Warmest of welcomes to a new iteration of plus/minus, the newsletter I set up last year as a placeholder for future writing on the collision of technology with politics, society, and culture. That future is here, and it’s exciting and a little daunting to venture into the world of regular writing.
The original brief for this newsletter still holds up: expect fresh thinking and crisp writing on topics like social media, elections, AI, climate change, and much else, interspersed with a “weekend edition” covering somewhat lighter fare like sport, culture, and food. What will hopefully change is the cadence: I’m planning to publish something most days, which could be anything from long-form, heavily researched pieces to shorter and more spontaneous jottings. Since I know some people doing very interesting academic and policy work, I also plan to feature their voices here as guest contributors, in a strand I’m nicknaming plus one.
My solitary request is to please share the posts you enjoy, to help them reach a wider audience. I’ll make it trivial to do so by scattering share and subscribe buttons liberally throughout, like here:
This is in fact a neat segue into the subject of this first post. The social media landscape has changed a lot since I last wrote about it in the context of Elon Musk’s rebranding of Twitter to X. Over the following nine months, social media platforms have faced a growing range of threats, from the self-inflicted to the potentially existential. Rivals to Twitter such as Bluesky and Meta’s effort Threads now seem viable alternatives for rapid responses and hot takes. Meanwhile, blogging platforms such as this one are having something of a renaissance, albeit with a retro twist: rechristened as “newsletters” and delivered directly to your email inbox. (This has not freed them, however, from controversy over content moderation.)
Now that the internet is approaching its own middle age, it’s a tad easier to anticipate which trends in online communication are permanent and which are merely cyclical. The victory of social media, especially Twitter, over longer-form blogging seemed total only a few years ago, but in retrospect, it seems that the appetite for thoughts articulated in multiple paragraphs rather than a single breath never went away. Twitter was slow to expand its tight limits on tweet length and to allow tweets to be edited, while under Musk its algorithm seems to have moved to favour content from outside a user’s direct network to create a shared (angry) conversation—a further step away from Twitter’s original, serendipitous reverse-chronological sorting. Combine that with the new stigma that attaches to Twitter accounts with a blue tick—previously a mark of notability, now just as often one of notoriety—not to mention Musk’s “amnesty” for accounts spreading hate speech and disinformation, and it’s easy to see why advertisers and users alike are abandoning ship.
Some of the time that users previously spent on Twitter might have shifted to its direct rivals like Bluesky and Mastodon, while others (me included) might now spend more time reading newsletters or listening to podcasts, which continue to steadily grow. So while it’s highly likely that, in the event of a full-blown Musk-made Twitter meltdown, microblogging would persist at some other venue, the nature of communication and content consumption would shift further. This suggests that a certain amount of randomness (some might call it chaos) is intrinsic to patterns of social media usage, and indeed the past few months have seen other unpredictable developments in the platform landscape. I plan to write about the US threat to ban TikTok in a coming post, but between that, the descent of Musk-era Twitter, and the “pivot” of major platform companies into AI, VR, and other advanced acronymic tech, it’s an interesting moment in the evolution of online communication and a fun time to be launching something new.
You’ll have to forgive the slightly “meta” first post of this new plus/minus era, but I’m looking forward to covering an array of topics in the coming weeks and months which I hope you’ll find insightful and/or entertaining. Coming next: the state of play in the race to the White House. See you tomorrow! ±