do think Posts or Spoutible would have an angle here. And someone should pursue it. Because as much as I love the earnestness of Threads, and I am going to use it, it’s also blatantly illegal and, you know, someone should do something about that. Split it off from FB. That would be so rad.
I had another tech revelation last night and I may as well get it off my chest while I’m ranting about the internet, sorry, I know this isn’t why you signed up for this thing. Anyway, I realized ChatGPT is AJAX. If you aren’t old or weren’t paying attention back then, AJAX is the technology, or bundle of techs don’t @ me nerds, that powers Google Maps, and allows you to pinch and zoom and pan and swipe all within a browser window without using Flash (RIP). It cannot be overstated how revelatory AJAX was, how much of a giant leap forward on the internet. AJAX absolutely changed the game, proved Google was more than search, killed off whole competitors who were widely used and considered cutting-edge just a week before, like Mapquest. God. Just saying the name Mapquest now is like saying “rotary phone.” But before AJAX, Mapquest was a unicorn. Mapquest went public. AJAX killed it. AJAX killed Flash. AJAX moved markets. AJAX changed the world. Everyone had to have an AJAX strategy. Everyone had to rewrite their apps for AJAX.
And now AJAX is just.. AJAX. It’s everywhere and we don’t even think about it. The world went on. And after a while we didn’t have to keep hearing about AJAX anymore and the earth kept warming and wars kept happening and kids kept being born and people kept falling in love and nothing really changed and the end. That is LLMs. Mark my words.
Not to say real AI won’t come along and kill us all, but when it does, LLMs will be one small component of it just like AJAX is still one small component of the internet.
Last night was my night off from Jane so I spent it watching instructional videos on installing windows and part of John Wick 4, but I meant to tell you the other day when we were doing DDJP Jane invented a new dance, called the “Spinny Winnie.” This dance involves holding up both your index fingers, and spinning them, kinda like my friend Danielle likes to do, but then you also spin your whole body while doing this. Which is super fun.
Then the dance ends by both people collapsing on the floor, facing each other, putting their heads in their hands, and “talking about your day.”
Good dance. A+. Would recommend.
Club mix for you today, since, you know, Friday, and Spotify’s Release Radar sees fit to give me a bunch of remixes instead of, you know, new tracks I actually want to listen to. But at least some of them are.. okay. But if you feel like dancing today or, you know, teaching a spinning course, here you go.
Have a lovely weekend!
My Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) record is in transit but no delivery date has been provided BUT my Target version will arrive on Monday! i will of course stream the album all weekend 😁
since Threads launched i keep getting followed by fake Elon Musk accounts (on Instagram). probably not related to anything but feels like unusual timing..
*Accurate, timely news of breaking events... " this is what I want...and Twitter is rapidly losing (or not surfacing)this type of content. It's sad. On the ground news, which starts by real people just "reporting" what they're seeing by Tweeting it, followed by news orgs seeing these signals and digging in and amplifying the news was the core value of Twitter in my book and Elon's essentially killed that.