Christopher Sloce
South America talks to Elon Musk. The ketamine courses through him, his pineal gland opens. The lithium beneath Bolivia, the rubber of Brazil, sepia visions of Fordlandia. He smiles. His fantasies travel. He and the world’s first anarcho-capitalist president, the Argentinian Javier Millei, doing synchronized versions of the dance from Joker (you don’t have to ask if they have the makeup on, they do), strutting into a meeting of the Sao Paolo forum, where the Hawk Tuah girl is dressed like Harley Quinn, hitting the heads of Latin American labor organizers and other communists with her gigantic hammer, a red tide washing out the pink in a wave not seen since El Condor Augusto Pinochet. Adin Ross thumbs up in the background. Musk’s children finally approve of him, clapping in a single file along with Bolsonaro in a hall lined with FunkoPop effigies.
His vision is interrupted: a declaration of the Brazilian Supreme Court. The news on X, the Everything App reads that Brazil will have to do without everything. X will be banned in the country and accessing it through VPN will constitute a 50,000 real fine per day (around $9,000 USD). No matter. He says. My design will be complete. Now: remove the blocks. He skips around his lair, and all the Funkos fall off the badly installed shelves.
While Elon Musk was celebrated with cameos in Iron Man 2 and listed alongside the Wright Brothers and a fictional scientist Zefram Cochrane as a historical innovator in that bellweather of science fiction liberalism Star Trek in its Discovery series, a careful eye would have predicted his far right turn sooner rather than later just by observing how he approaches Latin America. During the Bolivian coup that deposed democratically elected socialist Evo Morales, all Elon Musk had to say when someone accused him of the the United States government being involved to open up lithium mining for his projects, he replied “We will coup who we want! Deal with it!” Chalking the entirety of the Bolivian coup up to the United States committing subterfuge is a Civilization understanding of global politics, but it doesn’t change that Elon Musk declared a right to a coup. Musk’s operations in Brazil are a completion of that lofty goal.
Once the Worker’s Party (better known as PT for Partido dos Trabalhadores) and Lula De Silva defeated Jair Bolsonaro’s right wing Liberal Party in an election, like their American counterparts, Bolsonaro supporters flooded government buildings, including their own legislative building. Judge Alexandre De Moraes, the Supreme Court judge who temporarily banned X, alleged that X was used to spread election disinformation and demanded several Bolsonarist accounts banned from the site. Elon Musk refused to budge, as well as directed users to access X via a verified private network. This is how Brazil wound up banning the website until October 4th of this year. His response here was fitting: an AI generated photo of Moraes in jail and a boosting a free speech rally on September 7th in Brazil.
Musks’s continued fit was the gain for another site: functioning with a similar interface as proto-X Twitter, and the added benefit of sprouting right from Twitter’s skull. From August 30th to August 31st, close to 1 million accounts joined Bluesky, a site that looks like Twitter with one large exception: its logo is a butterfly instead of a bird. Continued unrest on X — including changes to the oft-needed block feature — sent waves of users scrambling for greener grass (or bluer skies, if you’ll forgive the pun). By September 16th, the app crossed 10 million users. By late November, the app had over 20 million users with CEO Jay Graber claiming Bluesky was onboarding one million users per day.
Bluesky has arrived. But the party online is long since over, AOC and Alf’s genitalia notwithstanding..
The promise of social media is dead. It did not connect us. It turned your chill uncle into a bleach-drinking Christian dominionist and gave your niece a debilitating eating disorder. The pinnacle of social media’s material good to society is finding a pre-Wayfair coffee table on Facebook Marketplace. The medium is in its zombified stage. On Facebook, bots serve up pictures of Shrimp Jesus for both other bots and the handful of brain-addled boomers still left on the site typing “Amen” to every AI-generated amputee soldier begging for birthday wishes. Instagram is functionally a TikTok clone, and TikTok itself has everything from New Age conspiracies about how dinosaurs were actually demons, potentially rabid pro-Trump squirrels, and anti-aging advice for 10 year olds. Tumblr treks forward, true, but that’s because it captures a specific niche; but it is an insular one whose culture is now being scraped into the yawning maw of AI. Threads is the answer to a question nobody is asking: what if we made “gas leak” social media for former mean girls who are now multi-level marketing executives?
The beatific trapper keeper aesthetic of MySpace is nowhere to be found because social media has more to do with keeping you immersed in advertising instead of building your own space. If social media was about showing off your personality, we would still be pasting HTML codes so your page could be Goodfellas themed, complete with a cursor shaped like a gun (how far we’ve strayed from the light). In this feeble field, Bluesky should look pretty good. The app isn’t a superating tumor covered in users who share memes about Haitian people eating cats. It fundamentally just works. If you used Twitter before, you should have no issues with the interface of Bluesky. The fact remains though: Bluesky has 15 million users, give or take a few. When Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he claimed it had 254 million users. If Bluesky was a country, it’d have the population analogous to Benin. X’s population would be just under Indonesia, the fourth most populous country on the planet (though using “population” as a metaphor doesn’t include many people who simply quit using X). By raw numbers, there’s not a debate.
The “competition” is more about the legacy of what Twitter was. Bluesky is about reclaiming the heritage of Twitter. (And for functional purposes: when I refer to “Twitter”, I am referring to the site up until the point I left. Everything after that was X, in my opinion). X, on the other hand, is something new that swallowed up Twitter. Twitter might be inside X, the Everything App, but it’s the same way a bird is inside of a cat’s mouth. X was a conscious, Silicon Valley-an disruption of Twitter’s “digital town square”. Bluesky is not that, despite its origins.
When we use Bluesky, we are using a proof of concept for the AT Protocol, short for the “Authenticated Transport Protocol”. This originates from Twitter, where Bluesky would be among a number of different applications, all with different moderation standards. Eventually, even Twitter would move to this “open and decentralized standard for social media”, as Jack Dorsey wrote on December 11th, 2019.
If you would like an example of what this effectively means, it’s more instructive to look at Dorsey’s posts after banning Donald Trump for claiming he won the election. On January 13, 2021, Jack Dorsey publicly wondered “Was this correct?”, a week after the Keystone Cops coup attempt of January 6th, where a bunch of motorboat salesmen pottered around the Capital, thinking their very presence would lead to Trump’s restoration as President. Rather than embark on any moral philosophizing, Jack Dorsey instead introduced a separate wrinkle. If people were upset with Twitter having a moderating standard, they would only merely have to wait for the future called #bluesky. Under this client, several “apps” would all be working on the same standards, but would be moderated differently.
If Twitter was the “digital town square”, then this protocol would be something else entirely, an ethos: the marketplace of ideas made digital flesh, communicated through one person’s selection of their preferred social media platform, infinite town squares. This decentralized Twitter would not be the first decentralized social media platform, as that ignominious honor goes to Mastodon. Even then, it’s fair to argue if the decentralization of Twitter under this protocol would be meaningful in any real way, as Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko claimed: “This is not an announcement of reinventing the wheel. This is announcing the building of a protocol that Twitter gets to control, like Google controls Android.”
Obviously, that’s not how things panned out. Elon Musk bought Twitter, and with it Bluesky, and rather than orienting the site to the north star of decentralization, he instead saw in Twitter the opportunity for a greater centralization, with the site acting as a social hub that could include opportunities for dating, for transferring money, and even an AI client named Grok. That’s why X is the Everything App and a conscious attempt to create a Boer WeChat.
The Bluesky team, currently headed by CEO Jay Graber, meanwhile, saw the writing on the wall, and were able to realize their future with Twitter was going to be in jeopardy under Musk’s reign. Bluesky was able to capitalize on their model of decentralized social media as well as discontent with a number of Elon Musk’s changes to Twitter and escaped Musk’s trajectory by finding a group of investors to put 8 million into the website.
Until the mass influx of users, Bluesky was a curiosity in the eyes of punditry. Since then, op-ed columnists have been putting in overtime pumping out countless overwrought essays decrying Bluesky as an “echochamber” too afraid to contend with Powerful Conservative Ideas like murdering women for exercising bodily autonomy. As usual, the talking heads are missing the true story. Bluesky as both a beneficiary of Musk’s bad business practices and a supposed “Blue MAGA echochamber” is a mere tributary to the real issue: the seismic shifts of the worldwide information market, of which we are all buyers and sellers anytime we discourse, we post, we argue. The social media “center” is mostly gone. The AT protocol cannot reinvent the suffocating facts of world capital, the “one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars” Ned Beatty as Arthur Jensen so passionately preaches in Network. There has been nothing more decentralizing, after all. Ask most of the countries beneath the equator.
What’s more instructive than bare facts about app usage are the interior myths products project onto us. Where X has the myth of unlimited free speech forever–an obvious lie we don’t really need to spend a lot of time on– the Bluesky community ethos is almost entirely to be abrogate to X’s community. Where Twitter/X reveled in its worst qualities like Oscar the Grouch, Bluesky has had in mind best practices. Twitter was an accident; the culture of posting was a historical run off from sites like Something Awful coming into conflict with early users actually trying to use Twitter. Bluesky has a lot of opinions on posting and thus opinions about itself.
These are opinions that have mostly started with the upper echelon, earliest users. With the site only crossing 10 million users just recently, we are early enough that to be involved in the first million is not insignificant. It’s why when Bluesky crossed the barrier, you can click the small emoji where the butterfly sits and get where you were in the great migration to Bluesky. And if you were lucky enough, you would also have in the lower right hand corner a stamp that reads something like CERTIFIED BLUESKY ELDER.
As Twitter had the verified user or “blue check” until X made the blue check a mark of, well, how much of a mark you are, Bluesky has the Elder. The Elders are a largely self-proclaimed community of Bluesky users who were able to join the website before it went “public”, which came about through knowing someone with an invite code, or scamming your way into one. The pre-X Twitter verification had some degree of real life weight due to the person’s identity being one someone could mimic online. However there was the instant delineation by that check and how well known that person was in real life. A Bluesky Elder was simply here.
A lot of Twitter’s earliest humor was the surprise somebody would post something. Part of the humor of someone like Terry Rozier tweeting “Osama shouldve hooped instead of tryna kill ppl cause he tall as hell!” is beyond the humor in the statement, and instead about the incongruity of what we’d expect when it comes to an athlete’s social media. Bluesky has celebrities but they are cognizant of posting. They are online in the sense of capitalizing Online when they write it, self-consciously and celebratory. The Bluesky Elder bound together parts as disparate as a poster with a recipe book that consisted mostly of pudding mix and Neil Gaiman, revealing the two were never as far as you thought when it came to the bounty of Online.
The invite code era of the site was created obviously for beta purposes, but getting to use the beta became a mark of honor on the site. Veteran social media users were going to always be prioritized by the Bluesky model: to get an invite code, you likely needed a hookup from somebody more on top of social media comings and goings than you, and in turn, you would be hooking up someone less plugged in than you. Under such a metric, the designation of something like the Bluesky Elder was bound to happen. While the bluecheck was akin to a dunce-cap shaped crown, the Bluesky Eldership was enforced through social codes and norms, argued about and pontificated about in the site’s earliest days. What Bluesky Elders understood was that the user base makes the site. There is a push and pull between how a user base acts and how the site will be moderated, a sort of dialectical relationship Bluesky users are conscious of. So many early posts were about setting the tone for the site: whether or not X posts or news of Musk’s peccadilloes were okay, whether or not the site (and “weird Twitter” icon dril) was friendly enough for sex workers and Black people, what posts would be called (‘skeets’ in every mouth but my own), whether quote “dunks” of someone else’s opinion were verboten, what we would be called. Somewhere in there the Bluesky Elder label stuck, which someone should have been more careful about. Labels are, after all, sticky things.
All of this took on a level of visible self-congratulation. There were stories, as the site loves to tell stories about itself. The stories centered around the fallout from an endless thread, where the Elders talked amongst themselves, posts stacked higher than the Tower of Babel. They even gave it a sobriquet: the Hell Thread. If the endless chattering to denote how the site would work amounted to some kind of Constitutional Congress, then the Hell Thread was a self-stylized revolutionary tavern, where everyone grew to know everyone, esteem and follower accounts rose, and occasionally someone would lose their clothes. Follower accounts rose, but so did the amount of accounts people would follow. If all social media posters are, in some sense, commodified, the Bluesky Elder had turned themselves and their reputations into a tulip market in 1600s Antwerp, only to wonder why being an Elder didn’t mean much when inevitability came and the site opened up. There were even smatterings of people who argued against the opening up, afraid it would be bum rushed with Nazis. But they have a social media site. They don’t need ours.
Bluesky, in essence, views itself as an anti-fascist social media site. There are remarkably few conservatives on there, and to my knowledge, I don’t know of a far-right presence at all. That’s all perfectly fine to me. I know what I believe. When Jemima Kelly wrote in The Financial Times, that perfectly pink bourgeois paper of old, that “With Bluesky, the social media echo chamber is in vogue” I groaned before I did anything else. Written in The Financial Times inimitable “upper class twit of the year” style–“I’m not sure I have ever felt more like I’m at a Stoke Newington drinks party than when I’m browsing Bluesky”– it mostly sticks out as a reminder that there are people out there, very much, who care about the marketplace of ideas and view all discourse as speech bubbles added to Raphael’s The School of Athens. It was roundly rejected by Bluesky users, of course, because it’s no way to make friends. Pitched between a bad review of their favorite product and a grand gesture towards the classic neoliberal economics that have typified our world since the late seventies, it was never going to succeed on a site where user’s use of the product affirms what they believe to such a deep degree, where people consider themselves progressive.
You can witness a similar blinkered approach to a socialist’s criticism of the site in Carl Beijer’s “Reviewed: Bluesky”. Beijer’s essay is largely pointed at the teeth of Bluesky’s liberal lotus-eaters, almost to its detriment at points, as a fair bit of the essay is spent directed at the Bluesky Elders who talk about using X as greasing up the Wehrmacht’s tanks. This is not exactly to Beijer’s benefit, as the essay sinks to mbarrassingly living through Beijer’s past as a left wing bee in Jude Doyle’s bonnet (“Just about every major left poster, from Felix Biederman to Phil Greaves to yours truly, was suspended at one time or another under the old regime”, he writes with not enough irony to make funny). We all have better things to do than remember when calling Neera Tanden a corncob would get you a podcast invitation. It is instructive, however, that his criticisms were roundly dismissed on the website. It’s not easy to dismiss his criticism when the responses exemplify why said criticism had to be written. Imagine Lewis’s Law for 40-year-old HR managers with Ukrainian flag profile pics.
Elon’s X project, always right wing, has grown to reveal itself more as his Dearborn Independent, the anti-semitic paper Henry Ford invested in that found itself circulated in Nazi Germany in a volume called The International Jew, the World’s Foremost Problem along with the Protocols of Zion. As long as Elon Musk ties himself more to the global, reactionary internationale, Bluesky’s going to look more and more attractive to people who want to use social media on a site whose algorithm doesn’t boost Musk’s anti-trans, anti-immigrant viewpoints.
What the user base wants and what the Bluesky team wants may not be as aligned as we might think, however. If the plan is still for “decentralized” social media, we’d do well to question the logic. If the end result of Bluesky is that it exists as the left-liberal alternative to the right wing social media constellation of X, Truth Social, and Gab, then the entire site’s existence is to serve left-liberals as consumers, just as MSNBC exists as a counter of Fox News. However, delivering the news is one thing, and social media’s need and utility has yet to be completely proven; for every memory or friend someone gains from any of these sites, there’s endless evidence that making our lives and selves easily replicable content has been a net loss for humanity. Whatever parts of our lives we try to get back through pure consumer choice is ultimately benefiting the people who set up those choices for us. Even if you get a fast food chicken sandwich that’s less homophobic than Chick-Fil-A, the chicken farmer still benefits.
On Bluesky, there is no chicken farmer. Morality exists at the pure point of the decision to not use Twitter. There is no real reason to use Twitter, and if it comes down to an argument of pure functionality, Bluesky beats Twitter for the simple reason I’ve never installed an extension to block Bluesky users en masse. But as a mirror of popular Twitter users acting somewhat critical of the site with their tongue firmly in cheek (think of the dismissal inherent in “the hell site” or “the bird app” and the constant refrain that “this site is free!”), Bluesky isn’t so much Oscar the Grouch as it is Bart Simpson, running up and down the hallway, banging pots and pans and screaming, “I am so great!” You can’t chalk it up to the fact there’s not enough conservative counter-programming; that just consists of sitting through jokes where someone says “Did you just assume my gender?” with a shit-eating hack grin.
However, Twitter did not just have the blue checks. It also had users, many of whom migrated from smaller hovels of the internet, who did manage to create an oppositional current on the site that seemed to exist in Twitter’s deep absurdity as a criticism. You may not get a dril in a world where he was pressured to become a Twitter elder. Bluesky elders already exist in cognizance of the absurdity of Online. They viewed the beat and rhythm of posting that had already happened as a King’s English but there’s no lingua franca for comedy. The result instead is a lot of posters with “funny energy”, their posts faint echoes of 2015. It’s one of the things that makes their antipathy towards X somewhat ironic. If Bluesky has a style, it’s what used to be groundbreaking now referring to itself.
There’s a lot to hate about Elon Musk, including his sense of humor, but as Elon Musk has ifunny, the Bluesky Elder has Favstar. No matter the similarities, the two will rhetorically remain in a lock-step with each other. Elon Musk will damn everyone on Bluesky to the dyed hair horde he hopes to defeat, and Bluesky will remain pleased with itself for not being Elon Musk. This does not mean they’re saved from another kind of nastiness. For all of Bluesky’s progressive accolades, for all their crying about Twitter’s censorship, anytime a jejune left-wing criticism of American politics comes up, the knives come out.
This gets even worse if you’re a woman, a person of color, or trans. Dissatisfaction with Kamala Harris’s proposed policies that would have continued war and misery in Palestine and Lebanon are still met with the standard accusations and the invocation of death camps, where scores of immigrants and trans people will be fed to the fire. Some of Jewish and anti-zionist cartoonist Eli Valley’s latest work around our current election, where a grinning Kamala Harris takes selfies in front of Gaza wreckage and triumphantly says “We are not going back” and a man who bravely only declares ethnic cleansing as wrong after Trump wins, is a cornucopia of bad faith arguments, including how many people have blocked Eli and accusing him of electing fascists, a sort of liberal take on Nazi arguments about “degenerate art”, which Valley is aware of. Where the fascists see art as a rooting ground for thought that destroys the society they purport to defend, American liberals look for who stabbed them in the back and settle on artists. It’s a similar impulse none of their resistance training, forged in the fires of 2016, seemed to have taught them, and gets them closer to the enemy but not so close they can stick the knife in before they get stabbed themselves.
Looking for myself, I can see I’ve been put on “The Shill List” (“List of shills including transgender, BLM homophobic, antisemitic and islamophobic shills that should be mass reported,” by an anti-BLM, “anti-fake trans” Zionist; and “other authoritarians” (“used anti-authoritarian derogatorily”, because there’s nothing more anti-authoritarian than being a fucking cop). This should give you enough of an idea who is using the site. It’s not hard to scour any Bluesky posts and find disagreements with some version of the Left that exists mostly in their impressions of what they’ve seen online. It’s enough to make you ask if the Left is in the room with them right now. But you know their response: “I am on the left, but…”
Fine. Let’s take them at their word. Bluesky is leftist, a machine that kills fascists and roots for Robert Mueller and the rule of law. Bluesky is a bar that fights all the nazis, the panel where Captain America punches Hitler. Bluesky is a city of refuge in the ever-shifting creation of cyberspace. The Elders found their settlement, they built their houses, and they discussed what a community would be. This would be a community that wouldn’t rely on arcane moderation, but a sort of community model, where gentle reminders of expected behaviors were the norm. It would exemplify, through its decentralized nature, a sort of free-flowing spirit of online corralled into a model that resembled the fixtures they remember from long ago. Everyone is important, everyone is a Bluesky Elder. To post is to resist. Underneath their romantic vision, however, there is a paranoia that one day Bluesky will be just another social media site, contrary to the evidence it largely is, as even its politics and humor are from some other time. But they didn’t only recreate old Twitter. Their bearing towards social media betrays a tech poptimism, where 10 million plus users can’t be wrong, something better suited to the guerilla testimony of Arab Spring participants than what we’ve seen social media become. But with Bluesky’s endless rules of engagement and hall monitor tone, they haven’t created a digital commune. They’ve created a neighborhood with a Homeowner’s Association and unwritten bylaws, “In This House We Believe” signs in the front yard. And like any nice neighborhood, those rules and ways are enforced with extreme prejudice. Witness the phenomenon of large accounts on the site suddenly afraid that the slate of Palestinian GoFundMes on the site are the work of scammers, to the point that some even brag about reporting these GoFundMes without even investigating the content. At the site of anything unfortunate that reminds them of the world outside, the Bluesky Elders look for the mods to act as a private policing force, declaring people illegal for not asking for help in a way they recognize as “legitimate”, to be scooted out of the walled city. Odd for a website that views its user base as digital refugees,, but as Bluesky users will tell you, decolonization is not a metaphor, and Bluesky is still a Silicon Valley project, one that has to make money.
And it may have found a way. In an announcement of Bluesky raising another $15 million in its Series A round (by luminaries such as Blockchain Capital, owned by former Mighty Ducks star Brock Pierce, a crypto-currency neo-colonialist who viewed crypto as necessary for revitalizing both Puerto Rico and El Salvador, as well as the jejunely named Darkmode Ventures which was inspired by the Israel-Gaza war to “to invest in Israeli entrepreneurs, many of whom are establishing their parent companies in the United States due to war considerations”) there is the beginning articulation of a plan: “In addition, we will begin developing a subscription model for features like higher quality video uploads or profile customizations like colors and avatar frames,” something the amateur coders of MySpace took for granted with their copy and paste HTML. Paul Frazee, one of Bluesky’s developers, said this regarding the website Bluesky hatched from: “The way Twitter did subscriptions was basically a blueprint for how Bluesky shouldn’t do them. Pay to win’ features like getting visibility or having a bluecheck because you’re a subscriber is just wrong, and ruins the network for everyone.” But that doesn’t contend with Bluesky’s culture or the paltry sundries a subscription might offer. No matter. In the end, what the Bluesky subscribers and the Twitter subscribers will have in common is one thing, if not politics: ten dollars a month is cheap if it allows you better worship yourself.
Even there, Bluesky might find itself outmoded. After all, Jay Graber isn’t at Mar-A-Lago. 