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Thank you for listening to Off the Hook.
Off the Hook, we couldn't get much worse.
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Bondi Le Bon!
Bondi Le Bon.
Bondi Le Bon.
And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off the Hook.
Amanda Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
Joined tonight by Kyle.
Hi.
How are you doing?
Fine. I'm over here.
Yeah, I know. I can see you.
And Rob T. Firefly is out there in Skypeland, looks like.
Good evening.
Also looks like Gila is in a different part of Skypeland.
How are you doing?
I sure am. Good evening.
And in yet another location in Skypeland, we have Alex.
You do indeed. Good morning.
Good morning from Bangkok.
You're still in Bangkok, Thailand.
Okay.
You know, Alex, it's safe to come back.
I mean, you know, we have until January, so you don't have to, you know, be in the bunker this early.
But please do clear out some space because a bunch of us might want to go over there, too.
I don't blame you.
I don't blame you.
Actually, it's been an amazing week here in Bangkok at the Ethereum DevCon and heading back tonight.
So I'll leave tonight and come back to New York.
Get back by around 3 p.m. tomorrow.
Okay.
So if you're planning an entourage to greet Alex on his return, that's the time to be there.
Okay.
So we have a bunch of things to talk about tonight.
We're going to try to keep it as, you know, upbeat as possible because that's, you know, in our nature.
But, boy, we have some hard roads ahead.
Let me start with four words, okay?
And you'll see what I'm talking about.
You'll see both humor and, oh, my God, in the same future.
Four words.
Attorney General Matt Gaetz.
Yeah.
That's the reality that we're facing now.
Attorney General Matt.
Okay.
You know, so last week it was the show where we were in shock over the election results.
This week it's the show where we're starting to reel from seeing what the cabinet picks are.
You have Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Yeah.
You've got Elise Stefanik who is going to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
I doubt she can even find the United Nations.
He has no diplomatic experience whatsoever except possibly negotiating over a parking spot or something like that.
But that's it.
And now Attorney General Matt Gaetz.
Can you imagine?
One of us very likely in the next year could find ourselves being indicted and the page of the person indicting us will be Matt Gaetz.
And I don't know if I can keep from laughing at that point.
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It's going to be hard.
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All right.
We have an interesting story here.
You guys are familiar with tracking apps, I take it.
You know, we, well, okay.
Honestly, I'm not going to kid around here.
I've never used one.
I don't intend to ever use one.
But people do use these for their kids, sometimes for their spouses, sometimes for complete strangers.
I don't know.
But basically, these apps allow you to monitor the location of somebody using their phone.
And, you know, for some people, I guess it might make sense if you think your kid might be, you know,
trying to make a run for it or something or is at risk for some reason of being abducted.
But how would you feel if it was no longer a choice, if it was something that was mandatory?
We're starting to see that.
We're starting to move in that direction.
I want to tell you the story of some people down in Georgia.
Let's go back to October 30th of this year.
That was when police handcuffed Brittany Patterson in front of three of her four children and drove her to the police station in Fannin County, Georgia.
She was then fingerprinted, photographed, and dressed in an orange jumpsuit.
What happened?
Hours earlier, around noon, she had driven her eldest son to a medical appointment.
Her youngest son, named Soren, 10 years old at the time, since turned 11, he wanted to come along but wasn't around when it was time to leave.
So, I figured he was in the woods or at grandma's house.
Patterson said she lives on 16 acres with her kids and her father.
Her husband works out of state.
No shortage of family in the vicinity.
Patterson's mother and sisters live just two minutes away.
But Soren, being a 10-year-old, was not playing in the woods.
He had decided to walk to downtown Mineral Bluff, a town of just 370 people, not quite a mile from the house.
A woman who saw him walking alongside the road, where the speed limit is 25 or 35 in some places, she asked him if he was okay, and he said yes.
But she called the police.
A female sheriff picked up the boy, called Patterson.
She asked me, says Patterson, if I knew he was downtown, and I said no.
And Patterson was upset that Soren had gone to town without letting anyone know, but says there was hardly reason to worry.
I was not panicking as I know the roads.
Know he's mature enough to walk there without incident.
But the sheriff disagreed.
She kept mentioning how he could have been run over or kidnapped or anything could have happened.
The sheriff drove Soren home, left him with his grandfather.
After returning to the house, Patterson scolded her son, and that, she thought, was that.
But at 6.30 p.m. that night, the sheriff returned with another officer.
They told Patterson to turn around and put her hands behind her back as three of her kids watched.
She was handcuffed.
The sheriff took her purse and phone, put her in the cruiser, hauled her off to jail.
Yeah.
Now, to Patterson, this made absolutely no sense.
She'd grown up in the area of plenty of unsupervised time to wander and play, and she was raising her kids that way, too.
The mentality here, she said, is more free range.
She was soon released on a $500 bail.
The next day, a case manager from the Division of Family and Children's Services came out for a home visit and even went to interview Patterson's oldest son at his school.
The case manager told Patterson everything seemed fine but declined to comment to the site I'm reading from, Reason.com.
A few days later, the Division of Family and Children's Services, the FCS, presented Patterson with a safety plan for her to sign.
It would require her to delegate a safety person to be a knowing participant and guardian and watch over the children whenever she leaves home.
And the plan would also require Patterson to download an app onto her son's phone, allowing for his location to be monitored.
Yes, the day when it will be illegal not to track one's kids is rapidly approaching.
Now, Patterson, to her credit, did not want to be compelled to track her son.
Recalling a similar case, she contacted attorney David DeLugas.
He's the head of Parents USA, a nonprofit that often provides pro bono legal help to parents wrongly arrested and prosecuted for child neglect.
GoFundMe has been established to help Parents USA cover the Patterson's legal expenses.
Now, as her counsel, DeLugas called the assistant district attorney to discuss the case.
He recorded the conversation, which is legal in Georgia.
The ADA told DeLugas that if Patterson would sign the safety plan, the criminal charges would be dropped.
DeLugas responded that if Patterson had to sign a safety plan simply because her son walked someplace without her knowing his exact location,
it would stop him from visiting friends or having any independence whatsoever.
But the assistant district attorney maintained that Saren had been in danger and thus a safety plan was necessary.
The matter was left unsettled.
And Patterson is saying she will not sign this.
She could face a year in jail.
She could face a thousand dollar fine.
She could even face having her kid taken away from her.
Now, obviously, there's a technological and a privacy aspect to all this that is of interest.
But the other thing that I think is of particular interest is where this happened.
You know, we hear all these complaints and accusations hurled from from one side of the political spectrum to another.
And if I were to read you the story without giving you the details of where exactly it took place, you would say, oh, boy, it's that nanny state again.
The Democrats just want to control everything.
But no, no, this is as red as red can be.
District attorney was appointed by Republican governor Brian Kemp.
District attorney's name is Frank Wood for the Appalachian Judicial Circuit.
Right. And it's about time that we face reality and realize that when we say that the government wants to control every aspect of your life.
You don't point the finger at just one side because it's omnipresent.
It's everywhere.
And Republicans are every bit as as guilty as Democrats, if not more so.
Yet somehow we get it into our heads that Democrats are to blame for things that they do as well.
And I just thought this was incredible.
No one's really touched upon that aspect of it.
But in a world where we see all these crazy accusations being thrown around where Democrats are somehow blamed for covid lately, they've been blamed for killing a squirrel.
Well, I mean, it just goes on and on and on.
And if you just do a little bit of digging, not too much, just a little bit, you'll see that there's examples of all kinds of bad things that are happening.
But it's not just one side.
It's all sides.
And we need to recognize that.
But mostly we need to fight this kind of thing, because forcing somebody to track somebody else is not healthy.
And I don't understand what's gotten into the heads of the people down there where they think somebody simply walking down a road at 10 years old.
He's now 11.
He turned 11 since this happened only a few days ago.
Now, how is that something that we have to go nuts over?
You know, I think when we were all kids, we did things like this all the time.
And just because we've we've convinced ourselves that the world is a dangerous place and that there's all these evil people out there looking to do us harm.
That paranoia should not translate into policy.
Yet every day we see another example of that happening.
OK, any any thoughts, ideas?
Yeah, it's like it's aesthetical to freedom.
Uh huh.
Alex.
Well, I think that you're right, Emmanuel.
I don't think this is a political issue at all.
I think this is much more of a philosophical and policy based issue, because this is this is all about really the paternalism, you know, or the state essentially acting as as if it knows so much better than we do.
Right.
I mean, we have certain things, certain laws, I think, that are paternalistic, that we may look at that are probably helpful, like laws about riding a motor motorcycle with a helmet on.
Right.
You know, there's certain laws that say you have to wear a helmet.
And so the state's telling you to do something and that's for your own benefit.
But anytime you have paternalistic laws that that are that are put onto the books, especially if they have some kind of criminal consequence for violating those particular laws, there is this risk that gives me that there's an overreach of the government.
And these types of laws, I think, are wrong in just so many ways.
But I think the first one is is what really what you're hitting at is that there's this erosion of autonomy of the individual because of these laws.
You feel like you have a choice to do things, but you're not.
You're being forced to to make one particular choice that the state has made for you and you're forced to do it.
And this is a particularly crazy choice as well to have to surveil somebody digitally or face some kind of prosecution.
And it's your children of all of all of all people as well.
It also, I think, prevents people from making the right decisions about these types of things themselves.
It just seems like it's an automatic and knee jerk response about using these types of technologies to control other human beings.
I could see people who are subject to being continually electronic, electronically monitored or surveilled digitally, especially with their geolocation being much more likely to, let's say, install some kind of stalkerware on their spouse's phone.
So it normalizes this type of behavior.
It provides this illusion of choice.
I think it stifles people's growth and it's totally misguided intervention of the state.
I'll stop there.
I agree with everything you said, except for one one thing where you said it's not a political issue and it shouldn't be a political issue.
But if this happened in New York, do you think for one minute it would not have been have been displayed by Republicans everywhere as yet another example of the nanny state running every aspect of your life?
And yet here we have a clear example of it happening on the other side, much like Republicans are trying to control women's bodies and having the government in the bedroom.
You know, so for some reason, Democrats are very bad at defending themselves against these unwarranted accusations where they have exclusive guilt in situations like this.
And here's a clear example where you could you probably couldn't find a Democrat within 100 miles of this place.
And yet this kind of thing is happening.
Rob, go ahead.
In addition to everything you guys are saying, I am always kind of feeling chills crawling up my spine when things like legal requirements that are put onto people require the use of something like a spyware app on a smartphone that that would be in the possession of this kid.
And in this case, not everyone wants to give their kids a smartphone, even today, they're ubiquitous.
But, you know, there are there are people who question the value of that in a young person's life.
Not everyone has access to a cell phone.
Not everyone has the luxury of being able to buy smartphones for their children, even if they wanted to.
And yet so many of the most private aspects of our lives more and more are tied through these devices.
And you hear about things like divorced co-parents using co-parenting apps to communicate with one another and arrange things around the around the child.
And sometimes that is part of conditions imposed on them by by by by a court, like a family court.
And this just makes me question our dependence on this sort of thing and our willingness to accept something as, frankly, scary as an app that tracks your child.
You know, you know, smartphones and the apps on them are are subverted and broken into all the time.
And maybe you don't want that security vulnerability going on.
Yeah. And also, the thing that really is the victim here is freedom where, you know, a kid can just have an adventure on his own.
I mean, think of when you were 10 years old, you know, I you know, when I was eight years old, I grew up in Queens and well, I didn't actually grow up, I guess, at eight.
But I was pretty grown up and I would go down and watch the trains go by on the L.I. double R, you know, and nobody in my house knew I was doing that.
But it was it was I rode my bike down there.
And yeah, it was it was my thing.
I went other places, too.
I'd ride all around the city.
Well, not New York City, but, you know, around my neighborhood, at least.
And when when we teach kids to be so afraid that if they venture more than a few feet from their home, they're in mortal danger and will be in trouble.
You're raising very unhealthy people that will take that with them for the rest of their lives.
Go ahead, Gila.
I think so.
I have so many streams of thought right now.
But one thing just going on what you said, it's not just that we're teaching kids to be afraid.
And unadventurous.
We're teaching kids.
We're teaching communities that no one is safe and that you can't see someone walking down the street and just mind your business.
If the kid is not running up to you and saying, oh, my gosh, I can't find my parents.
If a child is walking around the street looking OK, I mean, granted, I'm not a parent, but I feel like you can usually tell when someone is in distress.
And if you see a kid hanging out and having a good time, let the kid hang out and have a good time.
That's thing number one.
We need to be more willing to watch out for each other and less willing to jump to law enforcement whenever anything is amiss.
I think that's piece one point five.
I'm not even sure where I'm counting anymore.
I was thinking also about when I was a kid, I did not grow up in New York.
I grew up in the Midwest and my mom was driving carpool home from school, four kids in the car.
Me, my brother, two very close family friends.
And she said, I have to go to the grocery store for five minutes.
Do you want to come inside?
And we all said no.
So we stayed in the car and we took naps in the parking lot.
She was gone for 10 minutes and then she took us out for ice cream.
She would be arrested now for doing that.
Crack the windows.
I just want to put that on the record.
It wasn't that hot outside and we cracked the windows.
And how old were you?
Um, I was 10, which means the other kids in the car were 12, 9 and 6.
And did any of you know how to open a car door if things got too hot or a window?
Yeah, but also it was late fall in the Midwest.
We were going to be okay.
Well, blizzard could happen or, you know, a meteorite.
I don't know.
But yeah, I see your point.
We also knew how to get from the car to the store if we needed her.
And this idea that everything has to be centralized and everything has to be followable at any given moment, that there's no way to get off the grid, you know, that now you've got airlines that are just like, hey, here's free Wi-Fi from takeoff to touchdown.
That moment of bliss and non-connectivity, gone.
Gone.
But, E, I was curious.
Is this like a site that you interact with on the reg?
No, actually, it just came up in my news feed.
I'm not familiar with it.
Reason.com told this story.
And I assume it's, you know, on the up and up, if anything is not accurate.
Oh, no, no, no.
So it wasn't a, so the person who wrote the story, I looked it up.
So Lenore Skenazi is really cool, actually.
And if you people don't know who she is, you should totally check her out.
She's the founder of the Free Range Kids Movement because her kids were playing in the backyard without her.
And she, like, they called the cops on her and almost took her kids away.
So wait a minute.
The person who wrote this article had the same thing happen?
And that's the only reason I even saw this is because it already happened to somebody else.
Because I did not see the story reported anyplace else.
And it wouldn't have been otherwise.
People are starting to pick it up now.
But, so this woman, again, her name is Lenore Skenazi.
She's been fighting the good fight on this for coming up on 30 years, I think.
The rest of the site was kind of scary, though.
So I was just curious how you found it.
Well, I just found that story.
But, you know, following up with what you said about where we're moving, you know, technology-wise and privacy-wise, it just makes me wonder.
Now we have Elon Musk, who is part of this new department called the Department of Government Efficiency, if you can believe that.
Now, I think, you know, if you thought that any of these people had any respect or took their job seriously, making up departments, and having the department, by the way, spell out DOGE, for God's sake.
Like, I mean, do you see how they think it's all a joke?
They're laughing at us.
They're going to be, you know, basically taking money hand over fist from some scheme that they concoct together with their new department.
But now this guy is going to have authority and a means of advising the highest levels of government on what policies to enact.
You think our privacy won't be degraded even further?
Yes, Kila.
No, A, it absolutely will be.
B, I didn't think about the DOGE thing.
I'm very glad it's not called the Department of X.
And, Salon Musk, everything is X.
There's this concept that every accusation is an admission.
And, you know, people are saying, oh, well, the other side wants to be tracking everybody and wants to require everybody to register every single thing they're doing.
And they're standing in bathroom doorways and they're checking people's genitals when they walk in because that's what they want to do.
And they want you afraid of it.
But then you know it's coming.
So, yeah, I'm surprised they don't just start implanting RFID chips in babies after birth so we can track them wherever they go.
Oh, Gila, don't, don't, don't give ideas out.
They listen.
You think they're listening to this stuff?
They listen, they get forwarded, and they write it down because, you know, we might be opposed to some of the potential scenarios in our heads.
But those scenarios are, you know, realistic for them.
And also, I'm told that not everybody knows what DOGE is.
Does anybody want to explain DOGE very quickly?
It's a cryptocurrency, basically.
Do I need to go further than that?
It's a meme cryptocurrency.
What does that mean?
It's based on a popular picture of a cute dog that was slapped onto a cryptocurrency to make it, you know, cool and with it for the kids these days.
Why wasn't it called DOG then?
Because the meme picture of the dog is called DOGE because that's just how it sort of burst into being.
That's not a good enough answer.
I want to know why it's called DOGE and not DOG if it's about a picture of a dog.
But the point is, it's cryptocurrency, and it's very, very shady explanations as to just what is actually backing it, what it means.
Not the point right now.
They're calling a department that.
It just indicates to me they're not taking any of this seriously.
Kyle?
Yeah, the conversation is kind of all over here.
I mean, we're kind of, we've got big buckets and small buckets of topics.
Like, you're talking a little bit towards, like, transhumanism and, like, 6G telephone standards and some of the features that have been touted around that.
And what people are moving towards as far as enhancing their abilities through the use of technology.
And I think the tracking thing, like, as much as it's, like, the wildest scenario is likely, I think there's more of this sort of tempered specific use.
There are, like, the stuff around, like, requiring an app to track a child or them having, like, you know, kid-friendly ankle bracelets.
I mean, it is conditioning a certain sort of asset tracking and, like, property instead of the individual, like someone having choice from birth, you know, on about certain things.
And in a traditional sense, maybe last century or so, we, like, up until then, like, sort of felt it was the parents' guidance and they would be empowered until adulthood that they make the right choices around this.
So I think there's other topics in here, too, we're kind of touching on, like, parenting and, like, even philosophical ones that, as a country, we haven't really agreed on, like, what they are, the ideals of freedom.
Like, what is that?
And to be an individual prior to adulthood, like, what are the choices and things that you're allowed to do?
And then, of course, neighborhoods, like what I grew up with or, you know, in that period of time and the where, and, of course, that's different from where Gila and you may have grown up and the things you were allowed to do and not to do and the attitudes of the time were different.
And, of course, the scale and affordability, let's say, of these technological management features that we now have ready access to, almost an overabundance of.
And clear, actually, I think what we've been saying for a long time is a clear overabundance of these types of features.
So that, even in the present, is inherently contextual, like, what part of the country, what part of the world, what your community standards are, what your neighborhood is even like.
Is it an urban environment that is quite busy but also has a whole lot of supervision and, I guess, let's say, support for people that are commuting, whether old or young.
You know, that's kind of like the Manhattan-type model.
That's very different from a rural environment with when you're parenting and you entrust a minor to be operating equipment or going very far distances across a field or something without supervision.
Those are different standards.
Now, do you have to – in those environments, we're able to do a lot of these things with the abundance of technology.
And it's presumably a choice that parents, if they're in control, presumably, they're making with as much information as possible.
And I think we've always attested to the fact that there isn't really enough information on how capable a lot of these technologies are.
Look, parents, I think, should always have the choice as to how they want to do this.
But what you say, you know, it holds true for both urban and rural environments.
You know, a kid can run a tractor, sure, but I've seen kids in the city riding subways on their own.
So it really depends on how you're brought up, what your values are, what your level of comfort is.
And some people may choose to have a much more supervised upbringing, but it should not ever be forced on people.
And that's what I see happening in this particular case.
And the thing that bugs me so much is that it's happening in a red area, as red as it can possibly be.
And no matter what, it always somehow gets blamed on the other side when that is just not true.
And there are so many other examples of that, but we only have the hour.
Rob, go ahead.
Yeah, I think what's encompassing all of this, and this covers wherever, whenever you grew up, actually, I think most of us here on this program could say we grew up in an era where we kind of saw the beginnings of the, I guess, what we would call a surveillance state trying to form.
But I think the most insidious thing about situations like this app is it is training kids to be surveilled and to be okay with that and to accept that that is the way things ought to be.
And, you know, one generation of kids gets that instituted as some sort of punishment.
The next generation of kids just deals with it as a day-by-day thing that seems entirely normal, and that is what's frightening.
Well, I mean, Alex's kid was normalizing cameras, remember?
You know, about a year or two ago.
Right, Alex?
Yeah, that's funny.
I was just about to bring that up.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
Kids these days are just so used to being surveilled everywhere they go.
I mean, it's a completely different world.
The other aspect I wanted to bring up of this story that I find just so absolutely offensive is the fact that the district attorney was going to force some kind of safety plan on the parent and sign a safety plan.
And I guess that plan could be audited.
And if the parent did not keep to the safety plan, then I guess the charges could be brought again.
But the whole idea of having the state intervene in such a specific way about how you were bringing up your child and forcing some kind of electronic surveillance of that child is so anathema to personal autonomy and freedom.
And it's really shocking to me.
It really is.
I find that to be one of the more offensive aspects of the story.
Kyle, quickly, we have other stories.
I just would add that I think because it would be something that is imposed on a large scale because of the attitudes that everyone expressed so eloquently about the variation and the expectation people have to be able to choose in their lives.
And I think that there would be a lot of blowback or backlash to it.
So I don't think it's a huge risk, but I think it's important to be aware of how we're using these things and how we're conditioning, of course.
And I think we're also uniquely positioned because of our experience of having memories prior to things being networked kind of universally and now when it's kind of quite common.
So it is cool to share about what we grew up with and that kind of thing.
All right.
Moving on, we have this story concerning Twitter, now known as X.
Some of us still won't call it that, though.
But when they unveiled their newest terms of service, which go into effect two days from now, November 15th, users quickly picked up on one change.
And here it is.
By submitting, posting, or displaying content on or through the services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to make your content available to the rest of the world.
Now, that includes the right to analyze any of that content, including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type.
So basically, by continuing to use the platform, users will agree that Twitter slash X can use their data to train its AI models.
And using content to train AI has become a major issue as the technology booms.
On Twitter, artists and others in creative roles are fretting about their work being used, not just on that platform, but to train computers that could someday replace human creators entirely.
Other users say they're concerned about personal information in their tweets being used that way.
Some users said on the site they've already begun deleting photographs of themselves from their feeds.
And if users have an issue with those terms, they might end up in a federal courtroom that's favored by conservative activists and is already presiding over two lawsuits involving Twitter.
According to the update, all disputes related to the terms will be brought to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas or State Courts in Tarrant County, Texas, about 100 miles away from Twitter's new headquarters or X's new headquarters outside of Austin.
They say any user who continues to use their products or services on or after November 15th would be agreeing to the updated terms.
In a somewhat related story, the Guardian is no longer using Twitter, is no longer using X.
They said, we wanted to let the readers know we will no longer post on any official Guardian editorial accounts on the social media site X, formerly Twitter.
We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere.
This is something we have been considering for a while, given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far right conspiracy theories and racism.
The U.S. presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time, that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.
X users will still be able to share our articles and the nature of live news reporting means we will still occasionally embed content from X within our article pages.
Our reporters will also be able to carry on using the site for news gathering purposes, just as they use other social networks in which we do not officially engage.
Social media can be an important tool for news organizations and help us to reach new audiences.
But at this point, X now plays a diminished role in promoting our work.
Our journalism is available and open to all on our website, and we would prefer people to come to TheGuardian.com and support our work there.
Thankfully, we can do this because our business model does not rely on viral content tailored to the whims of the social media giant's algorithms.
Instead, we're funded directly by our readers.
And, yeah, that is the key.
That is the key.
I guess it's a parallel to what we do here at WBAI.
Imagine if we were subjected to the whims of the algorithm.
We're not.
We don't care about the algorithm.
But this is really something rather dramatic, as it's one of the bigger sites to leave the platform.
And we're seeing, both based on those new terms of service and the recent political developments, we're seeing a mass exodus.
And most of those people seem to be winding up on a site called Blue Sky, which is very similar to the way Twitter used to look and is fairly easy to use.
And I'm wondering if that is going to be where people wind up.
Now, I know there are people who want to go to Macedon as well.
I don't see why there can't be both.
But, you know, I've been doing a little bit of experimentation on all three.
And right now, the biggest engagement that I see, the most response and back and forth is on Blue Sky.
I don't know why that is.
It's certainly not on Twitter.
I'm not sure if the reason for that is because I'm being what they called a shadow band, where basically your posts aren't seen by very many people.
They have a number that shows you how many people have read your comment, your tweet.
That number used to be in the thousands, and now it's maybe 50.
So something happened.
Either everybody left or there's some kind of a band in place.
I don't really care.
I don't want to be part of this.
While I'm still on the platform, I'm engaging less and less and moving more and more towards these other alternatives.
And I'm finding a lot of enthusiasm.
I'm finding a lot of people that really are into this.
There are a couple of speed bumps.
There are apps that will allow you to migrate your followers to the new platform, to Blue Sky.
But it doesn't quite work as well as you might want it to.
For instance, if I followed Alex on Twitter, and his username was Alex, and I said to this app,
yeah, show me where Alex is on Blue Sky.
It will show me everybody who says Alex.
And that's not really what I need.
And I have to have some faith that whoever took the same handle as you is also you.
And if that's not the case, then I'm going to wind up following the wrong person.
That's going to clear out after a while.
We'll figure it out.
But alternatives are definitely needed.
And not being beholden to something as negative as what Twitter has become is so essential for us to be able to communicate freely.
I'm wondering what you guys have had any experience with this, Rob.
Yeah.
I mean, I could speak to the engagement end of it.
But, you know, there are a few of us behind the scenes who work on the Twitter and Mastodon accounts for this program.
And I have been noticing for a long time that, as you were saying, the engagement on Twitter had taken a nosedive.
You know, we post, you know, when our show is live and when we're doing overtime and things like that and some other things.
But people have not been interacting with it on Twitter for a long time.
Mastodon, it is a lively crowd.
And people really seem to appreciate our presence.
And, you know, it goes to it speaks to, like, the presence of these silos and algorithms and things that we've all kind of been at the mercy of on social media for so long.
And when something gets entrenched, it feels like, you know, on the organizational level that it can do anything, like, say, take all the content and feed it to the AI slot bots.
And it's it's sad.
And, you know, I I deleted my personal Twitter a while back.
But one hobby I had in the heyday of Twitter was starting up other little Twitter accounts for little art projects and things.
And, you know, I I have to chase all these down and make sure I delete them before the deadline, because I don't want that stuff ending up in the AI mills.
Anyone else?
Yeah, I question.
I question whether we we need an alternative to Twitter.
I just I just don't see this type of engagement providing much interaction or I don't have joy or any kind of level of sophistication to somebody's life.
I find that the whole thing to be pretty repulsive and especially with what Twitter has become.
It's it's been really, really bad lately.
You know, all the content that is is being propelled on it.
And, you know, and I I'll tell you, leading up to the election, I had gone to a couple of places in Pennsylvania where kind of the alt right would congregate.
I went to one of these freedom festivals on a weekend and it was maybe a couple of weeks before the election.
And it's it's one of these really kind of alternate right type of festivals.
And I like to go every year or so just to see what people are thinking and talking about.
And at one of the stages where there was a speaker talking about how the election was going to be stolen, he was telling everyone that they need to get on Twitter.
And it wasn't it wasn't true social or gab or anything like that anymore.
It was Twitter.
It was you got to get on Twitter.
You got to get on Twitter because Musk's our friend now and will be heard.
And so it it's just there are these gathering spaces from which I just feel nothing good ever comes.
So do we really need an alternative?
Well, I mean, you're kind of contradicting yourself there, because if we don't have an alternative, we just have Twitter.
You know, so and you also mentioned a couple of alternatives that exist, true social.
And what's the other one, gab?
Yeah.
And I forgot about those.
They must be worried now because, you know, right wing extremism was was was their domain.
And now Twitter's kind of taking that over as well.
I think we need alternatives.
I mean, don't we need alternatives to right wing radio?
You know, you need other places where people can communicate.
If you're saying that social media in and of itself is unhealthy.
Yeah, I agree with you on that.
If you take it too seriously or get too embedded in it, but to not have any outlets for all the people that are disgusted by what's been going on lately.
I think that would not serve us.
So I think, you know, yeah, let's let's have alternatives.
Let's do it right this time.
Let's protect ourselves.
I know our friend Corey Doctorow, he won't use Blue Sky.
The reason for that.
And, you know, I do understand this.
It's not set up the way that Mastodon is, where it's decentralized.
And if if if if one host goes nuts, you can just go to another one.
Blue Sky, you're dependent on the people running Blue Sky.
And they could go Elon someday in the future.
And he doesn't want to go through all that again.
Now, maybe there's a way to protect Blue Sky from that happening.
I happen to like the interface.
I happen to think it's, you know, like I said, it has the most engagement for me right now.
But I certainly don't want to go through this again.
And what what Mastodon has right now is is is quite nice.
It's just it's it's a bit of a hurdle for a lot of people who don't have a whole lot of technical skills.
So we make that easier and maybe we incorporate the two somehow.
We've got something really good.
But, yeah, I think we can all agree.
Twitter's a lost cause unless, you know, it somehow falls out of Elon's hands and someone else wants to put in the time to rebuild it.
But I'm glad we have alternatives.
Gila, did you have something?
I did, actually.
I agree that I think it is important to have an alternative, but that does give me two thoughts.
First of all.
I mean, I don't know if that's a moment that's going to be replicable again in the same way, because social media has balkanized itself in so many different ways that there is not necessarily going to be a place where everybody's going to be.
Part number one is part number one.
Part number two is to Emmanuel, your point about.
Left wing like talk radio.
As a concept, and we need more of that.
Do you remember Air America?
Oh, yes, I do.
I do.
I'm not saying the left is particularly good at it.
I'm saying that we need alternatives.
We need alternatives.
We need alternatives, but I think it's like herding cats.
Well, I mean, look, it's when you take on a simplistic point of view, and most of that point of view revolves around my way or the highway.
Anyway, it's fairly easy to get other people to agree with you on that, but if you're more nuanced and you believe in one thing but not the other thing that somebody else believes in, and you have all these different patchworks of opinions, and yet you somehow want to get everybody under a big tent, it's a lot more difficult than having that simplistic viewpoint.
And I think that is why, on so many levels, the left is behind the right, because they do the simple thing, and they just prey on people's emotions and prejudices, and they get a lot of people following them.
And the other side, it's a lot more work, and it doesn't always pay off.
It often doesn't, but, you know, in the end, I think history will judge one side much, much more favorably than another.
You know, one thing, though, I do want to say in closing of this story is that while I understand deleting accounts, I think maybe not deleting the account so much, deleting the tweets, sure, but deleting the account, if people want to find you, and they only know your Twitter account, how are they going to find you?
And maybe somebody else will take your name on an alternative.
So maybe we can come up with some kind of a uniform way that we install a pointer.
I mean, imagine how pissed off Elon will be when the majority of Twitter accounts are nothing but pointers to another social media site, and nothing else.
Yes, Rob?
Well, that problem has kind of been solved since before all this mess got to this point, because a lot of us, including me, including 2600, including lots of other things, have their own website on their own domain.
And, like, I have my own website, it's my name, and from there, you could see all my other social media crap that I'm on, and that list is always changing.
When I delete something, it falls off the list on my site.
When I add something, I add it there, and that's always the place where people know they can find me, and that's been long established.
And I think it may behoove folks to bring back the era of people having their own little corner of the Internet rather than their own presences on other people's corners of the Internet, and depending on that, to just be there.
Okay, I didn't want to let this story slip by.
We only have two minutes left, but I think it's important to mention this, that the menstrual health and period tracking app Clue has said it will not disclose users' data to American authorities following Donald Trump's re-election.
That message comes in response to concerns that during Trump's second presidency, abortion bans that followed the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022 will worsen, and states will attempt to increase menstrual surveillance, I can't believe I'm not even saying these words, in order to further restrict access to terminations.
Basically, in a statement on TikTok, female and male staffers at Clue, based in Berlin, stand together with arms crossed, along with a text on screen that reads,
We have never and will never disclose any members' private health data to any authority.
If we are ever subpoenaed, we will not comply.
You know, I want to hear words like that more often, because that is true courage.
Because I always hear, yeah, we protect your privacy, but if we're subpoenaed, we will fully comply.
No, don't. Stop complying. Start resisting.
It's never been more important than this.
Alex, I'll give you one second to respond to that, but we're out of time.
Yeah, I think other apps, anything that stores personal information like that, of such a sensitive nature, should also realize everyone always has that choice.
You can always fight back a subpoena.
You don't have to comply, and you have to be forced to comply through a motion to compel.
So I think it's very brave of them.
I like to see others standing up in the same way.
Okay.
We are out of time.
This has been Off the Hook.
Write to us, OTH at 2600.com.
And we are all going over to YouTube now for Overtime.
Go to Channel 2600 on YouTube to see us there for Overtime.
We'll see you next week.
Good night.