#the twitter implosion of 2022

[happypeachsludgeflower]

after the twitter implosion of 2022, it would be hysterical if we, collectively as fandoms, started making au’s where the protagonist helps the twitter crisis along a makes a fake verified celebrity account only to fall in love with the celebrity. Or a tumblr refugee fic where they meet while flocking to tumblr after the massacre.

[octolingrendezvous]

some agent designs :D

[scarletiswailing347]

something i hate about being used to small/dead fandoms is that the more active somethings fandom is the more overwhelmed i get which sucks cause i do wanna participate but oh my god theres way too many ppl here

[help-me-find-a-name-please-lol]

waiting for 2023 to bring the not-at-all-awaited Musk movie starring John Ross Bowie

[beardedmrbean]

Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, headed by critical race theory activist Ibram X. Kendi, revealed last week that it was laying off about 40% of its staff as part of organization restructuring. About 15 to 20 of its approximately 45 employees were let go. Testimonies from former employees have exposed alleged mismanagement of Kendi’s center, which in turn has exposed the fraudulence and fragility of the diversity, equity, and inclusion complex.

Disgruntled former employees have accused Kendi of mishandling grant funding, failing to complete major projects, and fostering an exploitative company culture in which he ruled with an iron fist yet was routinely missing in action. The center has raked in $43 million since its inception, according to 2021 budget records obtained by the Daily Free Press. It received corporate support from Peloton, Deloitte, Stop & Shop, TJX Companies, and Deckers Outdoor Corporation, according to a 2020–2021 donor report. Only six weeks after its launch, then-CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey gifted $10 million without conditions.

“Your $10M donation, with no strings attached, gives us the resources and flexibility to greatly expand our antiracist work,” Kendi posted at the time. “The endowment is vital, as we build our new Center.”

Despite the investments, the center did not deliver on some key priorities, such as the much-hyped Racial Data Tracker that would document racial inequities in all sectors of society to finally root out racism.

“I don’t know where the money is,” Saida Grundy, a BU professor who worked at the center from fall 2020 to spring 2021, told the Boston Globe after the staff cuts.

Multiple other BU professors served as faculty leads on various projects at the center. Professor Sanaz Mobasseri of BU’s business school led the Antiracist Tech Initiative, professor Kaylene Stevens of BU’s education school led the “Designing Antiracist Curricula” team, and political science professor Spencer Piston led the Policy Office, for example.

In December 2021, Grundy emailed BU provost Jean Morrison that the organization had been showing a “pattern of amassing grants without any commitment to producing the research obligated” by them.

Like its umbrella idea DEI, “antiracism” actually translates to, well, nothing of note. Serial academics such as Kendi have built careers around racial fearmongering, even inventing new disciplines to study racism and its early-stage minutiae “microaggressions” and “implicit bias.” Rather than confront actual crimes of racism, these courses seek to aggressively manufacture racist intent.

Despite all this bureaucracy, academic DEI projects have unclear aims and products. Kendi’s center published just two research papers since its founding, the Washington Free Beacon reported. A January paper, "Association of Neighborhood Racial and Ethnic Composition and Historical Redlining With Build Environment Indicators Derived From Street View Images,” found that predominantly black neighborhoods had more dilapidated buildings than white neighborhoods. The center released a report from its "Antibigotry Convening” from fall 2021 and winter 2022 that included many intersectionality themes such as “Ageism,” "Anti-fat Bigotry,” and “Transphobia,” further confusing its purpose.

Rachel Lapal Cavallario, spokeswoman for Kendi’s center, told the Boston Globe Wednesday that BU had “received some complaints from individuals questioning whether the center was following its funding guidelines. We are currently looking into those complaints.”

However, the center rejects the “characterization of it not having produced important work insofar as antiracism is concerned,” she said.

To raise Grundy’s question again, where did the money go? Echoing that sentiment, BU has launched an “inquiry” into the center amid the scandal, the Daily Free Press said.

The situation is reminiscent of the lawsuits against Black Lives Matter, another embattled racial justice organization. In 2023, Black Lives Matter reported a $9 million deficit for 2022 after raising $90 million in 2020. Only 33% of that massive sum went to charitable activism, federal filings showed, as a significant chunk was squandered on the leaders’ mansions, personal expenses, and favors for friends. Both Kendi’s center and BLM followed a similar model: drum up rumors of racism, prescribe DEI, create an apparatus, lure in donors, get paid.

The racial grievance business welcomes little accountability — or accounting, for that matter — which explains why it’s found a home in academia. Many colleges, such as Boston University, or my alma mater Boston College down the road, charge their students exorbitant tuition for useless degrees and boatloads of debt. Tenured professors collect big paychecks while hawking critical race theory, turning students into activists instead of real scholars.

Despite its self-destructive tendencies, the DEI racket continues to spread throughout academia. Some colleges are trying to meet demand for so-called DEI experts by creating a corresponding major, USA Today claimed. At least six colleges across the country offer DEI degree programs or will in the future, according to the publication’s analysis. Tufts University and the University of Pennsylvania even have DEI graduate programs.

Some universities have also woven DEI into their academic missions. Duke University in 2020 launched a Racial Equity Advisory Council, composed of four subcommittees including faculty members and students, which will propose “measures to assess and foster racial equity” to the university’s leadership. Every year since fall 2020, the Duke Endowment has sponsored professors with seed grants to pursue research proposals related to race as part of the school’s anti-racism mission. That’s more money down the drain.

DEI in America’s prestigious colleges contributes nothing, wastes money, and fuels a bubble of empty courses, professions, and promises. But if the shakeout at Kendi’s BU center is any clue, it might be starting to pop.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

By Leanne Italie

November 27, 2023

NEW YORK (AP) — In an age of deepfakes and post-truth, as artificial intelligence rose and Elon Musk turned Twitter into X, the Merriam-Webster word of the year for 2023 is “authentic.”

Authentic cuisine. Authentic voice. Authentic self. Authenticity as artifice.

Lookups for the word are routinely heavy on the dictionary company’s site but were boosted to new heights throughout the year, editor at large Peter Sokolowski told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview.

“We see in 2023 a kind of crisis of authenticity,” he said ahead of Monday’s announcement of this year’s word.

“What we realize is that when we question authenticity, we value it even more.”

Sokolowski and his team don’t delve into the reasons people head for dictionaries and websites in search of specific words.

Rather, they chase the data on lookup spikes and world events that correlate.

This time around, there was no particularly huge boost at any given time but a constancy to the increased interest in “authentic.”

This was the year of artificial intelligence, for sure, but also a moment when ChatGPT-maker OpenAI suffered a leadership crisis.

Musk himself, at February’s World Government Summit in Dubai, urged the heads of companies, politicians, ministers and other leaders to “speak authentically” on social media by running their own accounts.

“Can we trust whether a student wrote this paper? Can we trust whether a politician made this statement? We don’t always trust what we see anymore,” Sokolowski said.

“We sometimes don’t believe our own eyes or our own ears. We are now recognizing that authenticity is a performance itself.”

Merriam-Webster’s entry for “authentic” is busy with meaning.

There’s “not false or imitation: real, actual,” as in an authentic cockney accent.

There’s “true to one’s own personality, spirit or character.”

There’s “worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact.”

There’s “made or done the same way as an original.”

And, perhaps the most telling, there’s “conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features.”

“Authentic” follows 2022’s choice of “gaslighting.”

And 2023 marks Merriam-Webster’s 20th anniversary choosing a top word.

The company’s data crunchers filter out evergreen words like “love” and “affect” vs. “effect” that are always high in lookups among the 500,000 words it defines online.

This year, the wordsmiths also filtered out numerous five-letter words because Wordle and Quordle players clearly use the company’s site in search of them as they play the daily games, Sokolowski said.

Sokolowski, a lexicologist, and his colleagues have a bevy of runners-up for word of the year that also attracted unusual traffic.

They include “X” (lookups spiked in July after Musk’s rebranding of Twitter), “EGOT” (there was a boost in February when Viola Davis achieved that rare quadruple-award status with a Grammy) and “Elemental,” the title of a new Pixar film that had lookups jumping in June.

Rounding out the company’s top words of 2023, in no particular order:

RIZZ: It’s slang for “romantic appeal or charm” and seemingly short for charisma.

Merriam-Webster added the word to its online dictionary in September and it’s been among the top lookups since, Sokolowski said.

KIBBUTZ: There was a massive spike in lookups for “a communal farm or settlement in Israel” after Hamas militants attacked several near the Gaza Strip on October 7.

The first kibbutz was founded circa 1909 in what is today Israel.

IMPLODE: The June 18 implosion of the Titan submersible on a commercial expedition to explore the Titanic wreckage sent lookups soaring for this word, meaning “to burst inward.”

“It was a story that completely occupied the world,” Sokolowski said.

DEADNAME: Interest was high in what Merriam-Webster defines as “the name that a transgender person was given at birth and no longer uses upon transitioning.”

Lookups followed an onslaught of legislation aimed at curtailing LGBTQ+ rights around the country.

DOPPELGANGER: Sokolowski calls this “a word lover’s word.”

Merriam-Webster defines it as a “double,” an “alter ego” or a “ghostly counterpart.”

It derives from German folklore. Interest in the word surrounded Naomi Klein’s latest book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World,” released this year.

She uses her own experience of often being confused with feminist author and conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf as a springboard into a broader narrative on the crazy times we’re all living in.

CORONATION: King Charles III had one on May 6, sending lookups for the word soaring 15,681% over the year before, Sokolowski said.

Merriam-Webster defines it as “the act or occasion of crowning.”

DEEPFAKE: The dictionary company’s definition is “an image or recording that has been convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said.”

Interest spiked after Musk’s lawyers in a Tesla lawsuit said he is often the subject of deepfake videos and again after the likeness of Ryan Reynolds appeared in a fake, AI-generated Tesla ad.

DYSTOPIAN: Climate chaos brought on interest in the word. So did books, movies and TV fare intended to entertain.

“It’s unusual to me to see a word that is used in both contexts,” Sokolowski said.

COVENANT: Lookups for the word meaning “a usually formal, solemn, and binding agreement” swelled on March 27, after a deadly mass shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.

The shooter was a former student killed by police after killing three students and three adults.

Interest also spiked with this year’s release of Guy Ritchie’s "The Covenant” and Abraham Verghese’s long-awaited new novel, “The Covenant of Water,” which Oprah Winfrey chose as a book club pick.

More recently, soon after U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson ascended to House speaker, a 2022 interview with the Louisiana congressman recirculated.

He discussed how his teen son was then his “accountability partner” on Covenant Eyes, software that tracks browser history and sends reports to each partner when porn or other potentially objectionable sites are viewed.

INDICT: Former President Donald Trump has been indicted on felony charges in four criminal cases in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C., in addition to fighting a lawsuit that threatens his real estate empire.

[mariacallous]

For a man on a moral crusade, Sam Bankman-Fried lived a life of surprising luxury. The $40m penthouse in the Bahamas, the supermodels and celebrities roped in to back his business ventures, and the fawning glossy magazine profiles would all be perfectly standard trappings for a Wall Street tycoon or hedge fund playboy. But they seem strangely reminiscent of the tired old capitalism Bankman-Fried got rich rejecting, not the one he was supposedly building in its place.

Once one of the world’s youngest billionaires, Bankman-Fried made his fortune in cryptocurrencies – forms of digital money originally invented to circumvent the supposedly corrupt financial elite and empower the little guy – and had grand plans for giving it all away to life-changing progressive causes. But instead of bringing the rotten old order crashing down, he was this week arrested on fraud charges (which he has denied) relating to the implosion of his currency exchange FTX in what bankruptcy lawyers describe as “one of the most abrupt and difficult collapses in the history of corporate America”.

Cryptocurrency is sometimes called “the people’s money”, because of the way it tapped into the rage of those who had lost trust, for understandable reasons, in the post-crash financial system: often young men, economically disfranchised, willing or desperate enough to take a gamble on a volatile and intangible asset, and prone to hurl threats and vitriol online at anyone arguing for tighter regulation of this wild new frontier. But if you thought Wall Street couldn’t be trusted, try being an FTX user, wondering if you’ll ever get your money back.

Will we come to see 2022 as the year populism finally ate itself? For if the last few years have been all about the collapse of public trust in the establishment then 2022 was the year trust in the anti-establishment collapsed too. It’s been a bad year for revolutionaries, but a worse one for those who badly needed to believe in them, only to realise too late they seem to have jumped out of a frying pan into the fire.

God knows there are legitimate criticisms to be made of mainstream politics, the City, and – as Harry and Meghan pointed out at length from their Netflix soapbox – the mainstream media, among a raft of other institutions recently in the firing line. It’s hardly surprising that so many want to believe in better. But this has been a year of realising that untrammelled populist alternatives are just as capable of turning toxic, if not sometimes more so, than the supposedly broken systems they seek to disrupt.

Liz Truss’s surreal six weeks in power looks in retrospect like the peak of this phenomenon. She was determined to rip up stuffy old economic orthodoxy and, in doing so, finally deliver the mythical fruits of the Brexit revolution. Instead she proved that orthodoxy exists for a reason, with a mini-budget that cost the country billions and drove former leave voters into the arms of safe, conventional, remain-voting Keir Starmer, the polar opposite of everything she represented.

Perhaps a similar kind of disillusionment with the radical alternative explains last month’s otherwise decidedly surprising finding by the pollsters Ipsos that trust in journalists has hit its highest point in 39 years. Closer inspection of the numbers shows faith in the written press has been quietly rising for years as faith in the internet – which once promised to democratise information, bringing truths quashed by corporate media or political censors to the masses – correspondingly declined. Perhaps it’s not that people have learned to love Fleet Street hacks so much as that they’ve grown disillusioned with new media platforms awash with conspiracy theories, fake news and hate.

New Twitter owner Elon Musk’s decision to suspend several journalists covering his activities from his platform after he said they were “doxing” him, meanwhile, is a useful reminder that revolutionaries often end up morphing into what they once decried. Having previously declared too much content moderation “contrary to the will of the people”, Musk seems to have decided there are limits to free speech after all, especially when it’s him you’re talking about.

The moral of the story isn’t that the establishment is perfect, nor that all revolutions are doomed. But it is to beware of populism in all its guises, and perhaps especially the profit-making ones. The people’s rage turns out to be easily monetised, and some have made fortunes from it. But this was the year of realising that it’s the people, in the end, who usually pay.

[vanyelle]

Just read this NY Times article and burst out laughing at how absurd and beautiful this implosion is (not funny for the former employees, but just the absurdity of the situation as a whole is hilarious).

In “gearing up for legal battles,” Musk is literally creating future legal battles.

Thought I’d share a text-only copy-paste of the article under the cut.

Musk Shakes Up Twitter’s Legal Team as He Looks to Cut More Costs

Twitter has stopped paying rent on offices and is considering not paying severance packages to former employees, among other measures.

By Ryan Mac, Mike Isaac and Kate Conger

Dec. 13, 2022

5 min read

SAN FRANCISCO — Over the past two weeks, Elon Musk has shaken up Twitter’s legal department, disbanded a council that advised the social media company on safety issues and is continuing to take drastic steps to cut costs.

Mr. Musk appears to be gearing up for legal battles at Twitter, which he purchased in October for $44 billion, according to seven people familiar with internal conversations. He and his team have revamped Twitter’s legal department and pushed out one of his closest advisers in the process. They have also instructed employees to not pay vendors in anticipation of potential litigation, the people said.

To cut costs, Twitter has not paid rent for its San Francisco headquarters or any of its global offices for weeks, three people close to the company said. Twitter has also refused to pay a $197,725 bill for private charter flights made the week of Mr. Musk’s takeover, according to a copy of a lawsuit filed in New Hampshire District Court and obtained by The New York Times.

Twitter’s leaders have also discussed the consequences of denying severance payments to thousands of people who have been laid off since the takeover, two people familiar with the talks said. And Mr. Musk has threatened employees with lawsuits if they talk to the media and “act in a manner contrary to the company’s interest,” according to an internal email sent last Friday.

The aggressive moves signal that Mr. Musk is still slashing expenditures and is bending or breaking Twitter’s previous agreements to make his mark. His reign has been characterized by chaos, a series of resignations and layoffs, reversals of the platform’s previous suspensions and rules, and capricious decisions that have driven away advertisers.

Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

As he has transitioned into the role of Twitter’s new leader, Mr. Musk has had a cast of rotating legal professionals by his side. In October, he fired both Twitter’s chief legal officer and general counsel “for cause” within hours of closing his acquisition and installed his personal lawyer, Alex Spiro, to head up legal and policy matters at the company.

Mr. Spiro is no longer working at Twitter, according to six people familiar with the decision. Those people said that Mr. Musk has been unhappy with some of the decisions made by Mr. Spiro, a noted criminal defense lawyer who successfully defended the billionaire in a high-profile defamation case in late 2019 and worked his way into the Twitter owner’s inner circle.

Among those decisions was Mr. Spiro’s call to retain the Twitter deputy general counsel, James A. Baker, through Mr. Musk’s various rounds of layoffs and firings. Mr. Baker had served as general counsel at the F.B.I. until May 2018 — advising the agency on politically fraught investigations into Hillary Clinton’s private email server and Donald J. Trump’s campaign — and joined Twitter in 2020.

Last week, Mr. Musk said he terminated Mr. Baker after he learned that the lawyer had been responsible for reviewing internal communications about the company’s decision to suppress a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Mr. Musk had ordered that those communications, which he has called the “Twitter Files,” be given to a group of journalists to release and discredit the decision-making of the company’s past executives.

With Twitter drained of legal talent from layoffs and departures, Mr. Musk has sought lawyers from his other companies, including rocket maker SpaceX, to fill the void. More than half a dozen lawyers from the space exploration company have been given access to Twitter’s internal systems, according to two people and documents seen by The Times. SpaceX employees who have been brought in to Twitter include Chris Cardaci, the company’s vice president of legal, and Tim Hughes, its senior vice president, global business and government affairs.

A SpaceX spokesman did not return a request for comment.

Among its legal challenges, Twitter is facing more questions from the Federal Trade Commission, which is investigating whether the company is still adhering to a consent decree. In 2011, the company signed a consent decree with the F.T.C. after two data breaches and said it would not mislead users about privacy protection. In May, the company paid $150 million to the F.T.C. and Justice Department to settle allegations that it had violated the terms of that consent decree, which was expanded.

The F.T.C. has sent Twitter letters asking whether it still has the resources and staff to adhere to the consent decree, two people with knowledge of the matter said. An F.T.C. spokeswoman declined to comment.

On Friday, as Mr. Musk encouraged the release of internal information through the continuation of his Twitter Files, he also sent an email to employees noting “many detailed leaks of confidential Twitter information” showed that some were violating their nondisclosure agreements.

“If you clearly and deliberately violate the NDA that you signed when joining Twitter, you accept liability to the full extent of the law and Twitter will immediately seek damages,” he wrote. The email was first reported by the Platformer newsletter.

Mr. Musk’s team has also deliberated the merits of not paying severance to the thousands of people who have left the company since he took over, when there were about 7,500 full-time employees. While Mr. Musk and his advisers had previously considered forgoing any severance when discussing cuts in late October, the company ultimately decided that U.S.-based employees would be given at least two months of pay and one month of severance pay so that the company would be compliant with federal and state labor laws.

Mr. Musk’s team is now reconsidering whether it should pay some of those months, according to two people familiar with the discussions, or just face lawsuits from disgruntled former employees. Many former employees still have not received any paperwork formalizing their separation from Twitter, five people said. Mr. Musk has already refused to pay millions of dollars in exit packages to executives he claims were terminated “for cause.”

As Twitter has downsized, Mr. Musk’s team has been hoping to renegotiate the terms of lease agreements, two people familiar with the discussion said. The company has received complaints from real estate investment and management firms including Shorenstein, which owns the San Francisco buildings that Twitter occupies.

A spokesman for Shorenstein declined to comment.

In other money-saving moves, Twitter has laid off its kitchen staff and begun to list office supplies, industrial-grade kitchen equipment and electronics from its San Francisco office for auction.

Mr. Musk also continues to cut staff and leaders, including Nelson Abramson, Twitter’s global head of infrastructure, and Alan Rosa, the global information technology head and vice president of information security, according to four people familiar with the moves.

On Sunday night, Mr. Musk sent two emails to Twitter’s staff with advice about how to work for him that he had previously shared with SpaceX and Tesla employees. One message focused on first principles thinking, a worldview based on the teachings of Aristotle to reduce assumptions to basic axioms, which Mr. Musk credited with helping him make difficult decisions. The other advocated against workplace hierarchies.

On Monday, Twitter notified members of its trust and safety council, an advisory group formed in 2016, that it would dissolve immediately. The council was created to guide Twitter through challenging safety problems and content moderation issues, and was made up of organizations focused on civil rights and child safety.

“Safety online can mean survival offline,” said Jodie Ginsberg, the president of the Committee to Protect Journalists, one of the organizations involved in the council. “As a platform that has become a critical tool in both open and repressive countries, Twitter must play a constructive role in ensuring that journalists and the public at large are able to receive and impart information without fear of reprisals.”

Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

A correction was made on Dec. 13, 2022:

An earlier version of this article misstated the role of an executive for SpaceX who was brought in to Twitter. The executive, Tim Hughes, is senior vice president for global business and government affairs, not general counsel. The error was repeated in a photo caption.

[arpov-blog-blog]

Hopium Chronicles By Simon Rosenberg

The Republicans Have A DeSantis Problem

Been A Very Rough Couple of Weeks for the GOP's Bumbling Golden Boy

SIMON ROSENBERG

Perhaps the central insight of my 2022 election analysis was that I believed the Republicans had made a huge strategic blunder by running towards a politics - MAGA - which had just been overwhelmingly rejected by the American people in two consecutive high-turnout elections. As far back as late October 2021 I warned that if this “anti-MAGA majority” came to understand that the GOP was once again all MAGA it would make 2022 far more likely to be a close, competitive election than a red wave. And that’s basically what happened.

In the battlegrounds, where our campaigns had the resources to control the information environment and push turnout, we outperformed expectations, and MAGA once again disappointed. Incredibly we gained ground in AZ, CO, GA, MI, MN, NH and PA in 2022. In the battlegrounds MAGA has now failed the GOP in three consecutive elections, not just two. There is deep muscle memory and understanding of the dangers of MAGA in the battleground today. Running and winning as MAGA there will be very hard in 2024.

Ron DeSantis looked at all this and decided to become even more MAGA, super MAGA. He’s moved from a 15 week abortion ban to 6 weeks. He’s sold his Presidential campaign as a war against woke. He’s banning books, removing elected officials from office, mounting unprecedented assaults against undocumented immigrants and punishing businesses which don’t agree with his agenda. His response to the Silicon Valley Bank implosion was buffoonish and embarrassing. He choose Putin over America and the West. Republican Senators have been dumping on him all week. What in the world he is doing? As someone who has been in this business a long time it’s not easy to understand.

Last week we started to get polling showing how unpopular DeSantis’s agenda is even in Florida. I wrote a series of threads on Twitter going through the polling, and raising questions about whether DeSantis was blowing it. These threads got millions of views and kicked up an important conversation about DeSantis’s wild rightward lurch.

For all those Rs hoping DeSantis would be a reasonable and capable alternative to Trump this has been a very bad week. It appears the Rs might be on the verge of another cycle of “candidate quality” problems. It is another reason why as we head into 2024 I would much rather be us than them.

[kallmaker]

I Stand with The T - Public Thread

I Stand with The T - Public Thread preserved from the implosion of Bird Site. Trans people are part of this cis lesbian's queer family.

Why This Post

The post below captures a thread I released on eXTwitter on May 2, 2022.* It’s been roughly 18 months since and I wouldn’t change a word – except the misuse of “whose” in the second paragraph. My account there is dormant.

There are so many lies and intellectually dishonest “What Ifs” being told directly to us, by some of us, about our trans family. It’s their goal to make us feel as if someone else's rights come at the expense of ours. This is the antithesis of feminism and there is nothing radical about it. It's the same old same old same old.

As I've said for years, rights must be universal or they're not rights.

Sisters of the Pen who Shaped Me

My philosophy around these complicated issues comes from learning the words of Judy Grahn, Joan Nestle, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, and Dorothy Allison. And so many more. Their fortitude, brilliance, and ability to sit with complexity without being numbed or overwhelmed into inaction are beacons of unity and love in a fractured world.

I am also grateful to my younger kid, who says, "I had a wonderful girlhood and grew up to be a man." It's inspiring to see him pulling together threads of himself that weren't working well together and now increasingly are. His example speaks loudly to me, especially that when I ask what seems a simple question, his first response is, "Well, yes and no. A lot and only sometimes. I can't speak for everyone about that."

I can't speak for everyone about that. A reality that influencers on social media oft ignore when stirring up the coin of their realm: Anger and Fear.

I Miss the Sapphic Community of eXTwitter

Please follow me at any of these sites:

Facebook Threads Bluesky

  Over the past year, the sapphic community on the former Twitter became an oasis of normal in a vast morass of bigotry and "free speech" with the sole intent of bullying others into silence. The monkey-poo-barians were and are at the proverbial gates, which left me feeling anxious and unsafe though I was nearly always among friends.

Since the site has deleted accounts for mainstream journalists, non-partisan sources, and dissenting influencers who pointed out a business model now profiting off hate speech and violence, it's clear our presence there is merely tolerated, as if they simply haven't gotten to us yet. I'm not going back to living like that - it didn't feel good to be at or use the site anymore though I dearly care about the people there.

I posted my "Goodbye Twitter, it's not me, it's you" farewell in September of last year. I have copies of content posted there, and this is one thread that I simply didn't want to lose behind their paywall.

I Stand With the T Thread (unedited)

A thread about LESBIAN. It's long, sorry/not sorry. I #StandWithTheT, people.

I'm a 60+ cis woman whose been a lesbian for 90% of her life. It took me years to say lesbian without inwardly flinching. I fought to use the word and use it proudly. It's my power word.

It's because I have lived with my hard-won lesbian identity all these decades that I can't fathom NOT standing with trans and bi people now.

I didn't arrive at this understanding easily. It took work, help, and mistakes, all of which was worth it in every way.

In yesteryears, we had to make places to be safe. When you claim space, the world wants it back. So we put up walls for the safety of those on one side of them.

There is no wall that will keep out the future, especially a future you've helped bring about. And here we are.

To anyone trying to use LESBIAN as a brick in another wall: I have seen your kind before. You're descendants of the lesbians that told me how I *ought* to like sex or what I *ought* to read, and who I should shun and hate.

You're the same ilk as lesbians who coined phrases like "gold star" and waged forever tedious arguments about what a "real" lesbian is.

If you police other people's identities, you're saying it's okay for others to police you. I read that in the 80s, FFS.

I see you terrifying yourself with one-off examples of some dude who behaved badly to justify your malignant attacks on millions of people as well as your bad faith, intellectually dishonest hand wringing.

This peril you feel is not because a trans person wants to pee.

I get that it's easier to attack people - especially those who can't punch up - instead of ideas. It's easily monetized for one thing.

Fighting ideas means dealing with icky nuances and complexities, and I am right there with you wanting the world to go back to being SIMPLER.

Well, the world never was simpler.

Part of lesbian struggle and history has always been about ENDING gender limitations. Any way a woman can be is therefore the way women are, remember?

Marriage was withheld from same sex couples because of sex boxes on marriage license applications.

Jobs, education, credit, wages - all withheld from women because we were forced to mark F on forms, and that F was legally sanctioned way to police and enforce how we behaved.

The first person I heard argue that her sex did not belong on a job application was a butch lesbian.

Other feminists made this point too, but the emphasis on defying and breaking gender norms was all lesbian for me. I've been "refusing to state" whenever possible for decades.

The evolution of thinking around individual identity has grown exponentially with each subsequent generation. It confounds and blurs the ever-present rules about how any of us can be in the world. It is, in part, *OUR* doing. It. Was. The. Whole. Point.

I am completely aware of our struggles as lesbians, and I know how much heart, blood, sweat, tears, and loss went into creating a Lesbian Nation.

I honor that and was in the smallest way part of it. I am still L.A.B.I.A.: Lesbian Against Boys Invading Anything.

It takes nothing away from the extraordinary achievements of generations of activist lesbians to say our movement was not perfect.

We walled people out because of who they loved or because their journey to a queer life was different from ours. Also true: We changed the world with only our will and persistence because it wasn't like we had money. We fought for every scrap of space to breathe.

Other queer people need space to breathe.

Ask yourself who is making you feel as if it's YOUR air they are taking.

Spoiler: It's the same people it's always been. It's good for them if they pretend air is scarce and we fight over it.

This is an old lesson. Could all y'all hurry up with learning it?

Your attacks on the trans community in the name of lesbian solidarity and history betray both. Worse, they are attacks on yourself. The energy and anger you give to malice and lies about our trans family is coin in the pocket of the same people who WILL come for you next.

The same people who happily point you at the rest of us to make money and consolidate power are targeting trans people like they targeted "Adam & Steve" in the 00s, "Sluts" (women who refuse men) in the 90s, AIDS victims in the 80s, "Groomer" pedophiles in the 70s...

In the language of feminism, you are complicit in your own oppression. Your harm to yourself is harm to our entire community. It weakens all of us and makes it easier to send us back into closets to breathe the scarce air. Again, could y'all hurry up and learn this lesson?

For my trans and bi friends who are tl;dr, some lesbians use "lesbian" in an ugly way to be ugly to you. I know you can't afford to ignore them. You're not alone in having eyes on them.

It seems more true every day: we only have each other. You know you're a writer when, in spite of a boatload of compliments and reactions, all you can see is the misuse of "whose" in the very first tweet.

* Thread Info

URL: https://twitter.com/Kallmaker/status/1521311057544814592 You must be logged in to see it, otherwise the site will tell you the page doesn't even exist. Comments were generally positive though some not-feminists said some ugly things. If respectful discourse didn't work, I blocked them; you may see their comments if you view the thread.

[therandomavenger]

Social Media Showdown

Twitter used to be the place for artists, writers, journalists, and other professionals to hang out online. It had great discoverability, and people built huge followings seemingly from scratch. People sold books, connected with agents and editors, and became (sometimes unfortunately) celebrities based on the pithy comments they posted about matters both serious and inane. At its height, it had over 528.3 million monthly active users. If you wanted to be somebody, you were on twitter.

Welp, all good things must come to an end. When it was purchased by Elon Musk in 2022, he started implementing changes that let some of the already extant toxic elements come to the forefront, as well as doing things like letting anyone who wanted to pay $8 a month be verified which had, until then, been a privilege of people with some sort of public notability. It became, essentially, useless for the purposes people had been using it before. It was even rebranded as X, which was as frustrating as it was nonsensical. Most progressives jumped off the platform over the course of the next year, along with most advertisers.

But Twitter isn’t as dead as it feels. People are still using it. It’s developed an even more toxic culture, however, so for my purposes is no longer a fun place to hang out online. It still has 353.7 monthly active users, so it’s still kind of the King Gorilla of micro-blogging sites.

Into the void twitter’s ‘sort-of’ implosion left, several other sites emerged. There seemed to be a new twitter clone every week, sometimes multiples of them. But three of them have really gained some sort of traction, and I want to write about my experiences on them here. In addition to these three, I also tried Hive, which seemed promising but did not have a staff that was ready for prime time. A month or so in, it went down for updates for what was supposed to be one day and which stretched out into multiple weeks. No one came back when it did. I don’t even know if it still exists. I also signed up for a spoutible account, but I have never used it. Is Spoutible even still a thing?

But the three I have used extensively are Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky.

Mastodon

 What can I say about Mastodon? It currently has about 1.8 million monthly average users, so it’s not even the same class of creature as Twitter was. Part of Mastodon’s deal is that it’s not one site, or even one collection of sites. It’s part of something called ‘The Fedi-verse’ and is made up of hundreds of different servers (called instances). You need to join one of them to participate. This used to be a daunting challenge, but lately the mastodon app has made mastodon.social the default app for new sign-ups. Theoretically, you are able to change instances to find one that is a better fit for your personal circumstances, but this process can be described as arduous at best. Basically, you need to know what you’re doing, tech-wise, to fully get Mastodon. Also, while each instance has its own rules, there are some commonly accepted practices you’re supposed to follow. Like using descriptive alt text for your images.  These rules are just kind of understood, and new people sometimes run afoul of them and then the hordes descend to yell at them. Sometimes. My specific instance is welcoming and pretty chill, but there are some instances that are less so.

Also, it can be difficult to find the people you want to follow on Mastodon. Another problem is that discoverability is low, since every different instance has different rules for what accounts it will show you. They also have different rules for how they handle link previews and even how long your post can be. I’ve found a pretty nice group of people to follow on Mastodon, but none of my posts have really gone beyond them. Adding to this problem is the fact that there just aren’t that many Mastodon users who are active. If you already know of an active community, it can be a great place to plug in, but if you don’t know anyone, you’re going to have a very lonely time of it.

Also, instances can be what’s called ‘de-federated’ from other instances, meaning they basically cease to exist for each other, which means if that happens you lose all of your followers. Mostly this happens because of content violations, but it’s possible for it to happen for whatever reason the other admins decide upon. This is basically social media for people who know what they’re doing, not for normies. That can be a feature, not a bug. It’s up to you. I enjoy Mastodon, but it’s not my go-to when I have a new release or any other kind of news to share, the way twitter once was. It’s probably not destined to become a twitter replacement, and many, of not most, of its users would prefer that it didn’t.

You can follow me on Mastodon @ChadGrayson@mastodon.otherworldsink.com

Threads

Threads is the micro-blogging entry from Meta (the company that runs Facebook and Instagram), and that is both a blessing and a curse. It started out being linked to your Instagram account, which was nice because it gave users a pre-existing network of followers and accounts to follow. The bad part is—how do I put this?—the reasons I follow someone on Instagram, which is all about images, are completely different from the reasons I might follow someone on Threads. I think it would have been better not to link the apps at first, but I am not an expert.

To begin with, everything was running on an algorithm, with no following tab, but that was fixed after a couple of weeks. Compared to Mastodon, it’s much easier to develop a following on threads. After starting a little slow, I started interacting with people and responding to the questions and ‘follow-threads’ other people posted, and I quickly had over 100 followers (not a lot, but better than Mastodon).

Threads currently has 23.7 Monthly Active Users which, again, is not in Twitter/X’s ballpark, but is better than Mastodon. Also, discoverability is much higher on threads. It’s easier to get your posts seen beyond your small circle, using whatever algorithmic witchcraft is available to you. But every day I see several posts from people that are basically like ‘This Place is Dead,’ and maybe for them, it is, but Threads is definitely an app that will give you back what you put into it. Find your people (I’ve found a thriving community of writers and readers), interact with them in non-toxic ways, and your feed and your following will grow.

The Culture of Threads is much less focused on the ‘outrage of the day,’ which was what Twitter felt like most days. Everybody is kind of chilling and doing their own thing. It’s not a place you would go to for breaking news, but most people like it that way. Right now, Threads doesn’t have ads or sponsored posts, but I’m sure that is coming, eventually.

So, yeah, it’s a Meta product, with all that entails, but if you’re willing to give it time, it can be a rewarding experience.

Follow me on Threads @c.e.grayson

Bluesky

Bluesky has the blessing/curse situation as well, as it was created by Jack Dorsey, who co-founded twitter. Right now, it has 1.5 million monthly active users, putting it somewhere behind Mastodon. It’s the identity of those users that makes it worthwhile, however.

Bluesky is considered to still be in beta, and the only way to open an account is to have an invitation. Invitations are given to its active users to hand out however they please, so, to get in you have to know somebody. Cue flashback to my high school years when I wasn’t allowed to sit at the cool kids’ table. But thanks to a friend, I did eventually score an invite. Here, I found all of the famous people who had abandoned twitter, which was nice. There is also a big population of civilians like me, and so far, everything seems pretty respectful and chill. I’ve had some nice interactions with some people, and I’ve been followed back by people who are heroes of mine, which feels weird and nice at the same time. I’ve only been on Bluesky for a couple of weeks, and my reach there is not large. Discoverability seems to be an issue here as well, but all of this might change when it’s out of beta and you no longer need an invite to join. How that will change the culture remains to be seen.

Follow me on Bluesky @chadgrayson.bsky.social

I titled this ‘Social Media Showdown” but I’m not really picking a winner. I will say my reach is greatest on Threads, and I absolutely know that I’ve sold some books from there, not so much Mastodon or Bluesky. They each have their distinct cultures, but every site does. You get out what you put in, really, as it is with most things.

[ailtrahq]

Ryan Salame, a former FTX executive, is set to plead not guilty in a Manhattan court on Sep. 7, joining three other persons who have agreed plea deals with federal prosecutors since the exchange’s crash in November 2022. Ryan Salame who served as co-chief executive of FTX Digital Markets Ltd prior to the company’s implosion will plead guilty to criminal charges, according to a Bloomberg report on Sep. 7, citing sources familiar with the case. Salame is News/articles/2023-09-07/ex-ftx-executive-salame-to-plead-guilty-to-criminal-charges" data-type="link" data-id="https://www.bloomberg.com/News/articles/2023-09-07/ex-ftx-executive-salame-to-plead-guilty-to-criminal-charges?utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_content=crypto&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter" target="_blank" rel="noopener">scheduled to appear before District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan and a federal court in Manhattan today, on Sep. 7, to enter his guilty plea. The former FTX executive allegedly oversaw $24 million in political donations and could face prosecution for campaign finance violations, InnerCityPress noted. Federal prosecutors levied similar charges against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) in a December 2022 indictment. US attorneys also filed a superseding indictment to include illegal campaign funding in seven other charges. The News follows negotiations between Salame’s legal team and US prosecutors ahead of Sam Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial in October 2023.  Salame would be the fourth individual to plead guilty to wrongdoing in FTX’s $8 billion collapse. Three other high-ranking figures under Bankman-Fried’s leadership, Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, and Nishad Singh also agreed to deals with prosecutors. Department of Justice (DOJ) attorneys and agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reportedly spoke to former chief regulatory officer at FTX, Daniel Friedberg, in building the government’s case against SBF. The former crypto billionaire is set to appear in a federal court on Oct. 3 to begin his trial on multiple criminal charges. So far, arguments by SBF’s attorneys for his release prior to trial have proved unsuccessful. Bankman-Fried was transferred to the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center, a US prison notorious for its poor conditions, after a judge revoked his $250 million bail. While his former circle entered plea deals with prosecutors, Bankman-Fried denied all the charges filed against him including counts of fraud. Prosecutors allege that SBF redirected billions of FTX customer Assets to fund lavish purchases, garner social Capital, and finance risky investments at his hedge fund Alameda Research.

[awfullydxpeched2]

Something I did this week: 

I listened to Songs of Desperation by These Poor Bastards, in the genre of gothic country, for my album club. I was initially excited, as I like goth music a lot, and it’s most of the music I listen to. I like dark themes in music, or anything goth, so I was excited to hear a different stylistic take on goth. But, as I listened to the album, I found I really did not like the album. It wasn’t the musical choice of combining goth with country, I enjoyed that, but it was how melancholic the whole album was throughout. I find in most goth music, while dark in it’s subject matter or lyrical content, contains musical elements like synthesizers that brightens up the music a little, and creates a musically layered sound that is incredible to listen to, but I did not find this in this album, it just left me feeling down after listening. I wouldn’t listen to it again.

2. Response to an assigned reading: A Twitter Implosion Provides One Last Chance for Newspapers | Opinion

I found this article interesting with it’s claim that Twitter could be saved if it could be a media space for writer’s and journalists. I’ve always found this to be one of Twitter’s benefits, it’s ability to send out news or writing pieces in real time, quickly, with the ability of it being read by a mass widespread audience, it’s incredibly efficient for spreading information in a brief period of time, to educate people quickly on what is going on in the news. I do think, though, at this point it’s too late for Twitter to be saved. It is demising quickly, at the hands of Elon Musk, and unless someone else replaces him, it’s unlikely Twitter could be improved, since many people are leaving or considering leaving Twitter. I personally, have Twitter but have never been much of a enthusiast of it, and wouldn’t mind if the service became obsolete, since I do not use it, but I do think it would be a loss for journalists being able to communicate quickly and to put their pieces out for mass audiences to read. 

3. Topics I am researching:

Goth and Sexuality

Transgender rights and better advocacy

Autism and College Education

LaserDiscs

Dial Up Internet

Early computer chat systems (AIM for example or other 90s/early 2000s programs)

4. Links to five or more discovered resources (including articles, podcasts, books, websites)

5. Update on professionalism as a writer:

I've been engaging in some small practice on interviews, just by asking friends and my boyfriend questions I have drafted and engaging in some light conversation and quote gathering to practice my skills. I've found this is one of my weaknesses with journalism, so I think putting in some practice will be valuable.

6. An anecdote about something you did this week:

I wrote a piece reflecting on Depeche Mode's new single Ghosts Again from their upcoming album this March. I got up early for the premiere of the song, and it was an important moment for me, as I thought there would never be any new music after the sad and unexpected passing of band member Andy Fletcher in May 2022, and it stuck out to me for the realization it gave me of the significance of Depeche Mode in my life, but also for other people in my life who like Depeche Mode.

7. Something I did this week:

I have been doing an internship at Folsom Lake College, and this week helped run a workshop on citations in writing. I helped one of the instructional assistants teach students on proper citations, then after did a write up on how the workshop could be improved but also made more accessible.

8. Responses to assigned readings (assigned for our class or for another class) AMS 160

In When They Blew The Levee discusses the disaster that occurred in the town of Pinhook, Missouri, which was demolished under a flood control project, and the roles the NOAA and the U.S Army of Corps of Engineers play in how the disaster is portrayed. The author aims to prove what really happened in the town of Pinhook, by using counter-narratives and analysis, to challenge the other stance provided on the incident. The author used Louisiana Purchase as an example, showing how this purchase and how this had an impact on the environment through how the river is controlled and managed as evidence to prove the difficulty of managing water levels. 

Some questions I have: 

What is the environmental climate of Pinhook? What is the economic and sociological status of this area? Do the economic and sociological status of individuals from the area impact how the environment is managed? Were the reaction to the disaster and the actions taken impacted by the economy of the area? How did the carefully controlled narrative of the disaster originate, and how it did evolve as more was learned about the disaster?

[aulia-m]

Social Media Diversity Gets Reinvigorated

I think I’m pretty happy that one of the major things that came out of 2022 was the implosion of Twitter which opened up a whole range of other destinations for the social web that may have always been there but saw little attention.

The social space is exciting again with people flocking to places like Mastodon, Post, and Tumblr and the federated space is getting far more attention than ever. 

In a lot of ways it seemed to have brought back some of the web development energy of the 2000s as people began to rethink what’s possible.

Much of the development back then was fueled by VC money which ultimately halted many innovations in pursuit of growth and dominance so it remains to be seen how this new energy is going to be funded. I have doubts that crowdfunding will be able to generate the necessary resources without being supported by other forms. 

What that would be I guess is something that we’ll eventually find out in the coming years if the stance against capitulating to VC demands becomes more widely adopted.

[travelhackerpro]

Crypto Analyst Who Predicted May 2022 Bitcoin Collapse Issues Dire Altcoin Warning – Here’s His Outlook

Crypto Analyst Who Predicted May 2022 Bitcoin Collapse Issues Dire Altcoin Warning – Here’s His Outlook

The crypto analyst who correctly called the collapse of Bitcoin (BTC) this year is now issuing a warning to investors about an impending altcoin implosion. Pseudonymous trader Capo tells his 694,900 Twitter followers that while the financial markets may look bad, the conditions look even worse for altcoins. “The entire market looks bad… Thing is that some altcoins look even worse. If altcoins…

[thefilmsimps]

Glass Onion (dir. Rian Johnson)

-Jere Pilapil- 8/10 Folks, it’s good. I’m happy to see and happy to say that Rian Johnson seems to have found a repeatable formula where he can indulge a bit in his interest in meta commentary and rule breaking without enraging nerds who’ve formed a parasocial relationship with the Skywalker family. The Knives Out franchise, in so far as its two entries show, as ensemble mysteries anchored by Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc. Each movie is a murder mystery where a gaggle of famous actors are the suspects, and each blows up the formula for a murder mystery story a little bit. Each one also revels in the dysfunction of the upper class. This time around, Edward Norton is, in a sense, the patriarch of a group of friends who call themselves The Disruptors (the movie rolls its eyes at this as much as you do). Norton’s Miles Bron is a tech billionaire who invites the rest of the cast to a remote Greek Island for a murder mystery party. Every guest is a success story - in politics, fashion, science, uh, men’s rights - but Bron is the biggest success of all, as shown by the excesses in architecture and décor throughout his island. As one might expect, a real murder happens. Sometimes it’s just good to see a cast having fun, and in this case that’s enough for me. Midway through the movie, we gain some new information in a somewhat cumbersome and tiring way, but the performances carry the audience through this. Daniel Craig spent my entire adult life as James Bond, excellently, but it’s still a joy to see him playing silly as Blanc in both of these movies (and shout out to the underrated Logan Lucky). Ditto Kate Hudson, whose turn in Music was as agonizing as that movie itself. Norton has fun as the smarmy Bron, and Janelle Monaé runs away with much of the movie via a fantastic performance as the Disruptor on the outs with the rest. There is a lot of poking fun at Miles the billionaire here, to say nothing of how vapid or fake these other prominent figure stand-ins are. That shouldn’t be surprising considering the class consciousness (or attempt at it) of Johnson’s The Last Jedi and Knives Out. It’s strangely gotten more attention this time, but I think this movie was conceived with a general “fuck billionaire worship” perspective and lucked into some of our most famous billionaires exposing their own idiocy for the last quarter of 2022. There was no way to know that people would have incidents like Ye’s antisemitism and financial and cultural implosion or Elon Musk’s [gestures vaguely at Twitter and Tesla stock] fresh in their minds when this movie dropped in time for Christmas. That’s just some good timing that not even Miles Bron can buy.