My last post was about opening an account on Mastodon and feeling generally well-disposed towards it. My opinion has shifted over the short time that I’ve been on there. My view now is that I prefer(ed) Twitter as it was pre-Musk to Mastodon as it is now. This post is an attempt to articulate how my thoughts have shifted, not least for my own benefit.
To help me, I invoke the spirit of Shania Twain.
***
One of the more terrifying aspects of medieval and early-modern criminal law, certainly in Scotland, was a predilection towards burning the convicted. In large part this was drawn from biblical laws and punishments, and in most cases was related to crimes against natural law. The malefactor didn’t just have to be killed, they had to be thoroughly erased from existence because their very presence in creation was objectional to God. Indeed, in 1678, Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh wrote in his The Laws and Customs of Scotland in Matters Criminal that punishments for some particularly ‘atrocious’ crimes should be conducted in private or under the cover of darkness to avoid giving curious people any ideas.
I mention this because something of that same spirit prevails on Mastodon – the notion that some forms of wrong-think are so atrocious that they must be destroyed by fire, and hidden from the innocent eyes of decent users by de-platforming malefactors and defederation of servers/instances that bear the stain of their presence. I do not like that approach and reckon it will not survive contact with the larger world.
To misquote Shania,
I’ve known a few guys who think they’re pretty smart
But you’ve got your purity right down to an art
You think you’re all holy, you drive me up the wall
You’re all regular original know-it-alls
Oh-ooh-oh, you think you’re special
Oh-ooh-oh, you think you’re something else
OK, so you’re the thought police?
That don’t impress me much
People whose views differ from mine are voices I want to hear, or at least don’t mind hearing. And, anyway, other people’s right to hold opinions and their right to express them does not impose upon me any correlative obligation to listen. I block and mute on Twitter, but do that at my own initiative not at the whim of third parties who want to maintain ideological purity, I typically only block and mute on the basis of the way those views are expressed or when extended argument about topics gets tiresome.
To be clear, I’m not saying that there aren’t opinions out there that I find objectionable or that there aren’t bad actors telling lies for various ends, and I am not advocating a red in tooth and claw free-for-all approach to social interaction. But, notwithstanding recognition of the need for moderation and controls, I do not like being prohibited from seeing or hearing other people’s words and opinions because of someone else’s scruples, and that is the default position of Mastodon by design.
Much is made of a culture of kindness and tolerance on Mastodon, but when I’ve lifted the lino to see what’s underneath, I’ve seen some aggressively unpleasant attempts at forced moderation expressed in objectionable terms – not so much attempts to foster an ethos of kindness as the operation of levers to enforce silence while also expressing smug satisfaction about the superiority of the place. In that context, I am aware of the reported experiences of people of colour who have found the culture in the Fediverse to be unwelcoming at best and actively hostile at worst. The nature of Mastodon’s federated structure means it is difficult for me to see or experience that first-hand, but I have no reason to disbelieve those voices.
You’re all those guys who like to shine their ego
Wherever the zeitgeist goes there you are
I can’t believe you kiss your servers good night
Now, c’mon, baby, tell me? You must be jokin’, right?
Oh-ooh-oh, you think you’re something special
Oh-ooh-oh, you think you’re something else
OK, so you think that you’re refugees?
That don’t impress me much
I’ve made many good and genuine friends over the decades online on various list servers, forums, and platforms. As I said in the last post here,
Why bother? Well, it all comes down to two reasons: (i) at its best social media is genuinely social, fun and informative in exactly the same way as a night at the pub; (ii) out of sociability and engagement arises the potential to make people aware of my writing without spamming them.
I think Musk may well have done terminal damage to Twitter (see here for one reason why I think he has.) He emailed his remaining staff to say that he sees Twitter as ‘at heart a software and server business,’ which is about as complete a misunderstanding of what he bought as it’s possible to get, and that doesn’t bode well. For now, Twitter may or may not be on the tumbril rattling towards the scaffold, and Mastodon will do for some purposes – until something better comes along.
OK, so you’re Elon Musk?
That don’t impress me much …
You will be familiar with the idea that the difference between a frog and a bicycle is that a competent engineer can disassemble a bicycle and rebuild it – possibly improving it in the process. The attempt to do that with a frog leads to catastrophic collapse of the frog, Failure to observe that fundamental distinction between bicycles and frogs is a category error with significant consequences, not least for the frog.
That brings us to the elongated muskrat and Twitter. The muskrat appears to have fallen into that same category error and the jury is out on whether or not the platform is going to be launched into eternity (or close it’s eyes to subluminary objects, as the old broadside accounts of hangings had it) along with the frog. Complex systems under stress can collapse beyond the point of recovery very quickly, even if their central nervous systems leave them twitching for some time afterwards. Is this the case with Twitter? Quite possibly.
Anyway, like an awful lot of other people, I have also opened an account at Mastodon, just in case. If you are at all inclined to look for me, I am here: @cosmic_serf@mastadonapp.uk.
So far, Mastodon has been interesting, mostly in a positive way. The server(s) are currently struggling with latency and capacity issues because of the sheer number of people who have joined, but beyond that I have some concerns.
I’ve been around the internet long enough to remember when it wasn’t at all clear that Mosaic and Gopher would work. Many of the ideals that framed those early days fell by the wayside as the whole thing was commercialised and monetised. Where the ideals survive is in the open-source scene from which Mastodon emerged, and in the attitudes of old-timers like me. I would like Mastodon to succeed, but the idea that Mastodon is not like other sites because *waves hands in vague fashion* is wrong. It may have been true a fortnight ago, but it isn’t now because new users are importing learned behaviour from Twitter. When ideals meet humans, ideals always suffer.
As with any new place, there is a learning curve, and part of that is to control the timeline to see only what I want to see – or, more precisely, to not see what I don’t want to see. I figured out how to do that with Twitter and Facebook, but have still to do the work with Mastodon.
Why bother? Well, it all comes down to two reasons: (i) at its best social media is genuinely social, fun and informative in exactly the same way as a night at the pub; (ii) out of sociability and engagement arises the potential to make people aware of my writing without spamming them.
When I stopped working full time in early 2019, I made up a list of things to do. Many were mundane to do with clearing and shredding files and sorting out odds and ends around the house; some were more prosaic. One of them that I haven’t yet done is to return to processing my own black and white film, something I haven’t done since the 1980s. These days, processing and scanning is a lot easier than setting up a dark room (for which we have no space anyway.) My thoughts are turning back to that idea.
Regular readers will know of my fondness for film and film cameras, even though, like everyone else, I like the convenience of my phone camera and digital cameras for the immediacy of results and ease of image manipulation. Even so, like everyone of my age, film is where I started and the photographers I most like were all from the film age. It’s akin to my general liking for analogue things. Some of my happiest moments with a camera were with my old Canon AT-1 and Kodachrome 64. I still have that camera and quite a few others (one of the other things on that list that I haven’t done is to thin down the camera herd …)
One of the great things about that old Canon is that it had no automatic functions at all except a built in light meter. That meant that I had to learn by trial and error how film, aperture and shutter speed interact, allong with hyperfocal distances and depth of field and all that stuff. That has always stood me in good stead, even when I bought a used Canon A1 in 1988 with all its automated options. And my preference with the several cameras I have is to always have the manual setting option to hand, even if I often use aperture priority modes.
Modern cameras and the ready availability of filters to do anything make things too easy in most respects. It is, as Admiral Akbar said, a trap, and I fall into it all the time. More often than not I’m happy to fall into it – get a nice image, manipulate it if necessary, and stick it on social media or on this blog and Bob’s your uncle.
Now, it’s the photographer that takes the photo, not the equipment, and fetishisation of equipment is something that is a commonplace now. But there’s also a synergy between the equipment and the user, the feel of something that fits in your hands, that becomes, at its best, an extension of your mind and imagination. Like guitarists and instruments, you are always looking for the one, even though you know you’ll never find it.
But. Sometimes you have to challenge yourself and get out of the comfort zone, and I have a mind to get hold of one of the early Leicas – a iiif or similar if I can get one cheap. These cameras have no frills at all. You focus and compose and figure out exposure with a meter or using the sunny-16 rule, and hope that the camera and lens become part of you and you can concentrate on finding and making images.
Unfortunately, even though they are a tenth of the price of some of the Leica M series, the old Barnack Leicas still tend to be sold out of Japan to collectors at slightly inflated prices (especially once you factor in tax and duty and postage), so it is really a question of keeping eyes open and hoping for some luck. Happily, though, the early Leica designs were so influential and popular that there were a lot of copies made. Some of the copies cost as much as the originals, however there were a lot of Soviet copies that *can* be found cheap, and I’m going to have a crack with a couple of those.
What with the pandemic hitting production and supply, colour film is currently very expensive and I’m not inclined to waste what I have in the cupboard or buy anything new for experimenting, and hence it makes sense to think about using B&W and processing it myself.
Recent Comments