The day the networks died

I guarantee I can tell you the weather in Brussels. Even though I am on holiday in Romania, I’m checking the Brussels weather forecast twenty to thirty times a day.

It’s not because I'm feeling homesick. Twitter’s change to X gave the push I needed to close my account and delete the app. Now the reshuffling of the icons on my phone home screen means that when I don’t know quite what to do with myself, I automatically tap the blue-and-white icon, and up pops the Belgian Royal Meteorological Institute’s weather app.

Like an ex-smoker not knowing what do with their hands, it’s a small sign of how addictive the habit was. It also shows how much I have relied on Twitter both for current information and for online socialising. I've been on the site since 2007, and made many friends - but the shift to X meant that I could say that I had lived all the way through Twitter, from hopeful early days to broken hellsite, and I didn’t find the buzzword-filled promise of what was to come even slightly convincing. As euphemistic French death announcements say, “Twitter has lived”.

The wrench of deleting the app and closing the account was entirely about the people, not the product. I felt that I was burning a lot of good networks and friendships, and of course an enormous amount of free writing in 15 years of tweeting. (I downloaded my archive, but it would not surprise me if I never looked at it again.)

At the same time, I had noticed the circle of people I was interacting with getting smaller and smaller, as people left and as the blue tick algorithm boosts shoved conspiracy theorists and authoritarians in my face instead of my friends.

The Twitter views metric also showed me that, even with more than eight thousand followers, it was rare for me to get 500 or 600 views on a tweet. Not much for that level of effort, against the headwind of the sense of impending doom, increasingly irrelevant advertising, and the generally odious character of the new owner.

However, I am left with a dilemma. I have a lot of opinions, I'm interested in hearing other peoples, and there are networks of expertise that I want to be part of and learn from. Where do I go?

As a friend said, on some social media platform or other, every Twitter replacement is bad in its own special way. Substack Notes is full of self-promoting 50-something men (myself included). BlueSky is very quiet and heavily skewed towards Americans. Mastodon is complex and lack critical mass, as well as having a moderation problem that seems to be getting worse. Threads is not available in the European Union, and even if it were I would be very reluctant to jump on a platform that gives me the opinions of people whose photos I want to see. After all, I don’t want to see Loïc Blondiaux’s holiday snaps.

So what’s an opinionated wonk to do?

In terms of getting the word out, there are a few options. I will probably try to write more on Substack, so I am building up a collection of things that I have written rather than just thousands of potentially-searchable tweets.

I might use Substack Notes or BlueSky, or even, God have mercy, start posting regularly on LinkedIn. That's going to be the best set of tools that I can have for putting down what I think and getting it in front of (some) people.

Where there is a much bigger problem is in finding new networks. During the pandemic, everyone’s networks froze in place and if you were lucky you didn’t lose much - but you gained nothing, because you weren’t meeting any interesting new people.

Twitter’s fatal Musk infection feels like it risks the same. I don't want to be in a situation where I'm only talking to the people I met on Twitter, but I don’t see somewhere that will allow the creation that the early days of Twitter provided. In particular, there isn't anywhere that allows you to interact as an equal with people who are far more expert than you in your field, or to directly get into the eye-line of the right politician or journalist.

Let's not pretend that Twitter was egalitarian in that respect. It was much easier for people who weremore eloquent, more middle-class, and more opinionated to push themselves forward and Twitter was never a representation of society as a whole.

However, it gave a level of immediacy that I think will be hard to replicate elsewhere. I know I’m going to feel it when the next big story breaks. I can also see it being a real loss to people earlier in their careers who are trying to build up networks - unless the networks are more interested in TikTok dance videos than I anticipate.

Many of the good things that I would like to see in a social network, such as more democratic control, better moderation, better validation of information, and more inclusivity weren't ever provided by Twitter, but the reach of its network at least was a starting point.

Now it's gone, will we be able to reinvent it better somewhere else?

Tram lines

Milan Kundera died last week, and Jacques Rupnik discusses his ideas of Europe, and specifically his view that central Europe was the “kidnapped West”. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a great deal as I cross and recross the Ottoman/Habsburg imperial boundaries in my wandering around Romania. 🇫🇷

The end of MP's’ independent conscience in the House of Commons goes right back to the 19th century, driven by the natural pressures of party and an increasing electorate. A great data-driven historical read by Philip Salmon at the Victorian House of Commons blog.

Radio Télévision Brussels

🎧 Anita Anand and William Dalrymple’s History of Slavery series on their Empire podcast is reaching the last days of slavery and there are some fascinating stories coming out. In particular, I hadn’t realised how many attempts it had taken to abolish it - and the echoes between some of the anti-abolition arguments and the anti-climate-action arguments are quite striking.

🎥 On the road in Romania I caught the Moldovan foreign Oscar entry, a funny and dark comedy set in 1992 called Carbon. The trailer is online, hopefully it will be available on streaming sites or in cinemas. Catch it if you can.

Vijfhoek

🎬 One of the things I’m sorry to miss in Brussels while I’m gone is Palace Cinema’s “Sun Screens” programme, which has some really excellent and rare films alongside rescreenings of classics. Worth checking out are “Sois belle et tais-toi” about the experience of female actresses in the mid-1970s, Marilyn Monroe in “The Seven Year Itch” and “Let’s Make Love”, and a reshowing of Kieślowski’s Three Colours Trilogy. And all free if you pay 21€/month for the Cineville Pass, which I highly recommend.