Guest Column by A M Golden

[From your host: I held this excellent guest column submission for about a week, waiting for a propitious time to post it. JD Vance’s adventure on the platform, which I discussed here, was exactly the context I was waiting for. And it gives me an0ther chance to feature Bing….JM]

Anyone who doubts the uniqueness of the American Revolution need only to look to France several years later when revolutionaries stormed the Bastille and set up a Republic.  As revolutions were wont to do, those who replaced the guys in charge eventually demanded that everyone follow their ideas in lockstep.  Those who did not were accused of lacking sufficient revolutionary fervor and risked literally losing their heads.  The self-righteous Jacobins who forced this pure ideology eventually devoured themselves as, again, revolutionaries are wont to do, until the head Jacobin, Robespierre, eventually lost his own head and disenchantment led to the installation of Napoleon as Top Dog.

That should have happened in the United States, too.  Despite the passions of the Federalists and the Jeffersonian anti-Federalists, though some nasty words were printed and spoken aloud, no one was murdered for his lack of purity (unless you count Alexander Hamilton, which I don’t because that was less an ideological battle than a personal grudge).

Ever since talented-but-socially-awkward Elon Musk bought Twitter, turned it into X and antagonized all those people who bought his so-called climate-friendly vehicles, those same Tesla owners have flocked to every other faddish social media that promises 24/7 Trump/Musk hate in addition to freedom from having to be exposed to the opinions of those who disagree with them.

It was one of our illustrious commentators here (I do not remember which one.  I apologize.  It’s been three years and I’ve slept since then) who suggested that many of the Hollywood types would realize their mistake when they exchange 80,000 followers for 80.  That person was right.

I have belonged to Facebook for years.  I’ve tried Instagram but find it unwieldy and boring.  I couldn’t help it, however, when one of my favorite performers made the Grand Announcement that he was headed over to the new Post.News in 2022, which promised conversations “moderated for civility”.  It took ten days to get me onboarded and I found the place to be overwhelmingly progressive….and small. 

Don’t get me wrong, there was a huge influx of members.  Then nothing.  Some of them even proposed that members try to make a positive platform there by building a community not based on complaining about the platform they’d just left.  I heavily curated what I followed and then began contributing content on a daily basis: I recommended books on history that I’d read myself.  I amassed over 30 followers over the next 18 months; the favorite performer barely broke 100.

Ultimately, though, it was not a sustainable platform. It folded.  Once again, members were looking for places to hide from the world, including Favorite Performer, and were pulled into Bluesky.  This time, I didn’t take the plunge.

Now, it appears that Bluesky has reached its ideological saturation point.  This week, Megan McArdle wrote this entry in the Washington Post: Bluesky’s decline stems from never hearing from other side .

Our host once compared Twitter to the modern-day town hall or the public square where people discussed issues of the day, which is why it is essential that freedom of thought be respected.  McArdle points out that the use of Twitter for national conversations was overwhelmingly managed by progressives who campaigned for strict moderation that shut out conservative views and news, leaving a bubble that led politicians to believe that the public was more progressive than it was.  Then they left Twitter/X en masse to other platforms, like Bluesky….where they built an echo chamber.

 “Because the Musk and Trump haters are the largest and most passionate group,” McArdle wrote, “the result is something of an echo chamber where it’s hard to get positive engagement unless you’re saying things progressives want to hear — and where the negative engagement on things they don’t want to hear can be intense.”

Indeed, they lost the influence they had on Twitter/X by leaving it and where now, absent large numbers of conservatives, they are turning on each other when someone who agrees with most of what is posted doesn’t have enough pure revolutionary fervor for the rest.  Indeed, it would appear that telling people with whom you disagree to commit suicide is not uncommon.  It’s not the guillotine, true, but it’s the same mentality and only lacks the backing of the state to make history repeat itself. McArdle: “One can say the same about Truth Social, of course, but that’s not an example the left should be eager to emulate. Segregating yourself in a political silo amplifies any political movement’s worst tendencies, giving free rein to your most toxic adherents and cutting you off from vital feedback about, say, your unpopular tariff policies.”

The merit of the tariff policies notwithstanding, she has a point.  A national conversation cannot happen without engagement from the other side.  Opportunities to clarify and educate are gone when we segregate ourselves into ideological identity groups. This column was noticed by Josh Barro who linked to it in his Substack article below:

He argues that the most toxic progressives left for Bluesky and that the alternative platform is needed for containment, not the engagement the users obviously don’t want: “The problem with a ‘bubble’ is that it prevents the people inside from accessing the information on the outside. But the core functionality of Bluesky is not that it keeps information out; it’s that it keeps information in. Like the containment dome over a nuclear reactor, Bluesky serves the important safety purpose of ensuring that whatever meltdowns occur within produce minimal fallout. So while I’m not on Bluesky, I value the platform, and I encourage its users to continue screaming at each other about how much the rest of us all suck. Please do not leave.”

Finally, there is this article about Mark Cuban’s agreement with the McArdle column stated that he believes that the platform is becoming “ruder and more hateful.” “’Engagement went from great convos on many topics, to agree with me or you are a Nazi fascist,’ “Cuban wrote. “‘We are forcing posts to X.’”

Once again, while we have to momentarily compartmentalize our amusement that Cuban is surprised that everyday users of Bluesky unfairly label ideological opponents when elected officials of the party he supports do the same thing, I think it’s important that he recognizes the problem with that position enough to post his concern on Bluesky. Public engagement is essential in a democracy.  The ethical considerations here are the responsibilities of citizenship, respect for others and civility.

I suppose we’ll have to see how long it takes before someone on Bluesky tells him to commit suicide.