A few quick Saturday media and Substack thoughts:
Musk has continued down the path we have described over the past two or three weeks. This week, he managed to fire even more people, lock everyone out of the building and make half of the trending topics on Twitter (notabaly #RIPTwitter) fill with people tweeting about leaving Twitter. This morning he was tweeting “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” [the voice of the people is the voice of God] along with a poll to bring back Trump that was up to 9 million votes, with 52% in favour;
CBS News announced yesterday that it was suspending its news activity on Twitter because of the Musk chaos. Spanish journalists and top tweeters finally caught on to the global rush to the Mastodon lifeboats yesterday and told all their Twitter followers about it. The country’s largest media outlets ran articles and videos about how to leave Twitter. Not seeing a huge rush to Substack in Spain;
It’s very easy to be US- or Euro- or Western-centric about all this, but we must not forget the role Twitter as a global public sphere has played in what is loosely termed “citizen journalism” around the globe, which sometimes morphs into actual collaborative investigative journalism and frequently denounces the unjust and oppressive use of power in countries where the rule of law and separation of power don’t really exist;
In my case, as I’ve mentioned before, the response on Twitter was enormous during the Catalan separatist period (both the events themselves in 2017 and then the trial in 2019) and the first few months of the Covid pandemic. If everyone, or enough people, now leave to Mastodon or X or just lose interest and stop paying attention, there is no real alternative to the Twitter we have known;
Our lifeboat will be here on Substack. It works. I can report and analyse. You are finding more and more value in it as readers again (see the new graph below). We can use the formats to follow the stories changing Spain, and how those changes here fit in to the shifts and trends and problems changing the world. A daily weekday column + briefing notes with the rest is the basis, and it will also work for future dispatches and videos. You can comment on articles or in the new chat.
Substack lets us to add audio too (will post some tomorrow), and I think that’s a good idea, anything to make the information and conversation more human again, and it gives you another option as a reader. Perhaps that leads us to a weekly podcast in the future;
Join all the others with whichever paid subscription works best for you here. Many thanks to you if you have already jumped aboard the new ship:
New Substack graph:
I looked at Madtodon. It’s a poor substitute.