The tower at Newtown Castle, at the Burren College of Art in Co. Clare, Ireland. The fields beyond and the limestone ridges of the The Burren know the deep history of communing and enclosure.
Last night I did something that would have been unthinkable to my past selves. I finally deactivated my twitter accounts.
Long story short, I’m a near-early adopter. My first email address was on the National Capital Freenet in 1991. My first blog posts were composed in html on NoteTab in 2001 before I quickly moved to Blogger and then here to WordPress. I joined Facebook in about 2007 and Twitter right around then too. What has driven my participation in these platforms was a search for a dialogic commons where I could connect with people from all over the world who share the same eclectic interests as I do. The World Wide Web has made me a smarter, more connected person, and I have travelled the world because of the relationships that are maintained through these networks.
But perhaps it is the fate of all Commons that if there is a way to enclose them, it will happen. Facebook has long been a toxic mess and a tool of genocide and it will continue to be. The levels of social divisiveness, misinformation and outright hate that is generated in the real world from interactions of Facebook are off the charts. Twitter, owned by a neo-Nazi, took a set of 4500 connections I had made and throttled them, while simultaneously feeding me the most bizarre propaganda and bot-generated garbage. It’s not just that these spaces, which mimicked a true commons for so long, were taken over by private interests who enclosed them. It’s that these places have been weaponized in the service of sinister motives that seek the enrichment of a few at the expense of human lives. It is as if a common pasture was seized by a landowners and used to generate poison that was fed to the commoners who still used the land it for their livelihood, even as they were being killed by their landlord.
In 2022 when the man-child Musk brought a kitchen sink into the Twitter headquarters in his quest to live life as a meme made out of meat, I opened an account on Mastodon at a Canadian instance which has good values. I started using it as a place to post links – the original function of a weblog – and engage in some conversations with the very few people there that I knew. It’s nice. You can go there and follow me and say hi. It doesn’t occupy my time and mind like Twitter did. Every month I publish a compendium of the links I have shared there here on this blog.
I also opened an account on Bluesky because the one thing keeping me on twitter was a very active community of people involved in Canadian soccer and that is a deep interest of mine that is served by these kinds of connections. But last autumn, all of a sudden, that whole community seemed to up and move to Bluesky, so my nominal Bluesky account is mostly devoted to Canadian soccer stuff. If that interests you, follow me there. If you want to follow my professional life on Bluesky, I have an automated bridge to that app that republishes my Mastodon feed there. Bluesky is fine for now, but it will not be for long because it too is owned by venture capitalists and its enshittification is inevitable.
So this era of me relying on private investors to provide me with a platform to connect to people is over. Mastodon is part of the Fediverse, and is essentially a smaller version of the web. Each “instance” is liked a little social site that is owned by a single person or a co-op and is maintained usually by volunteers. Instances are connected together – federated – into a global network. At our instance we make decisions together about questions like “Should Threads be federated to our world?” We donate money to our admin to help him keep things going. You can participate as much or as little as you want in HOW it works, but you are always in charge. If you want to move from one instance to a different one, you can easily do that. It takes a little know-how to get set up, but once you are on, it’s really no different from the other microblogging platforms you knew and loved EXCEPT, it is free of algorithms and advertisements and will always be. You will only be fed what you choose to see, and no one can game an algorithm to show up in your feed without your consent.
So there’s that and I’m still here on WordPress, where I have been blogging for twenty-two years, since September 6, 2002. WordPress is open source, and I own my own domain. You probably know that my approach to blogging is fairly old school. This isn’t a “newsletter” (although you can subscribe by email) but is instead a blog that contains my writing, thoughts, ideas, things I want to share and all kinds of bits and bobs. You can subscribe through my RSS feed, and this blog is designed to be read that way rather than as a newsletter. It’s not a Substack or a Medium site. I have zero interest in monetizing it or tracking you. I don’t look at the stats. I love having conversations in the comments section, but it’s not a free for all, so comments are approved by me (or not, sometimes). It is, in a nutshell, a sketch book for open source learning. What you read here is the stuff I’m interested in.
If you read me and you publish stuff on the open web I probably follow you through NetNewsWire, which is an open source feed reader. If you’re blog doesn’t publish an RSS feed (becasue you use Wix or Weebly or something) or if you only write posts own LinkedIn without publishing them elsewhere too, I have no way to follow you. I don’t subscribe to many newsletters, because my inbox is a nightmare at the best of times.
It is time to leave the enclosures. It is not worth trying to make our social networks work under the terms of unfettered fascists and venture capitalists who prey on our attention for profit. The Internet was designed to be uncontrollable by a single person. It is a feature of how it works. Let’s stop investing in the walled enclosures that stifle our own creativity and expression and connection. Let’s stop being spoon fed the bot spawn and propaganda and empty calories produced by outrage farming. Come away.
Where else to find me:
- Mastodon: @chriscorrigan@mstdn.ca and Bluesky mirror @chriscorrigan.mstdn.ca.ap.brid.gy
- My Bluesky Canadian soccer account: chriscorrigan.bsky.social.
That’s it, really.
In keeping with Cory’s metaphor about fire exits, I’ve been thinking about how we might create “fire drills”, where we post on FB instructions for everyone on how to step-by-step join a parallel Fediverse instance (of BIEE for example), “welcome” people there, and see if we can get enough people to permanently move there that the FB site can just be boarded up. This is consistent with my belief that people will do something if it’s relatively easy and fun.