leaving in a huff

it's not a train station. no need to announce your departure.

the new dance that all the hep-cat kids are doing is apparently “leaving twitter/X in a huff because trump won.”

(honest question: do people with “problem glasses” know that they are “people with problem glasses?")

the whole guardian newspaper stormed off.

apparently even they can only take so much getting clowned.

"we find the benefits of being on X are outweighed by having other people be able speak back to us and refute our narratives" is an astonishing admission of inability to stand in the open agora.

like so much of late, it feels less like a movement than a pathology.

gatopal™ JD is on point here:

even when they shadowbanned us, vilified us, and threw us off the platform, we all kept coming back scrapping for more. because however slanted it might be we wanted to be in the debate.

not so team authoritarian empathy.

they want to take their ball and go home. (or at least to some place where people still pretend that their ideas can stand up to scrutiny)

the liberal spokesperson class seems to be fleeing X in variously epileptic and apocalyptic fits of pique.

i suspect it's atavistic need.

they simply cannot take it.

this is the difference between being a person who has ideas and being a person who IS their ideas.

i know i’ve been yammering about this a lot, but it’s always really useful to watch it unfold with tangible outcomes and see theory become practice.

it cements understanding.

so put on your safari hats and come along and let’s have a look and a goodall time…

if you are a person who has ideas, there is room for others to have them too. you can disagree and still be friends. you can argue and fight if need be.

but low identity people who ARE their ideas cannot.

the mere existence of other ideas is experienced as attack upon the very basis of the self. if someone else is right and you are wrong, your self-conception falls apart. that’s intolerable. it could leave you with no identity at all and humans cannot handle that.

so the tribe is all.

better a complete NPC than a nothing.

this is why they want markers like blue bracelets and shaved heads.

this is why they push so hard for censorship and when that fails, why they have to flee.

it's basic self-defense for externally validated people whose core sense of self is rooted in outside doctrine.

they are not so much people as personas and as they cannot control themselves, they must control the world around them in order to maintain some semblance of internal stability.

and when they lose that ability to dominate, they need to get the hell out of dodge.

a low identity person who adopts external ideals in order to provide a sense of self experiences refutation of those ideas as erasure.

losing this argument and having reality fail to conform to their preconceptions must feel like genocide to them.

i suspect it's why they call everyone who disagrees with them fascists and “literally hitler.”

they cannot distinguish between intellectual plurality and being rounded up and put into boxcars.

to them, it feels the same.

if i were trying to create maximum dissonance and projection, this would be a tough recipe to beat.

they rely upon consensus to validate them and tell them what is true. if consensus turns against them, they cannot endure. they can only survive if they can pretend to be the majority.

lose control of the media, lose control of the facts.

lose control of the facts, lose control of the “consensus reality.”

lose control of the consensus reality and they lose control of themselves and are left alone and exposed.

they are left frightened and disoriented.

they are left joyless. (lol, sorry)

maybe she can join “the view”

because this crowd prizes consensus uber alles, they are, of course, seeking to present their fleeing twitter in terror of having to defend their ideas as, wait for it, consensus.

the seek a smaller world where pretense of majority may be sustained.

this is supposed to be some kind of trend:

but like pretty much everything in the cult of old media, it’s pretty much bunk.

NBC News spoke to six people who have joined or committed to using Threads and Bluesky in place of X after the election because of Musk. Each of them cited growing issues on X, including bots, partisan advertisements and harassment, which they all felt reached a tipping point when Donald Trump was elected president last week with Musk’s support. Musk has since joined Trump on calls and in meetings to weigh in on his transition to president. 

ooh, 6 people.

they just cannot handle free and fair. they certainly had no issue with partisan ads when it was their party. they care not one whit for fairness, what they want is the whip hand back.

then they come at us with this hilarity of a claim shorn of context.

115,414 sounds like a lot. it’s not. X has 661 million monthly active users. so this was 0.01% of X users. not exactly “hemorrhaging subs” territory. if you annualize that it’s 3.6% churn which, honestly, is shockingly low. X had 541 million monthly active users in 2023, so they have added 120 million in about 300 days = ~400k per day. this would imply that this “mass exodus” was barely 25% of typical daily additions and that on that day, X probably grew.

bluesky, the “trump social of the left” now has 15 million users, which is not a small number, but it’s 2% of X and an utterly one sided homeworld for select viewpoints and cosseted media performance art. (and X is adding new users equivalent to this whole base every 5 weeks)

NBC would like us to focus on this:

but they left the elephant out of the room.

again, bluesky is ~2% of X. it’s cute, but irrelevant. it’s not the agora. it’s not where the conversation is. (substack was 1.5 million on election day, and that’s just site visits, not emails which is obviously a big part of the distribution here. even we with our quaint longform ways dwarf their reach)

this is not a “consensus” move, it’s a move to protect the illusion of consensus for a select few who whose need for self-preservation of self-conception dominates their decision trees.

this seems unlikely to get better from here.