(2022-04-28) Rao Elderblog Sutra13

Venkatesh Rao: Elderblog Sutra: 13. ...rebuilding of the foundations on something other than PHP and MySQL, but I suspect it will eventually happen when the hedge value of a non-platform alt-stack, with capacity for genuine commercial independence, becomes high enough.

That “hedge value” just went up sharply. I want to revisit the question of the future of blogging in light of the impending reconfiguration of the social media environment due to Elon Musk buying Twitter. (Musk Buys Twitter)

Is this a threat or an opportunity. Will this accelerate what seems like the terminal decline of blogging, or increase the odds of resurrection in a new form?

Nothing much has changed in the last year as far as the progress of the text renaissance goes.

serving as a distribution medium for blogs

If Twitter goes into decline post-acquisition (probability: 50%), or transforms in significant ways (probability: the other 50%), there will be many effects, but the only one that really interests me is the effect on the very positive relationship with blogs

Pre-Musk twitter, for all its faults, was, along with WordPress-style blogging, the last holdout of a convivial kind of web. Not convivial enough to satisfy genuine Ivan Illich stans like L. M. Sacassas or Robin Sloan perhaps, but far more convivial than Medium/Substack/Patreon/Facebook type corporatized platform ecologies

This is something you’d only get if you spend lots of time on twitter in conversational mode

It is uniquely a mode for the Great Twitter Bourgeoisie. A very middle-class thing.

Twitter’s greatest strength as a social space is that, as a company, it has been dysfunctionally managed for much of its 15 year existence, and has been a total dog as a stock.

Not even Trump with his loud, overwhelming presence, could really take it over.

That may be changing.

Musk is far too much of an opinionated auteur, and exerts far too powerful a gravity field, for this condition of conviviality-inducing neglect to continue.

But what happens to blogging if this starts to break down?

For almost a decade now, Twitter has been the main discovery medium for long form

And it has been a uniquely good place to distribute writing because it is what I call vibe neutral.

You can bring your mood to Twitter and create a little conversational party around it

People who can vibe with your mood can find you and join you. Unlike say Medium, Tumblr, or Livejournal

In fact, it is one of the reasons Twitter has struggled to hit the scale it seems like it should. Most humans don’t want vibe neutrality

Elon’s own personal vibe is far too powerful and infectious.

Just yesterday for example, he innocently tweeted “Let’s make Twitter maximum fun!”

When pre-ownership Elon calls for a “fun” vibe, it already has a vast vibe-homogenizing effect (for/against polarity at the very least)

When Board Chairman Musk calls for it in six months, it will have the effect of setting the tone for the day in a royal court. Courtiers will jump to obey

How do we know that? We know because of several years of experiencing Donald Trump’s effects on the global vibe on Twitter. While Trump was on Twitter, you were either part of a never-ending pro-Trump rally, or a never-ending anti-Trump rally

Despite my growing (entirely different) set of concerns with Substack, one good thing about it is that it gets you directly to the eldest of Elder Gods, the Cthulhu of social media, email.

In the long term though, the future of blogging is about more than the survivability of my one blog.

perhaps, this time, it would be good for blogging to plot a course into the future that isn’t so vulnerable to these battles over aggregated discussion and distribution media

perhaps it is would be best if blogging were to fade away gracefully, without passing the torch of independent convivial media technology to a suitable successor. Maybe the future is about neither corporatized platform technologies, nor Quixotic indie conviviality. Maybe it is about an entirely different kind of media environment.