“Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result — my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.” – Wynn Bruce
A couple days ago this man set himself on fire in front of the Supreme Court building. Initially there was very little anything about it in the mainstream media, and what did exist failed to emphasize – if they even mentioned – this was an act of climate activism.
In the movie “Don’t Look Up” I feel one aspect they got pretty right was the role of major media outlets. The movie didn’t really get into the ‘why’ of it as that is a much harder question, but i felt they had their finger on the what/how anyway. So what is the why? Frankly I am not sure, if I had to guess it is something like complicitness mixed with a bizarre apathy on top of a either a profound ignorance of the moral role of journalism in society or a deep corruption stemming from their late stage capitalist dependent business model .
I think a lot of us sense this, even if we wouldn’t articulate it in those sorts of terms, and social media, and platforms like YouTube and podcasts etc have filled a gap for a lot of people to at least supplement the information we get from the world. To let us bypass the largely corporate controlled channels and sort of democratically decide what we feel is important or worth knowing about. But, these forums and platforms haven’t proven especially robust to abuse, corruption, misinformation, or inappropriate censorship either.
Another billionaire moving to take over one of the better – i wouldn’t say great – platforms that in effect function as a public forum doesn’t bode well in my mind. Twitter limited political adds, and showed willingness to ban notable people – to little to late thought it may have been – so they have taken better steps than many others, but Musk most likely would be aiming to undo a lot of that.
So, now what, back to Facebook? Was OrangeMan right, will his shit social network be vindicated?
Well, at least for me, no.
Rather, I have been putting more energy back into things like this blog. Microblogging has its place, but plain ol blogs are good too and IMO have been getting neglected in favor of things like twitter threads more than they should have, I for one plan to re-curate my RSS feed reader, and do a bit more reading there.
I have been finding sources, journalists, channels, and platforms that are worth supporting financially and pitching in towards their funding via Patreon and OpenCollective
I am sharing what I am doing with you, dear reader. I guess that is something.
For social media itself there are very promising alternatives. Decentralized/federated options exist and are viable, but mostly under utilized. NextCloud, Mastodon, PeerTube, Element/Matrix, and so on. Ironically one of the most concise cases for Mastodon was made on the ol bird app very recently.
Similarly to this blog, this isn’t something all new to me I have had a Mastodon account for years now, and have played around with Element, and Nextcloud too, but now is certainly as good a time as any to renew my push in a good direction. Find me over on Mastodon via https://mastodon.social/invite/acHW86uF
A Mind Running Wild 