It has been seven years since I gave up Twitter;1 almost eight years since I deleted Facebook,2 and though I did get tempted back to tweeting for a few months around the 2019 election, I have otherwise done without the main social media platforms for the better part of a decade. Other ‘socials’ have intruded, most notably Quora and Reddit, and I took a long time to delete my Guardian ‘Comment is Free’ account, but the tug of needing to check whether my breathless prose have elicited any tokens of approval or replies has not been a part of my life for long enough that I look upon people who are too dependent upon that behaviour as slightly pathetic, and I congratulate myself on sticking to my principles,3 and seeing through the lie that is ‘engagement’.
That pleasure has been heightened by the very public psychic, intellectual and reputational collapse of the fragile, racist narcissist who now owns the shoddily rebranded Twitter. He seems to have missed that his new name for it would bring to mind something that is past, as in, “my ex,” but he probably has some personal mantra about only moving forward, regretting nothing, etcetera. I used to admire him, having fallen for the attraction of Tesla cars: the Model X was, and is, a wonderful machine. Now, I despise him, in the era of the Cybertruck. His unravelling seems to be multi-faceted and the only reliably creative thing he has left.
Because my life has changed quite a bit, my blog has remained quiet. I am living with my mother in a bungalow we have bought on the Isle of Wight, eight miles from the home I have shared with Amanda for thirteen years. My mother’s dementia, exacerbated by a fall in which she cracked a vertebrae in January, had left her unable to live alone and accelerated the need for her to move in with someone. The care system in the UK, as with most of the systems whose effectiveness and humanity define a nation’s level of civilization, has been eroded under successive neo-liberal governments to the extent that one cannot guarantee one’s parent will be free from torture in a care home.4 Residential care was, therefore, not an option.
Amanda and I are still together, though we live apart. We had planned for her to move in, at least part time, but it hasn’t happened. She is here a couple of times a week, and I am there a couple more, for a few hours at least, while a personal assistant sits with my mother. Once a month, my sister comes down to stay for a weekend and I spend Friday and Saturday nights at home. For most of the time, though, I have a twenty-four hour a day job, caring for someone with ‘moderate-to-severe’ dementia.
The relationship with my mother is not unalloyed tedium, and I’ll perhaps write more about the rewards and pleasures of caring for someone you love, for there are such things, at another time. However, one of its most devastating downsides is her constant need for attention. She can read a magazine still, or even a book, but it makes less and less sense to her and will, of course, be entirely unfamiliar to her when she picks it up again. She can watch recognizable television, and she can play solitaire on her iPad if it’s set up for her. However, she needs reassurance four or five times an hour, and that’s not just a stock phrase or two. I need to listen to what form her generalized anxiety has taken this time, and respond in kind. I am getting better at anticipating the moment when she will need to engage, but it still means that I am concentrating on my mother for most of the day and into the night. I have no attention for any sort of extended thought, whether it is reading, working on computer stuff, or writing a blog post. If I can’t fit an activity into a spare five or ten minutes, I am unable to do it.
I am the perfect candidate for the unfocussed, atomized flicker of social media addiction.
Last week, I deleted my Reddit account, because I had become too hooked on it. I don’t want to care about how some random musing of mine, on a topic I didn’t have any thoughts on when I logged in, has been received by a mass of anonymous strangers. It has its uses as a reference resource for computing, but the vegan subs to which I subscribed were childish virtue contests. I haven’t missed it as much as I expected. I have, in fact, been able to read again, fitting in a half hour at bedtime and, most days, some time while my mother has a nap after lunch. Until last week, I would have opened my book, but ‘just checked’ Reddit, and have ended up posting until my mother woke up. Since the great deletion, I have read a Jesse Stone mystery (utter crap and totally undemanding), and a Marjery Allingham mystery (shonky story but hypnotic settings) and two editions of the London Review of Books.
Nevertheless, I am fascinated by the possibility of social media, although I don’t want to surrender to the control of it. I have installed a Matrix5 server on my server box, and the chat application, Element, that runs on the Matrix framework. I haven’t really worked out how to use it yet, so haven’t invited anyone on to my server, but I hope to give it some time at some point. For now, if you’ve read this, feel free to leave me a message in this post’s room.6
This morning, the last morning of my weekend off, I was reading an article7 on the Guardian website about how Brazil has blocked Twitter, or X or ex-twitter or whatever. This appears to be quite a devastating move, as Brazilians are the fifth most enthusiastic people for ex-twitter use, and millions of them are looking for an alternative. The one an awful lot of them have settled on is, at first sight, a Twitter clone. It was even set up by the former boss of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, but, instead of sitting on a single entity’s servers, subject to their control and manipulation, it is, like the Matrix.org protocol, decentralized. At the moment, private Bluesky servers are only in beta, so I have signed up to the main server, bsky.social. Somebody had already nabbed my username, Danceswithcats (plagiarist!), so I’m dwcuk.bsky.social.8
I wasted a precious hour this morning exploring it and another precious hour this afternoon working out how to embed it in this site. However, it appears to be all set up. You’ll find a button at the bottom of each page of this website now, as well as a button to my Bandcamp page. If I can work out how to get Mastadon installed on my server and up and running, I’ll add a Mastadon button.
I know. I know. I’m a clicking hypocrite.
But it’s all very interesting.
- https://danceswithcats.net/debeaked/ [↩]
- https://danceswithcats.net/free-at-last/ [↩]
- https://danceswithcats.net/a-polemic-about-social-media-and-political-campaigning/ [↩]
- https://www.carehome.co.uk/news/article.cfm/id/1563427/bbc-panorama-exposes-abuse-neglect-two-care-homes [↩]
- https://matrix.org/ [↩]
- https://matrix.to/#/!eGHjKFMpvcxofeNxnT:dwccloud.uk?via=dwccloud.uk [↩]
- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/ [↩]
- I’ve suspended my account, for reasons to be explained when I get time for another post. [↩]
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