Author Archives: Steve Mays
Mastodon is designed to be “antiviral”
Clive Thompson provides a thoughtful look at how Mastodon is different from Twitter (and most other platforms):
Perhaps even more important than the design of Mastodon is the behavior established by its existing user base — i.e. the folks who’ve been using it for the last six years. Those people have established what is, in many ways, an antiviral culture. They push back at features and behaviors that are promoting virality, and they embrace things that add friction to the experience. They prefer slowness to speediness.
Mastodon will never really be a replacement for Twitter. It’s a subtly different place. You see less of the massively viral, you-gotta-see-this posts. You see a lot more murmuring conversation.
What is this thing called Amway?
The MAGA movement is a bell curve… that has peaked
The MAGA movement, based on aging white boomer victimhood is a bell curve. […] White boomers never faced the great depression, or a world war, yet we were particularly susceptible to the idea that we were victims of hardships. “Whatever the fuck is wrong here, it must be someone else’s fault. Women. Immigrants. Black people.”
After lifetimes of leaning into consumerism and mass consumption we boomers woke up to find ourselves angry and reactive to our own disconnection. Maybe a bigger SUV would help? Maybe a third marriage? […] Retirement is when a strange unnamed panic really set in for boomers. No longer able to rely on the stale connection of surface level workplace relationships, we were left sitting alone in our easy chairs staring at the Tucker Carlsons of the Fox News rabbit hole.
Trump is the ongoing final act of angry white boomers. No longer did we have to coyly perform the wink wink of coded racist language about welfare queens and urban crime. We were liberated to march with Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, our creeping panic weaponized into authoritarian rage.
For MAGA boomers to admit now, at this terribly late date, that all the white privilege and rage in the world isn’t calming our loneliness or our growing panic, means looking back on 70 years or more and admitting we fell prey to our most selfish, ugly, bullying instincts.
Essay by Mark Greene
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