Twitterers be Capitalists to

Been listening to a lot of my podcasters lately and given that a lot of them are fairly left wing, other than in the tech community, there has been a bit of silence around any potential move to Mastodon.  I couldn't quite understand this, particularly someone like Phoebe Roy complaining that the Mastodon interface is too complicated or that they just can't understand it.  Given these are all pretty technically savvy people I found it strange that they were seemingly so inept at using a fairly intuitive interface.  I mean for fucks sake we all grew up using the far more basic and clunky original message boards and chat functions of things like Yahoo which Mastodon is ten times better than.

But then it struck me, these are people with thousands of followers on Twitter.  They have both a significant social and financial stake in Twitter insofar as their careers are partly based on having a large number of people who follow them on Twitter and react to their postings.  They are part of the Twitter fabric and thus wont want to lose the social currency they have built up on the platform and which is inherently tied to the platform.  Like capitalists building up their capital, Twitters community of posters are building up their Twitter capital and the last thing they want is this fucking Mastodon thing coming along and diminishing it by creating an alternative platform which diminishes their social capital.  They will paasively resist it until the time comes to actively resist it.  

Just like a good capitalist defends their own capital against all alternatives....

The process of Creation

Art Spiegelman's "Maus" comics are probably, alongside "Barefoot Gen", the most impactful pieces of art I have been exposed to.  The way in which they bring together the hideous impact of racism, war and hate in an entirely different setting but using the same artistic structure moves me still to this day. They are very different projects insofar as the structure of the comics and the artistic style is quite different, but the gripping way in which they involve you in the protagonists very different stories is so moving, so well considered, so impactful. 

They are difficult pieces of work to invocate the term "love", can you "love" work which deals with such distressing and serious topics (hat tip to Christian Hunt for an excellent recent podcast on this) but I think I can attribute so much meaning and power to these artworks. In a way I love the way in which they have done so much to bring to our attention the horrors of the Holocaust and the Second World War.  Part of a long tradition of works which have sought to do this but which I think these art works have done more impactfully than the many other things I have read, listened to and watched on these topics.  They make you feel uncomfortable and are somewhat painful in their excoriating treatment of such awful topics but at the same time they so viscerally put you in the position of these nightmarish and entirely man-made situations... Intense, brilliant work by two very different masters of their very different but intensely meaningful artistic styles.