It was the fading years of the last century, and indeed millenium. Shoes were big, trousers were bigger, and to keep wallets attached to huge trouser pockets, clanking shiny chains were necessary. Nihilistic ear-destroying bands were de rigeur in my circle until, amid the Motörhead, the Slayer, and the Anthrax, I happened to object to one track by Atari Teenage Riot: not on musical grounds, but because they wanted to Destroy 2000 Years of Culture.

Destroy 2000 Years of Culture EP cover

Being the product of a Classical education, I felt personally challenged by this stated aim — and being surrounded at the time by people who had been comprehensively failed by British attempts at a modern and comprehensive curriculum, there was nobody able to offer (what I felt to be) a sufficient defence of ATR’s position.

Since then I have done a bit more reading and thinking, but I still maintain that this sort of Year Zero take is not likely to lead anywhere good. You may well have principled objections to the way the last couple of millennia went down, but you’re not going to fix the outcomes by ignoring what went before. In fact, those twenty centuries show the very specific sorts of scars that develop when someone tries — and fails — to destroy the facts on the ground.

From the sublime to the ridiculous

All of this scene-setting is because Bluesky announced it had secured $13M of funding in a round lead by (I swear I am not making this up) an outfit called “Blockchain Capital”. This name caused some predictable concern; so predictable, in fact, that Bluesky felt the need to include this note in the announcement:

This does not change the fact that the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.).

Less reassuringly, the very next sentence announces the appointment of Kinjal Shah to Bluesky’s board. Ms Shah is not just a general partner at Blockchain capital, but has been a booster of cryptocurrencies and NFTs. It was just the other day I was idly wondering what happened to all of the cryptocurrency and NFT guys; surely they hadn’t all managed a seamless pivot to become AI guys? But no, here is a proper old-school unreconstructed crypto/NFT gal!

I’m not quite as down on Bluesky as Jamie Zawinski, who famously has a “won’t touch anything Jack Dorsey has touched” policy. It’s too fun for me not to join in, but I am keeping my suspicions up, and this latest move is certainly not helping.

Elephant mother and calf

Meanwhile, in other I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-Twitter news, today is my second anniversary on Mastodon. This is “the social-media platform for Linux users”, and it definitely has that geeky early-Internet vibe. This is my tribe, and sure enough, I enjoy hanging out on Mastodon and always find a lot of cool people on there.

That said, I do still miss early Twitter, and specifically, the fact that it was the place:

The clarity of being @brand — and not having to specify anything else! — was very valuable, and it was something that Facebook or Google, for all their ubiquity, could never deliver.

There is value in a single digital town square, and in being able to be part of a single global conversation. Twitter was a big part of how I kept up with goings-on in tech from my perch in provincial Italy. Timezones aside, Twitter meant that not being in Silicon Valley was not a major handicap, because I could catch up with everything that was begin discussed in my own time (in a way that would not have been possible if more real-time paradigms like Clubhouse had taken off).

Now some guy who spends his time “skipping like a dipshit” for the favour of a would-be dictator has destroyed — well, not two thousand years, although I was on Twitter for fifteen years, and that is an eon in Internet time, and also I’m not sure about “culture”. I have not yet felt the need to go on Threads, but I do like what is going on over on Bluesky, and would rather not have to give up on it because some other grifters managed to ruin that too. I am going to continue to put my main efforts into Mastodon, though — and not just because Bluesky doesn’t have an iPad app. Grump.

🖼️ Destroy 2000 Years of Culture EP cover from image search (I own the album, but not the EP); elephant photo by Hu Chen on Unsplash