I’ve been trying to take it easy on the news front lately. I’ve been super busy at work and don’t have the emotional resiliency to wallow in online misery like I did back in 2016. Plus, the last place I go online for social media, bsky.app, has been struggling all day every day this week as it gets flooded by new users who are either clogging the servers, attempting to remake the existing culture on the website, or blathering on and on about how they’re crushed that they have to rebuild their followings while also spamming the world with new starter packs (groups of users collected by the person who made the starter pack that you can choose to follow in their entirety if, for some reason, you want to just blindly follow a dozen to a couple hundred people). These people need to sit down, take some time to adjust, and get used to the idea that they’re called “skeets,” as gross as that is. I resent anyone showing up after a goddamn year of hanging out in a nazi bar (aka, Twitter) who tries to dictate how the people who BUILT this website into the haven they’re now seeking use that same website. I don’t care what other people call a post to Bluesky, but they don’t get to tell anyone else what they’re called. We settled that in the great posting wars/posting strike of 2023.

Anyway, dumb jokes/sarcasm aside, the one thing I did get out of Bluesky this morning before it became unusable as a million new users signed up–which is always a sign that Musk has continued to drive people away by doing some new horrible thing–is that The Onion, in conjunction with the Sandy Hook families who had successfully sued Alex Jones/InfoWars into bankruptcy, had actually bought that shitty website and every single thing associated with. This is particularly funny to me because, when InfoWars first started appearing on the internet, I naively thought that it was a part of the expanded universe that was The Onion’s online presence. I was quickly disabused of this notion by the absolutely disgusting stuff I saw attributed to InfoWars, but it still strikes me as funny that I was accidentally correct, if perhaps a decade out of sync with reality. Now, I’m not entirely sure that The Onion, a beloved institution I first learned about from a high school friend, is in entirely good hands (I did not miss the fact that the first article one of the current owners of The Onion shared came from the New York Times rather than any paper that hasn’t completely ruined its own reputation or, get this, the media organize he co-owned), but it’s not like things are going to get any worse because some new rich guy owns The Onion in order to allow it to continue until he, like most rich people, inevitable undergoes his Too Rich To Live In Reality heel-turn. But that’s also just life these days, so it’s not really “worse” so much as “par to the course.”

Still, it’s nice to see a guy like Alex Jones eat shit right now, as everything else seems to be going the way of other horrible people like him. The only thing that would make it better is if Twitter fully collapsed and Musk somehow got all his loans called due in a way that didn’t cause the banks to collapse. Which they probably won’t. There’s that saying about whose problem a bank loan is (“owe the bank a thousand dollars and that’s your problem. Owe the bank a million dollar and that’s the bank’s problem”), so one might be right to be concerned about the safety of the various “august” [I hope you can hear the mixture of sarcasm and bitterness contained within those quotation marks] US banking institutions that might suddenly be out a few billion dollars, but money at that scale doesn’t really exist in a concrete format and some rich asshole will probably swoop in to bail the entire situation out, if the US government under Trump doesn’t get to it first. Twitter is going to be state media, after all, if Musk winds up a part of the government. I mean, he’s already discussing government action with foreign dignitaries (not a first, given all the shit he’s done over the Russian war against Ukraine), so who even knows what will happen in this bonkers “democracy.” I mean, the current sitting president did a great job of lending an air of legitimacy to this farce today, so I can only imagine that everyone in power is going to continue just letting it all happen since they don’t want to do the difficult work of intervening.

Anyway, the world is still descending ever-more-quickly into chaos and while The Onion taking over InfoWars has convinced me that there’s still the potential for random acts of goodness in the world, I’m not sure that social media mayhem and snarky satire is going to accomplish much. After all, it’s entirely possible that the government under Trump is going to shut stuff like this down. It’s not like the currently growing “administration” is showing itself to be terribly concerned with rules, laws, or norms. What’s to stop them from taking this stuff over or shutting down these companies? It’s not like anyone is going to ever hold these fucks accountable for what’s going on and “biting” satire or getting made fun of on the internet is something we know motivates people like Trump and Musk to abuse whatever power they can to make it stop. Maybe having a tall nail like The Onion and whatever InfoWars becomes will slow down the government’s abuses of marginalized people since they’re dysfunctional at their absolute best. That’d sure be nice.

I don’t really have any expectations for the next few years other than that things will be bad. You can already see the left-leaning communities start to eat themselves alive as they fracture over who they get to blame for the loss (it’s the voters who voted for Trump, those who could easily vote but didn’t, and every single part of the government charged with holding abuses of power accountable that chose to not do any of that stuff over the past eight years), which has had the side-effect of making Bluesky a place I don’t really want to spend a lot of time on right now, even aside from all the spamming of starter packs, new people trying to rearrange the furniture, and old people finally returning after bailing out over a year ago because they didn’t think a place like Bluesky was going to matter. That last one is the part that annoyed me the most. A bunch of people moved sites and then immediately gave up when they didn’t get enough followers or enough attention or whatever, which wound up keeping other people on Twitter longer than they might have if the people they’d followed had moved sites and made their peace with starting over in a new place. But that ship sailed and all that’s left is to wait for things to calm down again so I can actually enjoy being on social media again. Really sucks to have lost Cohost AND for the (relative) smallness of Bluesky to be exploded into a noisy cacophony of people desperate for attention who’ve all brought the unhealthy habits of Twitter with them. Still, at least I got to see Alex Jones’ face as his media company was bought out from underneath him not by an ally but the very people he’d made miserable with his conspiracy theories. That’s the good shit I needed today.