I soft-quit Bluesky around the inauguration due to the concentration of American political news and discourse. As always: I don’t begrudge anyone their topics of conversation, and I don’t hide from the news in general; but that’s not what social media is for, for me.
Anyway, I tried going back a couple weeks ago. My new mute words weren’t particularly successful, but my ability to moderate my feed’s content wasn’t the only issue. Within a day, it was full of both sides of a conversation about a small press’s financial problems, which were related to accounting practices that may not have been great. That’s the kind of topic I’m interested in—but the discussion swiftly got vicious, with authors piling on the press for not setting royalties aside, and the owner of the press providing the kind of response that only really reassures folks who trust you already. I don’t remember seeing this intensity of discussion on something like, say, Audiblegate, or #DisneyMustPay, where the bad actors are players who set standards in the industry, not struggling small business owners.
And so, more or less, it went. There’s of course no shortage of lovely art to repost and fun shitpost games to play. And I’ve gotten more visibility for my books on Bluesky than I have anywhere else (not that that’s saying much). But… authors versus publishers, liberals versus leftists, incessant dunking on AI and Trump and Elon—dunking that I agree with, and wish more people would understand—combined with the drumbeat of horrible news at home and abroad, and the stream of pleas for help from endless Palestinian refugees with nowhere else to go…
And through it, I found myself refreshing more often than I wanted, not to look for new posts, but for engagement on my old ones. Which… I mean, at my level of Social Media, this is just stupid. But it’s hard to avoid, for me.
It took a day or so to sink in, but I think the final nail was this:
https://bsky.app/profile/paleofuture.bsky.social/post/3lleyiummfc2n
I’m not embedding it because it’s an appalling image and I want you to choose whether to look at it. It’s an image of an ICE agent handcuffing a weeping brown woman, created by OpenAI’s recently released Studio Ghibli plagiarism machine, as posted by the official White House X account.
And I’m just.
No shade to the poster, who is only documenting the cruelty of the American regime, the smugness of Sam Altman, the hollowness of genAI. It’s all true, it’s all on the public record, it’s all another item in the list of bills that’ll come due, somehow, someday.
But getting that stuff thrown in my face Is just…
… I can’t spend my time like that.
“Can’t.” The probability that I’ll be back at some point approaches 100%.
But the prospect is less and less inviting. I was extremely reliant on Facebook and Twitter for a long time, but not so reliant that I ever want to see them again now. The more I post, the more it feels like work; and the more I read, in the long run, the worse I feel. So who knows? Maybe this is the quit where I discover I really don’t miss it.
Currently reading: THE REVISIONARIES, by A. R. Moxon (almost done!)