Sphinx

If Elon Musk is going to destroy the Bird Site, inadvertently or not – the reported wheeze that everyone will get a timeline prioritising tweets from $8/month ‘verified’ users suggests he doesn’t have the faintest idea what makes it great for many people – I am hoping that he either takes his time (couple of years, say) or gets it over with in the next couple of weeks. I have a chapter forthcoming, at some point in the next year or so, exploring references to Thucydides on Twitter both as a window onto his image in contemporary culture and as a snapshot of the dynamics of social media. It would be nice if Twitter retained something of its current significance when the chapter appears – or, I urgently need to rewrite some sections substantially before the book goes to press, to explain why anyone thought this stuff was worth worrying about back in 2019…

This past week has been very much a matter of “you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til some pampered egomaniac has stomped all over it and it’s gone’. There is a serious question as to how far Twitter just suits my purposes in several overlapping ways and how far my behaviour has adapted to take advantage of what it has to offer, but either way there’s no obvious alternative that covers all the bases, leaving aside the fact that my rather elderly iPad refuses now to run the apps for either Facebook or Mastodon.

Mastodon Social, where I am establishing a foothold (come up and see me at @NevilleMorley@mastodon.social), seems a reasonable possibility for replicating the ‘interesting chats with relatively bounded community of like-minded people’ element. Granted, it’s currently suffering from slowness and clunkiness and a confusing structure, so it’s going to take a while to reconstruct any semblance of my current Twitter circle – a powerful reminder of both sunk costs (the years it took to work out who I wanted to talk to, who I wanted to listen to and how to filter out a lot of others) and network effects (trying to find those people again, and being unsure whether they’ve not migrated to Mastodon or it’s just that the search function is a bit erratic). I can’t see any equivalent of Lists, which, filtered via Tweetdeck, were a wonderful means of managing different sorts of groups and conversations. In this respect, Mastodon seems more like it could be a cosier, less evil version of Facebook.

But one of the great things about Twitter has been the serendipity. Follow a decent number of interesting people, and you don’t just learn from their expertise, you encounter whatever they happen to find interesting from the people they follow. Network effects again; this time, not so much the pull of networks that have the ‘right’ people in them so you don’t want to leave as the pull of networks that have sheer scale on their side, so you’re more likely to connect to something you didn’t know you needed. For example: I would never have sought out a Eurovision community, but a chance retweet by a fellow classicist introduced me to the work of a historian of the ESC, Catherine Baker, and that’s now an annual thing – and, no, she doesn’t seem to be on Mastodon yet.

Still more than this: search regularly for ‘Thucydides’ and you get an illuminatingly random sample of what’s going on in some of the wackier regions of the Internet: over-excited fans of a very minor Korean pop act, lots of new age motivational trainers, conspiracy theorists, insecure body-builders and cryptocurrency obsessives. One of the theories that I need to find time to investigate fully – having finally extracted approval from the faculty research ethics committee after eighteen months of discussion – is that there is a significant correlation between people who call themselves ‘@Thucydides431BC’ and far-right views. Certainly it’s been an education – an endurable snapshot of that area of social media, like following someone I was at college with who’s become a Brexity UKIP-adjacent loon, whereas exploring this stuff in depth would rapidly lead to madness and despair.

And occasionally the streams cross, in a truly glorious manner. Based Balm’s aesthetic consultations; Thucydides wants you to combat cultural decadence and the decline of traditional masculinity by buying skincare products. Honestly, I don’t think a paraphrase can do justice to this website…

Confident. Abundant. Based. Vril. No, I don’t know if that’s a Bulwer-Lytton reference, or their spelling is as terrible as their fact-checking. Be more Vril.

Part of the advertised attraction of Mastodon is that it’s free from this sort of nonsense – the entry barriers are probably rather high for MAGA trolls and people advertising Jordan Peterson-esque beauty products. That can risk becoming an echo chamber in the bad sense. I have yet to find anyone on Mastodon misattributing quotes to Thucydides; this is both a positive and a negative thing…. So, no, I am probably not going to quit Twitter completely just yet, or at any rate the Thucydiocy Bot isn’t; it’s interesting to note that, while @NevilleMorley‘s follower count has diminished significantly in the last week, @Thucydiocy’s has been going up.