Many of us have left the big social media platforms; far more of us *wish* we could leave them; and even those of us who've escaped from Facebook/Insta and Twitter still spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the people we care about off of them, too.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/cap…
1/
This entry was edited (3 days ago)
Angela Scholder
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •So, that people should mail me their up to date contact details so we can keep in touch.
Well, just only a very few did so.
The rest will just be a shame, but my ring of people will je be smaller.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
RowinSpeez
in reply to Angela Scholder • • •Cory Doctorow
in reply to RowinSpeez • • •@RowinSpeez @AngelaScholder
Or that they're good people who are
a) Overwhelmed by life; or
b) Not seeing the message because of algorithmic ranking that downranks the messages from people you follow in favor of messages that people pay to show you (ads and boosted content).
Trantion
in reply to Angela Scholder • • •Claus Cramon Houmann
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It's lazy and easy to think that our friends who are stuck on legacy platforms run by Zuckerberg and Musk lack the self-discipline to wean themselves off of these services, or lack the perspective to understand why it's so urgent to get away from them, or that their "hacked dopamine loops" have addicted them to the zuckermusk algorithms.
2/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But if you actually listen to the people who've stayed behind, you'll learn that the main reason our friends stay on legacy platforms is that they care about the other people there more than they hate Zuck or Musk.
3/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
They rely on them because they're in a rare-disease support group with you; or they all coordinate their kids' little league carpools there; or that's where they stay in touch with family and friends they left behind when they emigrated; or they're customers or the audience for creative labor.
All those people might want to leave, too, but it's really hard to agree on where to go, when to go, and how to re-establish your groups when you get somewhere else.
4/
Rusty Shackleford
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Economists call this the "collective action problem." This problem creates "switching costs" - a lot of stuff you'll have to live without if you switch from legacy platforms to new ones. The collective action problem is hard to solve and the switching costs are very high:
pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how…
5/
How to Leave Dying Social Media Platforms – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
That's why people stay behind - not because they lack perspective, or self-discipline, or because their dopamine loops have been hacked by evil techbro sorcerers who used Big Data to fashion history's first functional mind-control ray. They are locked in by real, material things.
Big Tech critics who attribute users' moral failings or platforms' technical prowess to the legacy platforms' "stickiness" are their own worst enemies.
6/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
These critics have correctly identified that legacy platforms are a serious problem, but have totally failed to understand the nature of that problem or how to fix it. Thankfully, more and more critics are coming to understand that lock-in is the root of the problem, and that anti-lock-in measures like interoperability can address it.
7/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But there's another major gap in the mainstream critique of social media. Critics of zuckermuskian media claim those services are so terrible because they're for-profit entities, capitalist enterprises hitched to the logic of extraction and profit above all else. The problem with this claim is that it doesn't explain the changes to these services.
8/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
After all, the reason so many of us got on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram is because they used to be a lot of fun. They were useful. They were even great at times.
When tech critics fail to ask why good services turn bad, that failure is just as severe as the failure to ask why people stay when the services rot.
9/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Now, the guy who ran Facebook when it was a great way to form communities and make friends and find old friends is the same guy who who has turned Facebook into a hellscape. There's very good reason to believe that Mark Zuckerberg was always a creep, and he took investment capital *very* early on, long before he started fucking up the service. So what gives? Did Zuck get a brain parasite that turned him evil? Did his investors get more demanding in their clamor for dividends?
10/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
If that's what you think, you need to show your working. Again, by all accounts, Zuck was a monster from day one. Zuck's investors - both the VCs who backed him early and the gigantic institutional funds whose portfolios are stuffed with Meta stock today - are not patient sorts with a reputation for going easy on entrepreneurs who leave money on the table. They've demanded every nickel since the start.
11/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
What changed? What caused Zuck to enshittify his service? And, even more importantly for those of us who care about the people locked into Facebook's walled gardens: what stopped him from enshittifying his services in the "good old days?"
At its root, enshittification is a theory about *constraints*. Companies pursue profit at all costs, but while you may be tempted to focus on the "at all costs" part of that formulation, you musn't neglect the "profits" part.
12/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Companies don't pursue *unprofitable* actions at all costs - they only pursue the plans that they judge are likely to yield profits.
When companies face real competitors, then some enshittificatory gambits are unprofitable, because they'll drive your users to competing platforms.
13/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
That's why Zuckerberg bought Instagram: he had been turning the screws on Facebook users, and when Instagram came along, millions of those users decided that they hated Zuck more than they loved their friends and so they swallowed the switching costs and defected to Instagram. In an ill-advised middle-of-the-night memo to his CFO, Zuck defended spending $1b on Instagram on the grounds that it would recapture those Facebook escapees:
theverge.com/2020/7/29/2134572…
14/
‘Instagram can hurt us’: Mark Zuckerberg emails outline plan to neutralize competitors
Casey Newton (The Verge)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
A company that neutralizes, buys or destroys competitors can treat its users far worse - invade their privacy, cheap out on moderation and anti-spam, etc - without losing business. That's why Zuck's motto is "it is better to buy than to compete":
trtworld.com/magazine/zuckerbe…
Of course, as a leftist, I know better than to count on markets as a reliable source of corporate discipline. Even more important than market discipline is government discipline, in the form of regulation
15/
Zuckerberg: ‘its better to buy than compete’. Is Facebook a monopoly?
Amar Diwakar (TRT WORLD)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
If Zuck feared fines for privacy violations, or moderation failures, or anticompetitive mergers, or fraudulent advertising systems that rip off publishers and advertisers, or other forms of fraud (like the "pivot to video"), he would treat his users better. But Facebook's rise to power took place during the second half of the neoliberal era, when the last shreds of regulatory muscle that survived the Reagan revolution were being devoured by GW Bush and Obama (and then Trump).
16/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
As cartels and monopolies took over our economy, most government regulators were neutered and captured. Public agencies were stripped of their powers or put in harness to attack small companies, customers, and suppliers who got in the way of monopolists' rent-extraction. That meant that as Facebook grew, Zuckerberg had less and less to fear from government enforcers who might punish him for enshittification where the markets failed to do so.
17/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But it's worse than that, because Zuckerberg and other tech monopolists figured out how to harness "IP" law to get the government to shut down third-part technology that might help users resist enshittification. IP law is why you can't make a privacy-protecting ad-blocker for an app (and why companies are so desperate to get you to use their apps rather than the open web, and why apps are so dismally enshittified).
18/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
IP law is why you can't make an alternative client that blocks algorithmic recommendations. IP law is why you can't leave Facebook for a new service and run a scraper that imports your waiting Facebook messages into a different inbox. IP law is why you can't scrape Facebook to catalog the paid political disinformation the company allows on the platform:
locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doct…
19/
Cory Doctorow: IP
Locus OnlineCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
IP law's growth has coincided with Facebook's ascendancy - the bigger Facebook got, the more tempting it was to interoperators who might want to plug new code into it to protect Facebook users, and the more powers Facebook had to block even the most modest improvements to its service. That meant that Facebook could enshittify even more, without worrying that it would drive users to take unilateral, permanent action that would deprive it of revenue, like blocking ads.
20/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Once ad-blocking is illegal (as it is on apps), there's no reason not to make ads as obnoxious as you want.
Of course, many Facebook *employees* cared about their users, and for most of the 21st century, those workers were a key asset for Facebook. Tech workers were in short supply until just a couple years ago, when the platforms started round after round of brutal layoffs - 260,000 in 2023, another 150,000+ in 2024.
21/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Facebook workers may be furious about Zuckerberg killing content moderation, but he's not worried about them quitting - not with a half-million skilled tech workers out there, hunting for jobs. Fuck 'em. Let 'em quit:
404media.co/its-total-chaos-in…
This is what changed: the collapse of market, government, and labor constraints, and IP law's criminalization of disenshittifying, interoperable add-ons.
22/
‘It’s Total Chaos Internally at Meta Right Now’: Employees Protest Zuckerberg’s Anti LGBTQ Changes
Jason Koebler (404 Media)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This is why Zuck, an eternal creep, lets his creep flag fly so proudly today. Not because he's a worse person, but because he understands he can hurt his users and workers to benefit his shareholders without any consequences. Zuck 2025 isn't the most evil Zuck, he's the most unconstrained Zuck.
Same goes for Twitter. I mean, obviously, there's been a change in management at Twitter - the guy who's enshittifying it today isn't the guy who enshittified it prior to last year.
23/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Musk is speedrunning the enshittification curve, and yet Twitter isn't collapsing. Why not? Because Musk is insulated from consequences for fucking up - he's got a huge cushion of wealth, he's got advertisers who are desperate to reach his users, he's got users who can't afford to leave the service, he's got IP law that he can use to block interoperators who might make it easier to migrate to a better service.
24/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
He was always a greedy, sadistic asshole. Now he's an *unconstrained* greedy, sadistic asshole. Musk 2025 isn't a worse person than Musk 2020. He's just more free to act on his evil impulses than he was in years gone by.
25/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
These are the two factors that make services terrible: captive users, and no constraints. If your users can't leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (not solely their departure to a competitor, but also fines, criminal charges, worker revolts, and guerrilla warfare with interoperators), then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit.
26/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
That's why we got Jack Welch and his acolytes when we did. There were always evil fuckers just like them hanging around, but they didn't get to run GM Entil Ronald Reagan took away the constraints that would have punished them for turning GE into a giant pile of shit. Every economy is forever a-crawl with parasites and monsters like these, but they don't get to burrow into the system and colonize it until policymakers create rips they can pass through.
27/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
In other words, the profit motive itself is not sufficient to cause enshittification - not even when a for-profit firm has to answer to VCs who would shut down the company or fire its leadership in the face of unsatisfactory returns. For-profit companies chase *profit*. The enshittifying changes to Facebook and Twitter are cruel, but the cruelty isn't the point: the point is *profits*.
28/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
If the fines - or criminal charges - Facebook faced for invading our privacy exceeded the ad-targeting revenue it makes by doing so, it would stop spying on us. Facebook wouldn't like it. Zuck would hate it. But he'd do it, because he spies on us to make money, not because he's a voyeur.
To stop enshittification, it is not necessary to eliminate the profit motive - it is only necessary to make enshittification unprofitable.
29/
Greg Linden
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Greg Linden
in reply to Greg Linden • • •Sensitive content
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This is not to defend capitalism. I'm not saying there's a "real capitalism" that's good, and a "crony capitalism" or "monopoly capitalism" that's bad. All flavors of capitalism harm working people and seek to shift wealth and power from the public and democratic institutions to private interests. But that doesn't change the fact that there are, indeed, different flavors of capitalism, and they have different winners and losers.
30/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Capitalists who want to sell apps on the App Store or reach customers through Facebook are technofeudalism's losers, while Apple, Facebook, Google, and other Big Tech companies are technofeudalism's great winners.
Smart leftism pays attention to these differences, because they represent the potential fault lines in capitalism's coalition.
31/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
These people all call themselves capitalists, they all give money and support to political movements that seek to crush worker power and human rights - but when the platforms win, the platforms' business customers lose. They are irreconcilably on different sides of a capitalism-v-capitalism fight that is every bit as important to them as the capitalism-v-socialism fight.
32/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I'm saying it's good praxis to understand the divisions in capitalism, because then we can exploit those differences to make real, material gains for human thriving and worker rights. Lumping all for-profit businesses together as identical and irredeemable is bad tactics.
Legacy social media is at a turning point. Two systems built on open standards have emerged as a credible threat to the zuckermuskian model: Mastodon (built on Activitypub) and Bluesky (built on Atproto).
33/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The former is far more mature, with a huge network of federated servers run by all different kinds of institutions, from hobbyists to corporations, and it's overseen by a nonprofit. The latter has far more users, and is a VC-backed corporate entity, and while it is hypothetically federatable, there are no Bluesky services apart from the main one that you can leave for if Bluesky starts to enshittify.
34/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
That means Bluesky has a ton of captive users, and has the lack of constraint that characterizes the enshittified legacy platforms it has tempted tens of millions of users from. This is not a good place to be in, because it means if the current management choose to enshittify Bluesky, they can, and it will be profitable. It also means that their VCs understand that they could replace the current management and replace them with willing enshittifiers and make more money.
35/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This is why Bluesky is in a dangerous place: not because it is backed by VCs, not because it is a for-profit entity, but because it has captive users and no constraints. It's a great party in a sealed building with no fire exits:
pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fir…
36/
Pluralistic: Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits (14 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Last week, I endorsed a project called Free Our Feeds, whose goals include hacking fire exits into Bluesky by force majeure - that is, independently standing up an alternative server that people can retreat to if Bluesky management changes, or has a change of heart:
pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/con…
For some Mastodon users, Free Our Feeds is dead on arrival - why bother trying to make a for-profit project safer for its users when Mastodon is a perfectly good nonprofit alternative?
37/
Pluralistic: Billionaire-proofing the internet; Picks and Shovels Chapter One (Part 4) (14 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netNerdRelaxo
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Cory Doctorow
in reply to NerdRelaxo • • •Sensitive content
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
ludo
in reply to NerdRelaxo • • •@NerdRelaxo
The TL, DR is that there are many good reasons people are locked in shitty platforms and we can care about those people and build routes for them to safety.
Yes, it is good to be out and about in the fediverse AND it is good to care about others who are meeting their needs in the best way they can at the moment while we work on evacuating those cesspools and finding ways to get those beautiful babies out of that locked in bathwater
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Why waste millions developing a standalone Bluesky server rather than spending that money improving things in the Fediverse.
I believe strongly in improving the Fediverse, and I believe in adding the long-overdue federation to Bluesky. That's because my goal isn't the success of the Fediverse - it's the defeat of enshtitification.
38/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
My answer to "why spend money fixing Bluesky?" is "why leave 20 million people at risk of enshittification when we could not only make them safe, but also create the toolchain to allow many, many organizations to operate a whole federation of Bluesky servers?" If you care about a better internet - and not just the Fediverse - then you should share this goal, too.
39/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Many of the Fediverse's servers are operated by for-profit entities, after all. One of the Fediverse's largest servers (Threads) is owned by Meta. Threads users who feel the bite of Zuckerberg's decision to encourage homophobic, xenophobic and transphobic hate speech will find it easy to escape from Threads: they can set up on any Fediverse server that is federated with Threads and they'll be able to maintain their connections with everyone who stays behind.
40/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The existence of for-profit servers in the Fediverse does not ruin the Fediverse (though I wouldn't personally use one of them). The fact that multiple neo-Nazi groups run their own Mastodon servers does not ruin the Fediverse (though I certainly won't use their servers). Not even the fact that Donald Trump's Truth Social is a Mastodon server does anything to ruin the Fediverse (not using that one, either).
41/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This is the strength of federated, federatable social media - it disciplines enshittifiers by lowering switching costs, and if enshittifiers persist, it makes it easy for users to escape unshitted, because they don't have to solve the collective action problem. Any user can go to any server at any time and stay in touch with everyone else.
42/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Mastodon was born free: free code, with free federation as a priority. Bluesky was not: it was born within a for-profit public benefit corporation whose charter offers some defenses against enshittification, but lacks the most decisive one: the federation that would let users escape should escape become necessary.
The fact that Mastodon was born free is quite unusual in the annals of the fight for a free internet.
43/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Most of the internet was born proprietary and had freedom foisted upon it. Unix was born within Bell Labs, property of the convicted monopolist AT&T. The GNU/Linux project set it free.
SMB was born proprietary within corporate walls of Microsoft, another corporate monopolist. SAMBA set it free.
44/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The Office file formats were also born proprietary within Microsoft's walled garden: they were set free by hacker-activists who fought through a thick bureaucratic morass and Microsoft fuckery (including literally refusing to allow chairs to be set for advocates for Open Document Format) to give us formats that underlie everything from LibreOffice to Google Docs, Office365 to your web browser.
45/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
There is nothing unusual, in other words, about hacking freedom into something that is proprietary or just insufficiently free. That's totally normal. It's how we got almost everything great about computers.
Mastodon's progenitors should be praised for ensuring their creation was born free - but the fact that Bluesky isn't free enough is no reason to turn our back on it.
46/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Our response to anything that locks in the people we care about must be to *shatter those locks*, not abandon the people bound by the locks because they didn't heed to our warnings.
Audre Lord is far smarter than me, but when she wrote that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," she was wrong. There is no toolset better suited to conduct an orderly dismantling of a structure than the tools that built it.
47/
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
You can be sure it'll have all the right driver bits, wrenches, hexkeys and sockets.
Bluesky is fine. It has features I significantly prefer to Mastodon's equivalent. Composable moderation is *amazing*, both a technical triumph and a triumph of human-centered design:
bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-20…
I hope Mastodon adopts those features. If someone starts a project to copy all of Bluesky's best features over to Mastodon, I'll put my name to the crowdfunding campaign in a second.
48/
Composable Moderation - Bluesky
BlueskyAlex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But Mastodon has one feature that Bluesky sorely lacks - the federation that imposes antienshittificatory discipline on companies and offers an enshittification fire-exit for users if the discipline fails. It's long past time that someone copied that feature over to Bluesky.
49/
:blobcatverified2:
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow
in reply to :blobcatverified2: • • •Sensitive content
:blobcatverified2:
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow
in reply to :blobcatverified2: • • •Sensitive content
@Jain Then please mute or block me, or if you'd prefer I can block you.
However, if you don't want to see any of my posts, I am mystified by why you think I should change my posting style to conform to your preferences? Surely that's a "you" problem.
Quincy Peck
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Quincy Peck • • •Sensitive content
Alexandre Oliva
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •what a wonderfully inspiring thread/blog post! thank you thank you thank you!
it reminded me of a phrase in pt_BR: "ninguém solta a mão de ninguém", that comes out in en as "nobody let go of anyone's hand", as in "let's not leave anyone behind, and resist together". it went viral at around the time bolsonaro got elected president. it seemed so fitting to (unintentionally?) bring this back to mind on the day trump got reinaugurated.
Debacle
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •I don't know how far #BS is #freeSoftware or not. But from what I know, it is only theoretically "federatable". Instead,it is a centralised, walled garden, it is opposed to our #digitalSovereignty.
We should definetively turn our back on it, before it is too late.
BS is not fine, no matter what cool features it might have.
It is a trap.
Porting useful features to #fediverse software is, of course, the best course of action!
volkris
in reply to Debacle • • •No, BlueSky is out there and distributed. It's not centralized or walled.
In fact this is one of the beauties of it, it takes down some of the walls around instances here on this platform.
It's LESS of a walled garden.
@pluralistic
Author in Mourning
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
volkris
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •see this is the key captive users and no constraints? That's a contradiction. If the users are captive that's a giant constraint!
No, this is the nonsense that people post around here about BlueSky, and we should identify the silliness.
In many ways that platform is better than this one, and it's worth recognizing that, not fighting against it with arguments so don't really make sense.
That_Damn_Frank
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
- Sugar (0 votes)
- Sweetener (0 votes)
Poll end: 16 hours agoBill Seitz
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
thesystemsthinker.com/a-lifeti…
webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/2013…
A Lifetime of Systems Thinking - The Systems Thinker
Russell Ackoff (The Systems Thinker)utopiArte
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Let me rephrase that:
They are locked in because actually they don't care because they lack way to much perspective and self discipline and are way to happy with their dopamine.
They are as locked in as the bodies in matrix movies that provide the system with energy and sustain the system with their energy. They are their self fulfilling prophecy, because they don't care enough, they don't understand enough and they never experienced the alternative.
They are as locked in as Germans were in their society in 1933 and as we all are in our consumerist customs and daily life in the face of climate change.
And that's why this whole discussion ultimately is kinda senseless and useless because what climate change will impose on the societies will shadow everything you (we) can imagi
... Show more...Let me rephrase that:
They are locked in because actually they don't care because they lack way to much perspective and self discipline and are way to happy with their dopamine.
They are as locked in as the bodies in matrix movies that provide the system with energy and sustain the system with their energy. They are their self fulfilling prophecy, because they don't care enough, they don't understand enough and they never experienced the alternative.
They are as locked in as Germans were in their society in 1933 and as we all are in our consumerist customs and daily life in the face of climate change.
And that's why this whole discussion ultimately is kinda senseless and useless because what climate change will impose on the societies will shadow everything you (we) can imagine.
They could work on plan B and leaving step by step, building up first the alternative till they come to the tipping point and than move ultimately.
But, they wont because they are way to hypnotized and "programed" by their acquired customs. Even choosing bluesky as the option just proves that point again.
As Malcom stated, they are "house negros".
Cory Doctorow
in reply to utopiArte • • •inwit
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
pa27
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Joe Morse
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Maybe the collective action problem gets easier in small increments. Like intermittent fasting, but for toxic and #enshittified social media platforms.
I'm deleting all Meta platforms for at least a week. And I'm looking forward to the attention span I get back from just focusing on the Fediverse and real life.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Woozle Hypertwin
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •LB: I think I agree with everything @pluralistic says here. Every time I got to a "but..." [finger raised] place, he either addressed it or went in a different direction than I was expecting.
This also answers my own question about "why not Mastodon?", also asked by many others.
My only question now is "can I get hired to work on this..."
Nai Sdrahcir
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •{Smoke Hunter} (@NaiSdrahcir@mastodon.social)
Mastodonludo
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
BeeCycling
in reply to ludo • • •ludo
in reply to BeeCycling • • •@beecycling
One of the early superman issues had him lock a mine owner down in the mine to teach him empathy.
These aren't problems one person solves. Pretending that the wealthy are powerful, that our current money is a game there is no alternative to play, is how we silo our imagination.
Superman needs supervillains, nations need enemies, humans need each other.
We need to imagine something more interesting than these dorks!
Alper
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Polyrical - music and politics
in reply to Alper • • •Yes, changing social media will offer some obstacles, but massive and successful protests happened before the Internet and social media existed. Seems incredible now. The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice surpassed 200,000 and was organized by telephone and in person conversations by Bayard Rustin and team. When certain social media outlets are captured or compromised as organizing tools, the organizing will move to other tools, including texts and (shudder) phone calls.
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Polyrical - music and politics • • •@Polyrical @alper
I spent a decade riding a bicycle around the streets of Toronto with a stack of fliers and a bucket of wheatpaste, winter and summer, trying to get people out for mass demonstrations.
It worked, sometimes.
But if you think that we can do that labor intensive work without losing time and capacity to do more meaningful organizing, I have a bucket of wheat-paste I can lend you.
SaftyKuma
in reply to Alper • • •Dr. King did it without social media and with the media of the time fully against him. So we need to go back and re-learn the lessons from the civil rights movement.
Cory Doctorow
in reply to SaftyKuma • • •@SaftyKuma @alper
mamot.fr/@pluralistic/11386264…
Cory Doctorow
2025-01-20 20:48:53
Wade Roberts
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •the sentiment is densely packed with peripheral intent and action, but I’ve said this for years:
Friends don’t let friends use Facebook.
Alan Levine
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •As the pup sez, Is ihat fine?
"This is why Bluesky is in a dangerous place: not because it is backed by VCs, not because it is a for-profit entity, but because it has captive users and no constraints. It's a great party in a sealed building with no fire exits"