Twitter and social media

I quit Twitter and Facebook a while back.

Most days I am happy with this decision. I'm not only happier, I'm also happier with who I am as a person.

I'm on Instagram, which I'm frustrated by in some ways, especially it being owned by Facebook, but it has most of the people I missed most out in the Internet ether. I tried to do Tumblr instead, because I like the functionality and lack of Facebook ownership marginally better, but too many people I know either never went there or migrated away at some point, so my support was largely lonely.

I'm also, for whatever it's worth on Letterboxd and Goodreads, which have only limited social benefits (or deficits). I'm also on LinkedIn, although, like everyone, I have no idea why, except, I guess, it's my key connection to a handful of people I don't wish to lose all connection to, even though we don't actually make any contact through it.

Similarly, I'm on Stage32, which sounded super promising when it was introduced to me, but I don't think I'm connected to even a single person I've had any social interaction with ever there, so I'm on it because I've never deleted it.

I haven't deleted my Quora, but all of their recent changes to make it more profitable, or whatever their motivation, have made it an intolerable hellhole in my opinion. That was too bad, because it was nice for a long, long time as an alternative tothe toxic environment of social media.

But the other day, I found myself wanting to update my Letterboxd account, including my picture, and was informed my picture there was attached to my Twitter account. So, I created a new Twitter account.

Then I was involved in a discussion with people who were super pleased with Twitter and their activity there. So I peeked in through my new account that I set up just to peek in. I looked at the accounts of some of my favorite people who are not on or at least not active on Instagram.

Now, I want to be clear, this was kind of a random assortment of people. And these were people who, if some combination of them got together at a bar or coffee shop near me on a regular basis, I'd be unbelievably excited to go every week. I'd update my life schedule to make it work. I'd travel a mildly inconvenient distance. All of that.

But on Twitter?

As Marshall McLuhan taught us, the medium is the message. Twitter is a place to declare things not to listen.

And, yeah, I'm not still not feeling that right now.

Even if you're declaring something I agree with like, "Hey, Neil is awesome!", who cares? I've had altogether too much declaration at this point in my life.

I'm leaving that new account up. I might post blog posts there, because, why not? I might leave it for the eventuality that I find having a Twitter account necessary and/or more desirable. I certainly left my original Twitter created and unused for a long time before using it to any extent. Perhaps that'll make sense again.

Or perhaps I'll be that careless with my own needs again.

Who the fuck knows?

My war on cars

I don't drive.

For much of my adult life this has been something of a point of shame with me.

The first thing you should know is that I'm not very good at it. I struggled in driver's ed, but probably could gotten through if the complications in my family life at the time hadn't interfered with whatever was needed to get that taken care of.

I've tried off and on to finish gaining that skill and the dictates of some relationships made it so it was occasionally difficult and perhaps even unreasonable of me not to have done so.

But here's the thing I realized. I'm temperamentally incapable of being good enough at driving for my own comfort. I can't hold the right level of attention to do it regularly.

When I tell people that, I only rarely acknowledge that I don't actually think that puts me in some tiny percentage of adults in the world. I'd guess I'm somewhere in the middle, if I had to guess. Perhaps a little below the median, but not massively. I simply don't think most people are safe controlling a motor vehicle, at least on a regular basis.

I also think most routine driving makes people worse human beings. I don't mean that as a bit of rhetoric. I think our brains are not evolved to understand the morality of controlling a giant iron machine that travels 10-100 times faster than our body can and that, while doing it, literally everyone loses some degree of their essential morality.

That's probably considerably less true on awesome road trips on long stretches of scenic highway, where the entire experience is freeing and not especially demanding.

But everyone is stupider and angrier while doing day to day commuting and driving about.

I was just reading, Owning a Car Will Soon Be as Quaint as Owning a Horse by Kara Swisher, because I heard her on the War of Cars podcast. I agree with most of her points here.

Here's the thing, I know that most people think driving is essential to their life, but I'm not someone who has ever lived in some community that's friendly to non-driving. I've lived mostly in Seattle and Austin, sprawl and cars, among other people who are largely confused by my lack of driving.

But, as I live longer, I find I'm even more confused by everyone else's commitment to driving. It's a perspective thing. They see it as freedom, I see it as slavery.

Because, while I haven't driven, I've lived in households where cars were an important part. Where we made payments on a car, paid insurance and licensing, gas and maintenance. Honestly, for people who aren't specifically fans of them, who enjoy the care and feeding, I can't imagine what makes people take part.

The degree I'll go is to say, I suspect private car ownership is going to go the way of cigarette smoking as a cultural artifact.

There will continue to be mystique of James Dean or Burt Reynolds driving like there is of Humphrey Bogart or Lee Marvin smoking. But, increasingly, you, as a member of the general public, doing it became more frowned upon.

It creates foul smells, makes the air worse for the people around you, endangers their health, and, as mentioned, has a negative impact on your personality. Thinking of the real life act becomes more difficult to view as innocent the more you consider the overall effect.

It's not a new comparison for me. For years, I justified my own smoking by saying at least I evened out my poisoning of the environment by not driving. But I quit even that a couple of years ago.

To age myself, I've gone from a world where most non-smokers I knew kept an ashtray in their house for when smokers came over to one in which most smokers I know don't even smoke in their own house anymore because it increases the health risk and makes their smoke smell even more noticeable when they go out. I think there will be a similar shift from those of us who don't drive being seen as being troublesome and burdens on the drivers around them to people who insist on having their own cars being seen as burdens on the rest of us, our roads and our air.

Honestly, I think as more people give them up, more work will be done finding solutions to the problems we use cars to solve now. I'm not among the self-driving car converted, although I do believe they could, at some point, be a part of a larger group of things we all incorporate into our solutions. I think the things a post-car ownership world would be aiming for would not all be addressed if we all mostly going about the same lives we do now in self-driving cars instead of driving, aside from the problem of people being assholes when they drive.

I know my bias on this is based on a series of coincidences that make my life. All of our biases on everything are. We just forget that most of the time. I think as more people's experience changes, I agree that people will move in this direction, though, and the world will be better on a vast number of levels for it.

Honestly, we're all just in that world, but our predecessors building a society around the needs of private car ownership and driving was at best foolish and more likely utterly contemptible. We should do better.

Creative choices

So, I have a creative project I'm working on that I'm super pumped about. I've been putting words down in some volume and all of that, but now I'm having this --

You see, it's a project whose natural home is as a movie, or series. Without getting into details, as Stephen King put it in On Writing, I'm writing with the door closed, not because I'm afraid of my idea being stolen. Honestly, the idea really is fantastic, but this feels more than anything I've ever had like it's my inspiration that's driving it and making it so exciting to me. I don't know what someone else might do with it, but it would definitely be different than what I'm doing.

Despite that, it feels like it's ideally at a scale that I'm not sure I could recreate. If this were 1992, I'd be imagining I could pull that together in some way, because the indie dream was alive.

But for a nearly 50 year old guy in 2019, it seemed like a lot of steps that might be higher than I know how to climb. My knees aren't what they used to be, after all.

I've thought a lot about ideas that could be made on a micro-budget and make that part of the aesthetic of the work itself, but I couldn't imagine a version of this that would work that way in my head.

So, I'd started writing it as a novel.

Now, for me, the tradeoffs between moviemaking and novel writing is one I'm always torn about at this point in my life. What with the aching knees and such. So, I was able to start writing it as a novel and, unusually, not hating my own prose writing that much. Like maybe I could get it somewhere that would work eventually.

But then I was listening to the Adam Conover podcast, as I'm wont to do. He had Matt Stoller, author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. I haven't read his book, although I have read The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu, so I come into the discussion of the dangers of monopoly with at least that much information.

So, this discussion, however, is specifically Why Monopoly Power is Killing Hollywood, which felt a little like reinforcement of the reasons I didn't want to even start this as a movie project, but on another felt like a gauntlet being thrown down. This is especially true considering the themes of this project.

None of this should be interpreted at reflecting a decision. Or a question for anyone else. Just an explanation of my own thought process.

Also, I highly recommend Stoller's It's Time to Break Up Disney: Part One and Copyright, Antitrust, and Disney's Monopoly.