Blue Sky Mine

Since the U.S. election, the Twitter-like platform Bluesky has been the beneficiary of millions of users deciding that they had finally had enough of serving time on and adding value to a platform owned by a egomaniacal charlatan increasingly devoted to promoting right-wing propaganda. (Why did those users wait so long? Haven’t they heard of the sunk-cost fallacy?) After a few years of being a relatively quiet internet backwater, Bluesky has suddenly gained traction, launching an attention gold rush in which established users are gaining thousands of followers a day and the stakes of frequent posting are beginning to come into sharper focus. The familiar species of clout chasers, thirst trappers, and controversialists are sure to rise in salience as the notification jackpots increase. The chain-letter-like, engagement-for-engagement’s-sake participatory posts are already becoming inescapable. Let’s get an inane personal question to trend! But there is also suddenly more in the way of useful links and other things to read, more useful commentary from unanticipated sources, more of what could plausibly be identified as “the discourse” becoming legible there.

Tech writers are now writing their obligatory columns (like this one) about Bluesky, many offering the carefully hedged hope that this time it will be different, this social media platform will become and really remain informative and “fun” instead of eventually taking the customary ad-supported and algorithmically propelled nosedive into the content cesspool. These writers tend to assess the overall “vibe” of a platform as if it could ever be known from an individual user’s perspective, and then extend the wish that it will improve in some arbitrary way and be less for the early adopters (typically characterized as dorks who were earnest and clueless enough to post to a platform when there was no “juice” to it) and more for the savvy pro posters who are only now deciding to stop adding to Elon Musk’s power.

On the surface, these sorts of takes tend to ask “Where are all the cool memes?” as if that were the ultimate test of significance. That means assessing new platforms only in terms of how big and all-encompassing they might become, how viral they can make the most heterogeneous of things, and how individual users might make money or amass cultural capital through them. This usually looks like Twitter nostalgia: People are posting like its 2009! Context collapse is hilarious, actually! And though Bluesky has a few idiosyncratic features — like the “starter packs” that allow users to mass-follow thematically grouped accounts — it is essentially a clone of Twitter in its functionality. Yet the evocation of old Twitter, as if all the new Bluesky users want nothing more than to go through the same motions that made “the bird site” into “the hell site” long before it devolved into X.com, “enshittifies” any new platforms in advance, assuming that for them to succeed, they will have to scale and accommodate business models that turn people into metrics-chasing self-entrepreneurs (like me!).

Likening Bluesky to some golden age of Twitter that never existed limits the collective imagination of what it could become. As Nathan Jurgenson asks (on Bluesky), could Bluesky be for anything else than Twitter redux? What functions did Twitter actually serve for pluralities of its users, and what were they contingent upon? I always thought of being on Twitter as part of my job, when I had one. For better or worse, I used it to gauge what the audiences relevant to what I was doing might be interested in, which takes were tired, and what sorts of writing was already out there. I would post a thread now and then if something I was reading — a tweet or something someone linked to — triggered an idea, and I would try to recruit writers when they posted something that could be construed as a pitch.

In the 2020s, none of that seems applicable anymore. There is not much paying work left in creating and shaping texts for readers, because, as lots of commentators are eager to point out, fewer and fewer people bother to read text and society is purportedly becoming increasingly “post-literate.” (This was a theme in some election postmortems: that a significant portion of the U.S. electorate lacks the critical thinking skills that come from better reading habits and are thus readily susceptible to demagoguery.) Passive consumption of video is the algorithmically enforced norm on most platforms, which have become more or less indistinguishable from conventional television, with a rationalized, rigidly formatted flow of content and ads. (Most of what Raymond Williams wrote about TV in 1974 applies equally well to social media today.) A recent post from Katherine Dee speculates that “social media basically brought us to something like an oral culture,” encapsulating some of the points theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong had put forward in the late 20th century with respect to “secondary orality” and “global villages.” (It reminded me too of this Real Life essay from 2019 by L.M. Sacasas and this one from Britney Gil, which both took up the “return of oral culture” idea.)

But what seemed like secondary orality during the rise of Twitter might look differently on Bluesky. If Twitter once served to make text seem more immediate and speech-like relative to the dominant form of print media, Bluesky could be seen as a place where alienated textualists are gathering to try to help something like print culture survive. (Bluesky has no video sharing yet, though that probably is more a technical limitation than a deliberate design choice.) Ryan Broderick describes himself as “fretting over ‘the literacy wall,’ a moment at some point in the future where enough people who grew up on a text-based web have died off and taken with them any memory of enjoying reading and writing posts online” and wonders if Bluesky is “something that can survive against the tide of 90-second video clips.”

I’m not ready to break out The Gutenberg Elegies and start moaning about the “crisis of meaning” and the loss of “inwardness needed for serious reading” and that sort of thing. But it does seem that all these new Bluesky users must at some level still believe in text, still want to read, even if it is only in disjointed snatches of a few sentences at a time. They might even think it’s worthwhile to try to compose their own thoughts in a compressed, aphoristic textual style, in sentences that reward rereading, in ambiguous or multivalent sentences that hold open room for interpretation or internal contradiction. They might believe that style as it manifests in text is singular, inimitable in any other medium, exceeding the mere informational content of the writing.

It’s a rare moment when those sorts of investments are treated as potentially popular, even implicitly, but the flight to Bluesky, even though it is still dwarfed by the other big platforms, seems like such a moment. It almost seems credible that there is a broad constituency for a public sphere that is struggling to be born that is shaped fundamentally by the pleasures of the text and not video. It would be great to make the most of it before the mirage dissipates.