Recently, while talking to a friend who used to run a large media website, I casually mentioned the rise of Bluesky. More than a million users have deleted their X (formerly Twitter) accounts and moved over to the upstart social media site, which they see as a healthier replacement.
“I don’t get it,” my friend said, his voice (and apparently his heart rate) spiking. “Why? You’re free!” After all, we had witnessed X’s unraveling, as it turned from a genuine community space into an often venomous one. Why should we imagine Bluesky would avoid that fate? And more to the point: Why keep trying to recreate the internet of the past? Why not accept where we are and move on?
We have officially arrived in late-stage social media. The services and platforms that delighted us and reshaped our lives when they began appearing a few decades ago have now reached total saturation and maturation. Call it malaise. Call it Stockholm syndrome. Call it whatever. But each time a new platform debuts, promising something better — to help us connect better, share photos better, manage our lives better — many of us enthusiastically trek on over, only to be disappointed in the end.
Bluesky, created by one of Twitter’s original founders, Jack Dorsey, has been around since 2019. In the aftermath of the presidential election in November, it has become a digital refuge from the interferences of Elon Musk. People have been fleeing X since Musk bought the company in 2022, when, seemingly for his own amusement, he began stripping it of nearly all its conversational functionality. (Shonda Rhimes was an early deserter: “Not hanging around for whatever Elon has planned,” she posted on the site. “Bye.”) Musk started charging a fee for security features that protected users from hacks, and introduced a requirement that all content be used to train Grok, X’s A.I. chatbot. Since Musk took over, the volume of hateful slurs directed at Black, Jewish, trans and queer people has soared. For many, Musk’s close alignment with Trump was the final straw.
The history of the internet is littered with the virtual headstones of services that rose and faded as tides of attention — and money — came and went. (Anyone remember Turntable.fm? Foursquare? Versus?) Typically the demise of a company doesn’t inspire a collective funereal lament — and a rallying cry to decamp for greener pastures. People rightfully see Musk’s X as emblematic of the overreach of our technocracy, and the site’s devolution into bot chatter, nonsensical spam, low-grade advertising and Pop Crave alerts as a harbinger of the era to come.
The velocity and tone of the eulogies for X signals something crucial about the way we’ve come to think about our online environments and our power to shape them. People aren’t merely saying goodbye to X — they’re condemning the place. Many seem to hope their departures will resemble a general strike, or a boycott, though that seems unlikely, as X is not a profitable company, and Musk seems pleased by the influx of right-wingers who want a more mainstream Truth Social.
To some degree, though, I understand what the defectors are searching for in a site like Bluesky. I’ve spent a lot of my life on the internet and most of my career writing about it. The first time I went online, in the ’90s, it was electric. As a child, I would sneak out of my bedroom to use the family computer to log into AOL chat rooms. The sheer depth and velocity of conversations amazed me; suddenly I had a portal to explore new avenues of thought and identity that held the potential to radically expand my own. I’ve been chasing that dopamine high in the halls of BlackPlanet, Tumblr, Instagram and TikTok ever since. The kinship, profundity and brilliance of Black Twitter alone was enough reason to keep trying.
That early optimism masked the inner machinations of Silicon Valley. After all, the idea of an online utopia is what has been marketed to us since the earliest days of the internet’s formation. And at its best, X was enchanting. It offered new forms of storytelling (including, yes, memes), windows into social-justice movements, fascinating rabbit holes of academia and theory, razor-sharp media criticism, nostalgic spirals, unparalleled humor, rich repositories of knowledge and real-world friendships. Of course there was also the daily drama, cultural analysis and main character energy that provided much of the appeal and entertainment.
But we would be mistaken to assume that any site can resist the same trajectory that almost every other tends to follow. The whisper network draws in early adopters, followed by a stage of velvet-rope exclusivity. Next comes lucrative rapid growth and an imperative to scale in order to maximize profitability, which invariably results in changes that degrade the initial experience. And then, decline. (Just look at the debate raging over on Substack, the popular newsletter platform, about recent changes to its app, motivating early users to find yet another alternative.)
Facebook, which arguably inaugurated our modern social media era, debuted in 2004; Twitter in 2006. Even Instagram, a baby by comparison, has now been around for nearly 15 years. What have we learned in all these years of expecting these sites to be our salvation? I think of the running gag on “Silicon Valley,” the HBO show that satirized the tech industry, in which various founders, pitching increasingly inane and convoluted offerings to investors, all invariably described their work as “making the world a better place.” There’s no denying that these platforms have at least in some ways made our lives easier and more interesting. But the blight we’re currently experiencing on X isn’t something that developed after Musk’s takeover. It was there from the start.
The early internet was founded on the hope that cyberspace would be a unifying force for good. Unlimited access to information would provide free education and encourage greater participation in government and civic life. There was hope it would advance civil rights movements too: In 1985, Donna Haraway famously imagined a future free from socially imposed identities in the “post-gender world” of digital life. But from the start, the technology industry and its products replicated existing inequalities. There were ideas about “free” culture and openness, yes, but the people who benefited the most already had access to capital. (In the 1990s, the venture capitalist John Doerr famously described the tech boom of that decade as “the greatest legal creation of wealth this planet has ever seen.” He was right — just not for everyone.)
Take the earliest messaging boards of the 1980s and ’90s, created with the most basic functionality: to exchange messages among computers. Yet from Day 1, they were rife with hostility. “Yes, they were creating a whole new world,” writes Charlton D. McIlwain, author of “Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter.” “But it wasn’t a question about if and when racism would rear its ugly head. Racism, fueled by anti-Blackness, was already there when it began.”
As Malcolm Harris lays out in his 2023 book “Palo Alto,” the politics of the products are tethered to the ethos of their environment. The Palo Alto System, as Harris interprets it, is meant to uphold power structures that California has been cultivating since its beginning, starting with pilfering land from Indigenous people for development. Harris urges us to see that as a forewarning. The state that those practices birthed “didn’t simply quell violence,” he writes. “It stoked it, focused it and organized it.” Harris traces that genesis through mining, to the building of the railroad and the establishment of Stanford University, whose founding president, David Starr Jordan, was a eugenicist, through to PayPal’s co-founder Peter Thiel, who helped fund many of the companies we use today — including Facebook, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yelp, Spotify and SpaceX. He also helped fuel Trump’s first win in 2016, a campaign that represented the supposed antithesis of Silicon Valley’s professed progressive values. “Competition and domination, exploitation and exclusion, minority rule and class hate: These aren’t problems capitalist technology will solve,” Harris notes. “That’s what it’s for.”
As platforms get bigger — adding members, investors and expectations — their goals change as well. Consider Facebook. Early on, Mark Zuckerberg saw the site as social infrastructure for a global community. He spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to keep it civil, building armies of human content moderators to police the flow of disinformation, hate speech and child sexual abuse materials on the site. But as Facebook has grown, it has ceded responsibility, significantly scaling back those mandates (while still claiming they exist).
One reason people think Bluesky will be different is that the app has a decentralized ownership model, which means it’s controlled by a four-person board rather than any single person or company. Bluesky is a public benefit corporation, a for-profit company that aims to have a positive impact on society rather than focusing on maximizing shareholder value. There are currently no ads, which means Taco Bell and Tide aren’t trying to get your attention with meme-speak.
The platform is still small, with roughly 25 million users, a fraction of the population of its peers, and it runs on an open-source protocol, which means that anyone can build their own subcommunities on top of it with their own moderators and guidelines. Already there are a few attempts, including Blacksky, a community dedicated to Black users that hopes to recreate the best of Black Twitter. (So far, it’s still a nascent aggregation of scattered photos and messages.)
Yet all other indicators point to a service organized suspiciously like its predecessor: The company hopes to start generating revenue with subscriptions, and has raised close to $23 million in venture funding from private investors. Even Dorsey has lost his early faith: In May, he announced that he had stepped away from the Bluesky board, and later gave an interview in which he lamented that the team was “repeating all the mistakes we made as a company,” referring to the early years of Twitter. Bluesky, he said, was turning into just “another app.”
The growth mind-set of Silicon Valley prioritizes scaling and profitable returns — often above all else. The core revenue model for the last two decades has remained the same: scraping and selling data, and using that same data to place targeted advertisements in front of the people whose data has been scraped. The sites need people to drive engagement, but that leads them to make decisions that keep people scrolling, even if it makes them miserable. Researchers at Cambridge University and elsewhere found that negativity on Facebook is rewarded with more engagement. Posts of unfavorable news stories were shared far more often by users — one reason, one can deduce, sites give virulent behavior a pass.
I’m no oracle — Bluesky may very well turn out to be the salutary place that people are craving. It has a gentle, low-stakes feel to it. Its early era has been marked by cordial interactions, generosity between members and more autonomy: The service has what users call a “nuclear block” button that wipes trolls and racists from the plane of your personal existence. The culture and ethos are still taking shape, and it’s still tricky to figure out whom to follow. It’s not clear yet whether one should try to recreate their social dynamics from X or start anew.
As it stands, X is still more robust (read: fun) than Bluesky. The jokes and ideas are more polished, a result of density and familiarity. It offers more up-to-the-minute analysis on the frenzy around Luigi Mangione, developments in the Diddy sex-trafficking case and the push to ban trans health care. X users are still providing firsthand reports from Gaza, Sudan and Syria. These are some reasons that many people, including me, are still willing to tolerate the noxious environment on X, for now.
It would be easy to articulate an argument for building shared social realities that aren’t at the mercy of a billionaire’s whims, to tell people to go outside and touch grass. Unlike my friend, I understand why people keep searching for online nirvana: The possibility of transformative power in digital practices and online convening spaces is still a seductive promise. Moving forward, I plan to integrate what the sociologist and author Ruha Benjamin has to say about right-sizing our relationship to the internet. “We put so much investment in being saved by these objects we create, by these technologies,” she writes in her book “Race After Technology.” But what we hold dear about the internet is not what the companies can monetize. “Our real resource,” she continues, “is ourselves.”
No service will save us, and we shouldn’t expect one to. The very nature of technology is ephemeral, and it all has its own half-life, an invisible rate of decay that turns any platform into a wasteland. The key is remembering that the devolution into instability is right around the corner, so we should get the most out of it while we can.
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