Month: April 2022

A Window Of Opportunity For A Twitter Rival Based on Usenet Principles Exists


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing about cherry-picking the principles of Usenet to serve as the core of a Twitter rival is it’s now or never. We have, maybe, three to six months, before things sort themselves out and we learn if the New Normal of post-Elon Musk Twitter won’t be different, or if it will.

But here’s what I would do.

First, I would look at my “Shelton Bumgarner” Instagram account that has many, many videos about this very concept. It’s the reason why I have like 14,000 posts.

Anyway, after you look at some of those videos, I would figure out what are the best elements of Usenet that you might be able to use for a direct rival to Twitter.

Here are the elements of Usenet that I think would really surprise people that we’ve lost:

Inline Editing
The ability to inline edit posts is really cool. Imagine if the New York Times shot its content into your Twitter clone and people could have a discussion within the text. Each person would have a different color. It would be a lot like Google Doc’s collaborative feature.
Full Size Posts
The ability to have full-page post with native inline editing is something we haven’t had since Usenet. Reddit’s application of fullpage posts is very ham handed.
Robust Threading
In the context of full page posts, the threading you found with Usenet is very, very powerful.

The point is — study Usenet’s features and use the more interesting and innovative ones to start a Twitter rival NOW. A lot of center-Left people are thinking about leaving Twitter altogether and all you have to do is give them something new to use and they’ll at least check it out.

Julia Fox Is An Example Of Why We Need A New Spy Magazine (Or Gawker)…But Won’t Get One



by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

We’re in the middle of a vibe shift and the celebrity press is really dropping the ball on Julia Fox. She exists as the Very Of The Moment It Girl, and, yet, there isn’t any one central media repository that picks apart her every public move. This happens, yes, but it’s there’s not like a Spy Magazine or Gawker that does that with her at the moment.

“It Girl” Julia Fox

Yes, Ms. Fox trends a lot of Twitter, but it’s not like there’s a publication or site that gives us, the public, a daily snarky take down of her every twitch. But, as I have said repeatedly, lulz, that moment has passed.

Unless someone like Elon Musk does something really innovative with Twitter, we’re just not going to have a new Spy Magazine or Gawker blog. It’s just not going to happen.

Just like rock music isn’t going to come back and the snark of my youth aren’t going to come back, either.

The Gawker It Girl, Julia Allison.

So, oh well.

Tinx, Cancel Culture & Me


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Tinx

So, apparently the Internet’s Big Sister, Tik-Tok superstar Tinx is in trouble for “fat shaming” people on Twitter. This makes me think about my own ranting about how Mike Pompeo is a fat fuck and if, one day, those ranty tweets will come back to haunt me.

Fat Fuck Mike Pompeo

Of course, for that to happen, I would have to win the literary equivalent of lottery. Sometime totally unexpected would have to happen to me in a big way. But I don’t know — I guess given how all-powerful “cancel culture” is, that just me drunkenly ranting about how I think would-be autocrat Mike Pompeo is a fat fuck probably would be enough to get me “canceled.”

It’s shit like that which makes center-Right people (which definitely doesn’t include me) get mad and start thinking about how center-Left people are “groomers.”

All of this is very dumb.

But there is a great book about the implications of cancel culture — in a metaphorical sense — called Kiln People. It’s by David Brin.

The Vision Thing: Of Elon Musk, Twitter & Usenet


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

My dream.

In honor of Elon Musk potentially buying Twitter, I’m going to talk about my own vision for Twitter. My vision of Twitter is a service that, at its core, revolves around the principles of Usenet. It would not be Usenet, which is long dead and shouldn’t come back.

My dream.

Nor would it be a Reddit clone. Reddit is pretty much as close as you can get to the old Usenet experience in the modern world, but even then it lacks some fundimental elements that don’t make it all that engaging if not a 23-year-old Incel. It’s kind of all of the insular bad parts of Usenet and none of the advanced features that make it so much fun.

My dream

My vision of Twitter would be a social media network that was, at its core, based on the concept of Groups. This is similar to Reddit, yes, but I’ve really thought this through. As part of the onboarding process, you would forced to create Groups that you could any name you liked to. You could create Groups on the fly, in fact, that people could discover.

Usenet

Now, there are a lot of issues with my vision for this new, improved Twitter. First is how granular it would be. People are just too stupid and lazy to use the more complex elements of software, as can be seen by how small a portion of MS Word people use on a regular basis.

But you could come to some sort of compromise.

The point would be that once you setup Groups, you would have Posts like you did in the old Usenet days that allowed you to write not a 280 characters but as long as you liked. And, what’s more, these Posts would allow for inline editing, inline media AND be part of threaded discussions.

Usenet

Of course, this would be such a jarring change of the pretty basic Twitter UX / UI that this is all a daydream. People would freak out if you changed Twitter’s user experience THAT much. And people would complain that Twitter was simply becoming Reddit, not knowing that the principles being used were actually closer to Usenet.

I suppose you could apply the distributed nature of Usenet to Twitter as well, but that’s beyond my knowledge set. It always took time for a Usenet post to circulate around the system, which was a huge flaw and caused spam to destroy it in the end.

Anyway, Twitter has a lot of unlocked potential if you mixed its current UX / UI with that of some of the more fun elements of Usenet from 25 years ago. But no one ever listens to me so, lulz.

Usenet

Of Nepotism Babies & Industry Plants: The Hardest Part Of Getting Into Showbizness — Is Getting Into Showbizness


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It is an open secret in Hollywood that the vast majority of new people in showbizness have some sort of pre-existing connection to the industry. It’s vey rare for someone to just come out of the blue and become a success.

And I honestly can not think of any solution to this.

The reason is — the entire industry is designed to stop aspiring artists of various sorts from getting in. You have to fight and fight and fight to get that big break and sometimes even then things don’t work out. In short, it’s rare that someone has a such a unique talent (whatever it may be) that they break in without some help.

As such, 90% of making it big in showbiz is having some connection to Hollywood in the first place. That’s it. If you are related to someone with Hollywood ties or whatever, you don’t need all that much actual talent because the hard part is gotten past.

Or, put another way, life is unfair. A lot of what determines if you’re going to be success in something like showbiz is determined well before your birth. Either you whine about this or you figure out what you’re good and try to break into your industry of choice through simple hard work and luck.

Why America Is Doomed


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I know what you’re saying, “Oh, this is just more of idiots ‘hysterical doom shit’ that got him blocked on Twitter by Mueller, She Wrote.” And, I guess, that’s an accurate description in some way.

But some of it is just stating the obvious — there are some deep seated problems in American politics that aren’t going anywhere. And I’m of the opinion that we’re careening towards a situation in 2024 – 2025 of having to pick between autocracy and civil war.

Here are the problems we face.

  1. We Live In An Age Of No Nuance
    A lot of the problems the United States faces require nuance that we just don’t have as a nation. All we do is resort to “both sides” whenever it’s possible that our side show not to be perfect. This allows us to avoid any accountability and we march ever closer to existential choice of autocracy or civil war.
  2. We’ve Passed The Tyrannical Event Horizon
    There’s nothing we can do at this point. Macro trends are such that we’re careening towards autocracy or civil war around 2024 -2025. That’s it. No other choices. I know that it sounds like “hysterical doom shit” but that’s where all the metrics are pointing.
  3. We’ve Given Up
    If we still cared about having some shared goals and dreams as a nation, then we would be far more likely to do the things necessary to keep the country together the way it was in the past. But, alas, it’s over. We just don’t have the energy to defeat the rise of autocracy in the United States. And if we do, it will be through something I hate — violence on the battlefield.

    Anyway, good luck everyone. Don’t know what to say but we had a good run.

My Hot Take On The January 6th Insurrection ‘Multiverse’



by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The key issue about January 6th is we know what the conspiracy was and we know what the plan was. And yet, because of macro trends outside of our control, in the end, nothing will change.

Apparently, the plan was for the mob to drive Pence out of the Capitol and then Republican Senate President Pro Temp Grassley would handle things from that point on. The hope was that there would be sufficient clashes between the Right and the Left that the narrative would be that for Trump to declare martial law.

The rest would take care of itself.

There would likely be significant violence, but, in the end, the entire system to devoted telling the masses to calm down. As such, the only reason why the plan didn’t succede was the plotters were too lazy and stupid not to force the issue about Pence.

When Pence would not leave the Capitol, Biden becoming president was inevitable.

This does raise the question of if there had been significant political violence around January 6 beyond what actually existed, would there have been a civil war? The conditions were definitely there.

But even if Pence had played along and martial law was declared, we, as a nation, just weren’t ready for a civil war.

Come 2024 – 2025, however, I think that will be a lot different. We’re going to be primed and ready for a civil war — based on the state level — and we really will face the existential choice of autocracy or civil war.

The ‘Woke Cancel Culture Mob’ & My 5 Thriller Novel Project


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I was talking to someone recently who otherwise gave me a lot of relevant input on the novels I’m working on, when they said something that left me taken aback. They said I couldn’t write from the POV of anyone who wasn’t a CIS white male. In other words, because I’m a white male, I can’t get anything published that I write from the POV of a woman or an Asian or in the instance of my first novel an Asian woman.

This has been rolling around in my mind for about 24 hours and I continue to struggle with it. All I’m doing is exactly what Stieg Larsson did — write different scenes of the novel written from different POVs. Some of those POVs are men, some are women, some are white, some are not.

Now, if things have changed since Stieg Larsson wrote the Millennium Series, it is because of the controversy associated with the novel American Dirt. The reason why this made everyone so upset with the Hispanic community is it was an entire novel written from the POV of a illegal immigrant by someone who was not an illegal immigrant. I suppose that this controversy made publishers gunshy about publishing anything the author and the POVs are not identical.

But I also call bullshit.

I’ve spoken to a number of other similar people and not one of them mentioned this prohibition. But they had read some of what I’d written. So it’s possible that once it sinks in that I’m not using a first person POV, but rather a third person intimate and what that actually means, then the issue of me being a CIS white male author on occasion writing scenes in the POV of someone other than that isn’t all THAT bad.

I also plan on a second creative tract novel that will be shorter and more conservative with such things. So, theoretically, I could write a novel that is done in 1st person CIS white male POV, sell that and then turn around and say, “Well, I do have this whole novel series I wrote that goes against the woke cancel culture mob’s media narrative about what I can write….”

Or something like that.

I just had to get that out of my system. As I grow more serious about these novels, it seems the problems I have to ignore to finish them grow more existential.

Pondering A Publication Of The ‘Vibe Shift’



by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

This is all very moot for various reasons, but it is fun to idly daydream about this idea again. Listening to British duo “Wet Leg,” I can hear a deep music echo of the last time there was “good” music on the radio — that gauzy era known as “the 90s.”

Anyway, I keep thinking about the idea of a “vibe shift” and if it’s even possible for there to be one for various reasons. It’s a lot harder for a real vibe shift to happen than you might think. The reason is simple — for a vibe shift to happen, everyone has to be exposed to the same thing at the same time and make a collective decision as to what it all means.

So, yes, there may be the occasional general vibe shift, but I just don’t see there being a huge swings in vibes that happened up until the rise of social media. But, having said that, I was reading New York Magazine’s personality profile of the new Executive Editor of The New York Times, Joe Kahn, and it occurred to me we desperately need a new Spy-Gawker type publication to record this surreal post-Trumplandia world we live in.

I will note, as an aside, this passage from the piece, which definitely gives one some insight into who gets things published in New York Magazine.

Until last fall, I spent four years working at the Times, as a clerk for the columnist Maureen Dowd, whose only real input on this story was that she’d personally strangle me if I didn’t give Kahn a fair shake.

I mean, where’s snark?

The answer is, of course, snark is all over Twitter and no one cares about blogs anymore. Yet, it sure would be fun to have a blog that was obsessed with Julia Fox and mixed silly celebrity snark with biting media commentary. That’s just not going to happen. And if it does, I will be no where near it when it does happen.

But having said that, it continues to be extremely frustrating to me that I know that I could do something really interesting given the resources. We need a blog in the tradition of Late Night With David Letterman, Spy Magazine and Gawker. I just don’t see that ever happening again.

If it happens, it’s going to happen in, I don’t know, the metaverse or something. The era of print blogs is over. Long, long over. That will be the real vibe shift, when we’re so consumed by the metaverse that some snarky application of it will become popular.

Anyway, it is fun to think about.

Struggling With The Rise of ‘Wokeness’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

From my personal experience, the idea of “wokeness” has become a catch all enemy for MAGA. It’s tribal and abstract. Everything they don’t like, they ascribe to “the woke cancel culture mob.” It doesn’t matter if there is any connection to reality or not.

And it’s not like this is going to abate once they get want they want. The MAGA New Right won’t be happy until the center-Left is totally crushed and a white Christian ethno state is established. So, we’re going to drift and drift towards autocracy until there’s no more slack in the system.

A lot could happen between now and then, of course. It’s possible that as the MAGA New Right grows closer to its goal, the country will grow more and more unstable. As such — because we’ve bumped up against the self-perception of Americans of America being a “free country” — we’ll have a civil war. The only difference with this scenario is the civil war will happen later than the general 2024 – 2025 timeframe that I’ve come to believe.

But the point is — we’re careening towards a very, very dark future.

And, yet, I still struggle with why. Why is all of this happening? I think some of it has to do with the gap between Youngs and Olds when it comes to what is acceptable in the public sphere has grow so enormous that Olds are using their power to fight back. Or, put another way, they feel powerless, and so they’re turning to fascism.

But make no mistake about it — the United States is in a pre-fascist state. The only question is, do we have a civil war as we transition into an autocracy or do we slip peacefully into autocracy. Right now, I just don’t know which one we’re going to do.