#61 Cover Your Bases: How I Am Managing the News Right Now, Thoughts about BlueSky and Threads, Recommended Reads
It's been two weeks since the election(though it feels like 100 years). I am finally moving out of grief into a more functional determination not to get twisted around by all of the bullshit and chaos.
One helpful tactic has been to severely limit my reading of US news. I am tired, disgusted, and impatient with the so-called balanced reporting of The Washington Post and The New York Times, which I used to rely on as my papers of record. Both have too many stories that reflect the normalization of the crazy and corrupt and fail to ask hard questions. Instead of going down their anxiety-provoking rabbit holes, I read The Guardian (proud new subscriber) and also look at BBC News. This gives me ways to be informed without being devoured by clickbait.
I’ve also evolved my thinking about information-sharing right now (and wow, am I glad I no longer work in news, as I did years ago) Observations that now feel true for me I didn’t think about that much before:
Mainstream Media(MSM) has now evolved into Oligarch Media. Most of these platforms are controlled by billionaire men, amplifying their agendas.
No matter how many great reporters work at these services, the owners' wishes shape everything about the headlines, tone, and voice.
In addition, our Oligarch Class now owns most of our logistics platforms (hello, Amazon) and social media.
Oligarchs prioritize maintaining virtual monopolies(to maximize their businesses' profits), depressing worker costs and benefits(to maximize their businesses' profits), and discouraging/depressing economic alternatives (to limit choice and maximize their businesses' profits.).
I am giving my dollars to people who don’t have my interests at heart(not a shocker, but a starker reality now)—it is time to change that.
So, what can I do? Planning to:
Cancel my Amazon account.
Move book buying to Bookshop.
Redirect general spending to avoid companies on this list of Trump/Republican donors.
Double down on used goods, goods from friends, supporting small businesses and shopping locally.
What are you doing (or what have you decided not to do?) Please share strategies and coping skills; we all need them.
Thoughts about BlueSky and Threads
I joined Threads early on because it sounded interesting, a text-driven social network owned by Facebook/Instagram. After I joined, I found a friendly community there, mostly people interested in GenerativeAI, books, and Federated social media (i.e., distributed servers and multi-platform sharing). Once Kamala ran, my feed, like many others, was filled with political memes, #notgoingback posts, and social action opportunities. After the election, the mourning and bitterness shared by many of my fellow posters felt hard to read.
On November 7th, I created my BlueSky account. At that point, I didn’t know the site had been around for a year (though I did remember when an invite was a coveted ticket) or that a team of women ran it. I did know that an oligarch didn’t own it. After seeing Mark Zuckerberg join the crowd of rich white men publically congratulating President-Elect Trump, I was ready to spend less time on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram.
It’s been 12 days since I joined BlueSky, and I love it. The block-and-follow tools make it easy to follow people based on shared interests. Like early Twitter, it feels like a community. Unlike Facebook and Instagram, it lacks ads (and influencers, thank goodness!). Most importantly, it is scaling so rapidly (a million people a day, some days) that there’s a lot of activity. I also appreciate that it has a distributed server system, that the CEO, Jay Graber, is a woman, and that there is a well-developed system of custom feeds (easy to set up and follow) as well as open APIs.
On Threads, I have a small account with a tiny group of followers who read my posts. The number of people following my account seems stable, but hasn’t grown. The Threads algorithm doesn’t seem to prioritize individual post discovery, so there are some posts with lots of reaction and many with none.
On BlueSky, I’ve been adding 30+ followers a day. Many of them are super-engaged, liking, reposting, and commenting in a far more lively way than on Threads.
While I enjoy Threads and want to maintain my community there, I’m happy I set up on BlueSky. Seeing the site grow and evolve will be fantastic, and I am eager to be a part of that.
Good reads from the week (some political, so you can see how much detachment only works for me to a point):
Men and Women Perform, Handmaid Fails: As I move from straight (filtered) news to (equally filtered) commentary, I’ve anticipated hearing good ideas from Timothy Snyder. This recent post about The New York Times' biased and obscuring description of the novel The Handmaid's Tale in its bestseller list is a prize. Snyder says, “Christian Reconstructionism is now at the edge of power in the United States, and the attitude of the relevant people towards the female body and indeed towards rape is an essential element of what is happening and what is likely to happen.” Read the rest and see why it matters.
Writer Elif Batuman has a great essay about George Saunders’ short story, Love Letter, from the New Yorker issue of March 30, 2020. about where we are all right now.
That’s kind of it for the moment. I am coming down from my romance reading addiction and in the middle of some interesting books, but nothing worth sharing. I’ll get back to a regular-ish newsletter and more AI and professional topics over the next few weeks.
Please let me know how you are and what is helping you get through.
Best, Susan