Yesterday morning followed its usual pattern of early morning events for me, but for one notable change in circumstance. On the iphone I reach for the second my eyes open a decorous new squiggle avatar appeared, a memorable addition to the banking apps, endless snapshots, email chains, texts, whatsapps, notes, calendars, weather veins, Wordle reminders, headlines, playlists, DMs and (cough, cough) all that other stuff which lives on our hand-held brains. Before the customary cup of tea and cuddle, the telephone was ready to roll and scroll me into a day fresh with possibilities, potholed with familiar digital landmines. Now with added Threads.
By the time I woke up, there was already a boastful news bulletin circulated from Threads parent corporation, Meta. Like animals lining up two-by-two to enter Noah’s ark, in disarmingly similar socio-political times, a cool ten million had so far signed up to Threads, Mark Zuckerberg’s sword drawn in a thinly disguised billionaire’s pissing contest with Elon Musk. A new dawn for social media? It was not yet 7am.
When I was a young man, the clever person’s consensus was that the less outside surveillance of our lives happened, the better
Rarely one to voluntarily miss out on the emergence of “a thing”, obviously I signed up. Threads is Twitter in all but name. It looks the same, feeding the same endorphins by encouraging the same jostle for public approval. When Twitter arrived, I remember feeling queasy at the coercively shifty move from ‘friends’ to ‘followers’ in our digital allegiances, offering a vaporous imprint of fame for all. I decided to body-swerve it.
Already digitally exhausted from Live Journal, Bebo, Friendster, MySpace, Facebook and the rest, I thought I’d sit this one out and wait for the next excitement to arrive, maybe making more practical use of my time. In the interim, before Instagram arrived and sucked me in, I had my first book published, 120,000 whole words on paper, verifying my early suspicions with something which felt more substantial than a blue tick.
When I was a young man, the clever person’s consensus was that the less outside surveillance of our lives happened, the better. When they were first erected, cameras on high street lampposts felt like unnerving plot devices from JG Ballard novels. Whole civic demonstrations were staged against the suggested introduction of national identity cards. Now Zuckerberg and Musk are sparring rock star titans, drunk on their own nerdish power, driving an odd shift in life’s rhythm, it feels almost ludicrous to recall a time when freedom was considered an agreed gold standard.
The tech giants bowled in, wielding their magnetic popularity magnets and we fell like skittles, documenting every action and catapulting it out into some unknowable digital vault to be sold for analysis. We literally cannot give our whereabouts away fast enough. The meals we eat, persuasions we hold dear, fun we have, neuroses we harbour, grudges we bear, dead we mourn and lovers we caress are all galleried for full public inspection.
What a cheap species we turned out to be. Half a dozen likes and we’re anybody’s. Have us. Threads could’ve proved a useful opportunity to evaluate the benefits of social media, collectively bail out or formalise their arrangement. That Faustian ship has long sailed. Clearly, I will be sharing all of the above to my exciting new Threads page later, and look forward to seeing you there.
In other news...
This evening, the brutalist masterwork of the Barbican concert hall will play host to a novel event, Classical Pride. An entirely LGBTQ+ orchestra and soloists, conducted by a gay man will perform a repertoire of music composed entirely by LGBTQ+ musicians. This is the first event of its type in Europe. After debuting the idea in Philadelphia last year, it’s only the second in history.
Not only does Classical Pride offer a brief reprieve from the tinny party house music and Taylor Swift’s tireless mid-market self-absorption from gay events, it may even plug some of the gaps in the educations of folk of a certain age. I knew when Clause 28 banned the promotion of homosexuality in schools for all those years between the late 80s and early 00s that Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, Vita Sackville West and Truman Capote were now considered dodgy materials. I had no idea the works of Haydn and Tchaikovsky were, too. Even into my 50s, it’s never too late to learn, in the most gorgeous and elegant surrounds.
