Exiting the Vampire Castle
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, I guess I must want it; fool me three times and call it a business model.
I’ve always been bad at social media. I will be furtively active until I begin to feel awful and quit. But after some weeks, like a beaten dog returning to his master, so do I return to twitter. Some urge propels me: is it the compulsion to repeat? The death-drive? Sure, why not. But the master does not welcome the bad dog home again: the bad dog is ignored. The proprietary algorithm, like Father God, is jealous and punishes those who do not believe.
The ugly truth is that the twitter user is being used; your content does not belong to you but belongs to the master of the castle. Once upon a time twitter’s network —following Deleuze & Guattari’s dictate to “make a rhizome;” to make lines of flight away from control— seemed boundless, a secret portal through the matrix, creating spontaneous connections across space, time, race and class; I made friends there (Yoko Ono followed me); and yet, all the while, like Cthulhu, it was harvesting data and sucking brains. When it was good, it was pretty good, such as in moments of crisis, like when the queen died. When it was bad it was a hellsite; over the last few months the new owner has proven that the hell of this broken hellsite has no bottom, platforming anti-trans rhetoric in the guise of free speech. In the leviathan dawn of techno-feudalism, where big-tech is instituting austerity measures in the fiefdom, the lines-of-flight rhizome-dream no longer applies (did it ever?). The networks are being chopped. The wall that went up this week between twitter and substack is the most recent example. These blockades seem, to this peasant anyhow, stupid and self-defeating: “uh…? But Lord Dracula! Network effects do not work in a closed fortress! Severing data streams will kill the rhizome and stanch the flow of blood!”
Whatever, dude. I can only speculate, wildly, that, because of AI, in five-years-time the internet as we know it will no longer functionally exist, having metastasized into a machine-grown toxic wasteland of hallucinated content. Or did that already happen?
What it's like to be offline
