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: @mstdn.ca@chriscorrigan and mirrored on Bluesky @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.
That’s helpful. Instances are good. Better than everyone joining Bluesky and then trying to find each other in the firehouse feed. Editing to add that Facebook groups like BIEE aren’t that useful to me. I find that BIEE sucks me in and makes me dumber a lot of the time. I’ve actually started blocking people there who are persistent complainers or who share important information inaccurately or with ignorance. My favourite example recently was a wind waring that Environment Canada had posted for damaging northerly outflow winds and the person reposting it with comments of alarm later said “Which direction is a northerly wind anyway?” Sometimes people who do this later post comments that “well it really wasn’t that bad! Forecasters got it wrong again!” when they actually live on a sheltered part of the island.
So while I like the idea of a local instance, I would hate the idea that the same old time wasting stuff gets ported over there. It wouldn’t serve me well, or our community. Not impossible to host of course (remember BIO?) but any migration to another social media platform also has the chance to make networking healthy.
So if I need essential information these days, I get it from Environment Canada, the Alertable app, the BIM, Library and Hearth newsletters, posters in the village, the newspaper, and running into friends. I’m getting close to closing that account too.
Hi Chris,
Hope you and family are well?
Loved this post.
I don’t do social media much in part for the reasons you highlighted.
I thought I would just add a historical tale tying into your enclosures analogy.
My great great great grand uncle was sentenced to life for writing a threatening letter back in 1830, driven to it by wealthy land lords deciding to enclose common lands in England for themselves whilst bringing in threshing machines to replace large numbers of their work force.
So I agree with your enclosures analogy and extend it further with the threat from mechanization with threshing machines mirroring the threats AI poses to a modern workforces.
My ancestor was part of a viral movement – possibly the first?
It was known as the Swing Riots. So many families survival was being threatened by this land enclosure and mechanization that a letter writing campaign took place where land owners were threatened. The letters were always usually signed off as from Captain Swing.
Mobs also went to the land owners properties to destroy the threshing machines. It took a little while but there was some reforms introduced to ease some of the issues. Seeing the overthrow of the the royals and elite going on France at the time focussed the English ruling classes minds somewhat to finding a solution.
The government of the day, with the Duke of Waterloo as Prime Minister, fell because of creating the conditions for revolt in the first place and their harsh handling of the protesters.
Unfortunately, there was a price to pay. A handful of executions, 2,000 people jailed, about 500 of which were transported to Australia including my ancestor.
Almost everyone was pardoned in the end as many understood the workers were effectively forced in to taking some sort of action as they were being condemned to probable starvation.
I’ve simplified this somewhat but you can read more on the deeper roots and causes to this unrest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_Riots
There are plenty of parallels in the Swing Riots to today that the current ruling class should heed, including farmers reducing wages to the point that workers had to rely on poor relief from the parish, effectively subsidizing the farmer, just as large sections of Walmarts workforce have to rely on social security hand outs because they are not paid a living wage with some arguing that Walmart is the biggest recipient of government subsidy. There was also a shift to a sort of gig economy happening too that only benefitted the employer.
I don’t condone my ancestors actions as the letter he wrote was basically a threat to murder the land owners family. But you can see why people might contemplate such actions when the elite have such little care as to whether the ordinary folk live or die.
It will be interesting to see how long Trump and his pet oligarchs can keep convincing those who voted for him that they have their best interests at heart.
Hi Chris! Thanks for this amazing story and connection. Yeah, the history of enclosures is an instructive one for human culture across space and through time.
Hope you are well. Your son checked my bags at the airport last week!
Thanks Chris. I, and many others, have been having the same reflections.
My only link to the world is thru private Slacks channel and Asynco (https://asynco.org), an online community based on trust.
And my blog of course.
This movement to go back to intimate , trustworthy and semi-private communication is the way to go.
We will prevail
Thank you, Chris. I love your use of the concept of “enclosures” – it is powerful and precise.