Starting Again

I've been thinking a lot about the loss of Twitter. That is, the Twitter that was, for a time, a (minimally) humane and vibrant shared space for thinking together. It was never the utopian digital public square some imagined it could be, and it's easy to look back on it with more fondness than it earned. But many of us who think for a living, or for whom thinking seems essential to living, came to depend on it, and we are still mourning its absence.

Genuinely new ideas used to be hard to encounter. Most of the springs of cultural and intellectual creativity were guarded by high fences, unseen only by those already inside them. In truth only a minority had access to well-stocked libraries, budgets for new books, magazines and newspaper subscriptions, or an intimate social circle of adventurous thinkers, readers and creators who would reliably share their latest treasures with you.

It was even harder to get novel ideas out into the world, unless you had the luxury of holding prestige's megaphone to shout them down from the mountain. Many older digital tools paved the way, but Old Twitter finally tapped the vast underground aquifer of thoughts, questions, challenges, arguments, visions and epiphanies that flow from all human minds every single day.

Every day I miss drinking from that source. It sometimes tasted foul, or bitter, but unlike today's grim successor, it was rarely so toxic that you could only spit it out and turn away. And you didn't have to try to justify feeding the empire of a man pouring in the poison.

Of course even with Old Twitter, its dopamine-spark addictiveness and its temptations to anger and posturing were often genuine threats to one's health and moral character. And yet the risk was often worth it: to learn of research discoveries in your field that were made just yesterday; to join the debate that broke out an hour ago at an invitation-only event halfway around the world; to see every possible implication of a breaking news story worked out together by millions of strangers; to feel as if a sizable part of the human family was perpetually awake together, processing our shared reality and making new sense of it by the minute.
 
I'm on Bluesky now, which has plenty of charms of its own, but I'm rarely surprised with something new. It doesn't yet support the kind of lengthy, winding and chaotic conversations that can start with two voices and become an epic poem written by thousands. And there's no consolation to be found in the rest of the media environment, when reliable digital outlets for independent journalism and cultural thought are seemingly shuttered every week.

I think back to where we were before Twitter, to where I found brand new ideas in the early days of the Web. I found them in the old-school blogs and online journals of the early 00s, where novel thoughts and possibilities for the human personality, and the human family, were shared in a form that was deeply personal, reflective, sometimes self-indulgent, but not rarely surprising, and often invigorating. Some of the best of this century's thinking about technology and society flourished in that form, as encapsulated in treasures like L.M. Sacasas' beloved blog The Frailest Thing. These treasures were uncluttered with ads and links and desperate attempts to monetize the food for the soul that we had not yet learned to call 'content.' Some of those treasures still exist, and I've been seeking them out.

And so I made a place here for my own new thoughts to enter the world--the ones still being germinated, the ones not yet ready for keynote talks and books and journal articles, but perhaps ready for the test of another mind, or several. This seems like the right place for now. At least until we figure out what comes next.