WHELP THAT WAS FAST

Guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty.

Guilty.

All 34 counts. Every single one. Guilty as sin. It didn’t even take the jury that long. It was just long enough – they requested enough evidence and clarity to make sure the were crossing their Ts and dotting their Is and couldn’t be accused of ignoring the facts… and they were done.

And here’s the thing. Because there is a thing.

This was hard to do. This was very hard to do… historically. It’s not a thing done in the US, regardless of how much it should be done. But…

…the biggest thing making it hard is the convention – the unwritten rule – of not holding a former president to the law. That’s the biggest thing. That’s why Ford was able to get away with pardoning Nixon – an incredibly damaging act – just for one example..

But if all you do, your entire political career..

…if all you do…

…is attack, spit upon, break down every convention, every common ground, every civility and every unwritten rule and as many written laws as you can manage, smash them against the ground and shit on them, all for your own advantage and for your own power…

…eventually…

…those unwritten rules are not such a big deal anymore to anyone. You’ve made sure of that. You’ve broken every one you can, tearing down all the rules, written and unwritten, smashing all the conventions and agreements and social contracts that make everything work and can never be really written too far into law because that’s not how it functions but that doesn’t make them not important.

So when this particular contract, this particular convention, this particular gentleman’s agreement gets thrown out, as it has been today?

It’s your own. damn. fault.

He made this possible. Hell, gor this jury – he made it easy. And it’s all on him.

Petard, how dost thou hoist me?

He did this to himself, and it is delicious.

[link] #politics #USPol #writing #politics #uspol #uspolitics #writings

Performing for the Machine

I just saw a post on Mastodon that made me realise the importance of something I should’ve realised months ago:

Unlike on Twitter or Facebook, you don’t have to make your posts performative in some way to trick an algorithm into showing them to your own followers.

Yes, that’s a thing that actually happens. Some or most of your followers are never shown your posts on Facebook or on Twitter, or if they are shown them, it’s later and out of order. If you want it to happen, if you want it to be sooner, you have to find some way to make the algorithm decide it’s worth immediate visibility to those who are already following you.

But that’s not a thing on Mastodon, or anywhere else in the Federation. Your followers will see your posts every time, since it’s just a chronological feed by intention and design.

You don’t have to write for advertisers or for engagement optimisation or gods know what else just to have your toots be shown to your own friends.

You can just write whatever the hell you want. You can write for you, or you can write for them, or both, and that visibility will happen every time.

And that means it’s not just the ads or the owner’s political agenda that’s different between Twitter and the Fediverse.

What’s different is that you don’t have to perform for the machine.

I mean, I knew I needed to perform back when I first got onto Twitter in 2011. I was a working musician at the time, so I was fully aware that, just to get my music out there. But that’s not the same thing at all as having to perform to a set of corporate expectations in order to talk to your friends. And I think that difference is really, really corrupting.

Even not trying to perform, people will pick up on which of their posts do get seen by their friends and followers and which don’t, right? Consciously or subconsciously, they’ll pick up on it. They’ll learn over time – again, even passively – how to make posts which do get seen by more of their friends. And that shaping will be guided by whatever “the algorithm” decides best serves the company, because they’re going to spend their resources on what is best for the company.

Not for you, or for your friends. For the company.

And one fact I picked up was that Twitter in particular really, really liked my posts that make people mad.

It didn’t give fuckall for anything else I put up, particularly not music. Those were invisible.

But a post that made people angry? It’d show that to everybody. That’s what it reliably picked.

I think that’s corrosive. The more I think about it, the more corrosive it feels.

This is as, again, opposed to Mastodon (et al), which doesn’t pick. It just shows your posts to the people who asked to see them.

I think that’s a really – even critically – important difference.

And I think it’s really nice not to have to entertain a corporate machine in order to be seen by your friends.

[link] #sociality #writing #t0000000000bs_ #writings