“We die in proportion to the words which we fling around us… Those who speak have no secrets.”
— E. M. Cioran
Algorithmic allergy
A couple of nights ago, after a few glasses of wine, I deleted my Bluesky account. In the grand scheme of things this doesn't amount to much, and yet it felt like a personal milestone — one of those moments when you become fully aware that things have taken a qualitative leap.
I wasn’t interested in joining this platform to begin with, but then someone gave me an invitation code, pitching it as a great alternative to the sewage pit that is Twitter, and it felt silly not to give it a go for a month or so, because I’ve been trying to find ways to compensate for Twitter’s uselessness for a while. I didn’t use Bluesky very much, and just posted a couple of links to this newsletter, links that were duly ignored. Then I started to spot some of the same people I’d see on Twitter — some of the verbose and uninteresting maniacs of the cult known as #BookTwitter, that…