New Years View 2017
                            2017-01-08

So, a full week into 2017 and  I think I've finally reached a point
where I can look around me and evaluate what that will mean to me.

First on  my 2017 list: No  more twitter. I've been  thinking a lot
about this since  the US Presidential Election, and  I've also been
reading over my old post about Reddit.  The facts as I see them are
simple:

- twitter  is a  cess  pool of  fetid hatred  
- jack  dorsey and  the twitter execs couldn't care less 
- every user is expected to put up with it

The  toxicity of  twitter now  seeps  into everything,  on a  level
undreamed  of  just  a  year  or so  ago:  The  President-Elect  of
the  United  States  of  America   now  comes  onto  twitter  every
morning  and sets  the news  agenda with  his latest  pot-pourri of
ignorance,  hatred and  stupidity;  everyone  responds with  either
well-intentioned outrage or celebratory glee; Putin-bots attack the
conversation  with  a  chaotic spew  of  barely-formed  'opinions',
drowning any semblance of debate in a torrent of hatred.

The same effects can are visible in the UK with Brexit, and here in
Ireland with  the 8th Amendment.  I'm informed by other  users that
the same is true in every  other country - AfD in Germany, France's
FN, India's BJP/Shiv Sena extremists... on and on.

I guess the  most important thing is that others  are coming to the
same realisation - that twitter,  like facebook, is a cancer eating
away at our  sanity and ruining our lives. It  is an intrinsic part
of the deliberate erosion of liberal values, and it doesn't care.
There is another issue,  and it is one that I've  been on about for
years, **Owning Your Own Content**;

I think Lindy West put it best when she wrote

> Twitter, for the past five years,  has been a machine where I put
> in  unpaid work  and tension  headaches come  out. I  write jokes
> there for  free. I post  political commentary for free.  I answer
> questions for free. I teach feminism 101 for free.

That, to  me, is the  crux of the problem  we now face  with social
media. We, the 'users', are expected to increase the value of these
services by our  labour; in return we are met  with an overwhelming
deluge of  hatred. This is  no longer even about  selling ourselves
cheap, this  is about trading our  own worth, our own  *ideas*, our
own *values* for  disdain (at best) and threats  against our person
or our  loved ones. That's simply  *insane*, and I want  no further
part of it.

I  guess  some  reading  this  think I'm  jumping  on  this  latest
bandwagon,  but the  truth  is  twitter and  I  have a  complicated
history, and this  is just the latest incarnation  of that internal
dispute. I'll not  be deleting my account or  anything so dramatic,
but I'll  not be  reaching reflexively  for my  phone to  check the
latest outrage levels.

As  to  my  own  words,  I  think  I've  sorted  out  the  last  of
the  wrinkles  with  my  POSSE   System,  and  I'm  happy  to  note
that, following  long gestation,  Manton Reece has  kickstarted his
microblogging service.

I've been  a fan of the  microblog concept ever since  I learned of
it, and  I hope  that this  can be all  it proposes  to be.  In the
interim, my home-brew  methods should ensure that some  of my words
continue to appear on the irretrievably broken twitter service, but
they'll just  be there, shouting  at clouds, while the  world falls
down around them.

                            +++ENDS+++