When I first returned to this blog* after Boris Johnson's 2019 election victory I thought I'd just remain on twitter to post links and provide a little daily – but potentially always topical – keening over our exit from the EU inspired by Megan Anram's daily "Today was the day Donald trump finally became president" posts. Initially, I thought spending less time on everyone's favourite hellsite was simply for my own good, but when I watched Lindsay Ellis' video about her own cancelling last April I realised maybe the problem wasn't just me, but twitter's own business model, which now required the active promotion of upsetting content in order to keep our attention. Capitalism depended on growth, and twitter had grown as big as it was going to get. So I pinned this to my profile:
Yes, stay cool. Because Fascism Thrives On Division.
Then, just over a week ago, Elon Musk finally bought the site or app or whatever it is for forty-four billion dollars.
And immediately sacked its content moderators – one week before the American midterm elections, and exactly one day before a terrorist attack on a migrant processing centre in Dover followed by our reappointed Home Secetary's warning of an "invasion" of the south coast by refugees – and I was initially nonplussed by commentators passing the popcorn and using phrases like "it's going to be a wild ride." I mean, I get it. I write, and sentences must be finished, and lot of this blog is just me sharing stuff I find ineresting and then realising I should probably provide some kind of commentary, and "it's going to be a wild ride" is a handy sign off. But it still seemed a weird way to describe the rise of Fascism.
But maybe that wasn't what was being described. Maybe those commentators anticipating twitter's downfall were looking forward to the fall of the rise of Fascism, certainly something I'd like to live long enough to see... That's maybe not entirely true. What I mean is, given that I have to keep on living, I would very much like the fall of the rise of Fascism to happen at some point during that.
Has the word Fascism gone a bit weird on me now? Maybe.
Anyway, here's some chat.
And I was talking to my uncle Gordie last week, and learning how well his children's generation have been rallying around each other, and how much help is now provided – ar at least seen to be needed – which wasn't when I was their age, and I have to remember that I'm living to see other, far better things also on the rise.
* Here's how this post originally began:
When I first started
Okay
actually, before I continue I'm going to let you a little into how
tediously I go about writing these posts: I've just started writing this,
about four minutes ago, three of which have been spent arriving at the
word "tediously" which I might still change, and it would
normally now be about an hour before I looked back over all this and finally noticed
how... again, I'm going to spend a while now trying to find a synonym
for "bad"... let's just stick with "bad" then... how bad those opening
four words are, only as it happens this time I noticed almost
immediately. "When I first started"? Surely that's a... I'll look this up...
tautology? Doesn't starting mean doing something for the first time
anyway? And yet it sounds okay to my ear when I say it out loud. Maybe I
just like the sound of my voice too much. "When I first started..."
Okay.
When I first started returning to this blog to post daily
Oh bloody hell....
"First
started returning"? That sounds terrible. What can that mean? But no,
back in December of 2019 I returned to the blog after a bit of an
absence and I started posting daily, which I hadn't done before, and
then there was a break in early 2021, and now I'm blogging daily again.
Hence "first", hence "returning"... Yeah that"started" is redundant.
When I first returned to this blog to post daily... I've honestly forgotten now what I was going to say.
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