#leaving #migration #facebook #twitter #instagram #flickr #500px #netflix #hulu #web20 #web3 #mastodon #federation #fediverse #instances #future #corporateinfluence #EvilBillionaireSuperVillains

Well, it’s official—I’m quitting Twitter. Yeah, I know, I was just talking about this about six months ago, right? Back then, I said I was impressed and intrigued by the idea of moving permanently to the open-source, decentralized “social media as email address” movement known as Mastodon (which to be clear is the same thing from a slightly different perspective Jack Dorsey is trying to do at Bluesky), but that I wanted a greater need to actually move over to it before I fully would, and for it to have any chance of mainstream adoptability. Well, since those six months ago, we’ve now had a literal crazy evil billionaire spacecraft-owning supervillain buy Twitter; Facebook bump up now against the maximum profit it will ever make, and currently starting to take a tumble down now that Zuckerberg can’t figure out anything like VR or AR or any other magic wand that will save it; and Instagram completely collapse as it tries to chase the tail of TikTok, doing it in the usual mediocre way a giant corporation always does it when they try to pivot too quickly, pleasing neither the TikTok fans they were looking to convert nor old Instagram users like me who quickly left the service.

That’s enough to finally make Mastodon look a lot more attractive, right? So, lo and behold, that’s what I’m in the process of doing right now, and I’ve begun double-posting everything I usually do at my various “Web 2.0” social networks now to my “web3” Mastodon account, @jasonpettus@mastodon.cloud. If you’re hip and in the know, you’ll know how to use that “Mastodress” to immediately add me to your own Mastodon feed; but if you’re normal like me, you can just visit the web page Mastodon.cloud outputs on my behalf so you can browse my updates in a style very similar to a page at Twitter, and click a big giant “Follow Jason” button like you already know and love. The goal is to spend the following months of autumn and into the winter getting everyone trained to follow that new, open address that anyone can follow using any Mastodon client they want; then right before New Year’s, I’m going to do a massive slaughtering of my old Web 2.0 life, by not only deactivating but actively deleting all my content and account info at Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, saying goodbye (and good riddance) to those bloated, horrible old systems for good, and really embracing all of ours’ glorious web3 futures.

Well, okay, perhaps “same ol’ pictures of cats wanting cheeseburgers” is a bit too much to legitimately call “glorious,” but certainly the “receiving your pictures of cats wanting cheeseburgers at whatever destination you want” part is worth celebrating as our future, especially in light of the triple implosion recently of the former three biggest social networks in the world. See, for those who are having a hard time catching on, the tech behind Mastodon basically treats the information from a social media update in the same openly formatted way for everyone, which means that like email, it doesn’t matter who originally sent it and who eventually receives it, because it’s being sent under the same open tech standards that all the recipients understand in at least a basic way. So any organization at all who maintains their own Mastodon server (known in that community’s parlance as a “Mastodon instance”) can give it a domain name like any website has a domain name, and then anyone with the rights to do so can set up their own Mastodon address there using whatever their name is (@jasonpettus) followed by the domain name of the group hosting them (@jasonpettus@mastodon.cloud).

So that means, for example, that any high-schooler with a spare computer and a suburban family’s always-on internet connection could set up a Mastodon server just for their family (and in fact this is kind of the best-case scenario Mastodon utopians imagine when talking about this subject), so that I as the theoretical father of that family might be reached at @jason@pettus.chicago. That lets me communicate with the world in the same uniquely fun and informative way that comes with tweets or other small media-rich updates, but controlling the entire thing from just an old Windows laptop that 17-year-old @jacob@pettus.chicago has set up in our basement, no Twitter needed, thank you very much. All of my friends are on Mastodon accounts themselves, after all, so even if others’ accounts are hosted by big giant public corporations the size and scope of Twitter at its former height, all their media-rich updates get sent to my little tiny home server effortlessly anyway, because it’s all based on an open system of standards everyone is agreeing to. In turn, it’s effortless for any other Mastodon person on the planet to subscribe to my tiny little home account being run on this spare Windows laptop in the basement, because it just has a public address like everyone else does; and thus is the system working exactly like Facebook or Twitter, only that everyone is at whatever kind of hosting situation they want to be at, whether a big public place, a smaller niche one devoted to a specific subject, or a tiny family one run off an old Windows laptop in the basement.

And that’s not all, but since this is simply a data-transfer protocol to begin with, it works remarkably similar to the old RSS protocol of Web 2.0 days; so for example, this very journal where you’re reading this at the moment has its own unique Mastodon address, which is @jasonpettus@write.as, and there’s nothing really stopping any publication on the planet from having a Mastodon address for delivering its content as well. That way, if you don’t want to deal with all the nonsense at my main Mastodon account (the dark humor, the goofy memes, the snotty attitude, the obscure jokes about Medieval saints and the like), you can just subscribe to the blog’s feed directly, and get new issues delivered right to your home feed and nothing else besides that. So this, if widely adopted, could not only take the place of “legacy social media” like Facebook and Twitter for good, but could take the place of your RSS feed reader too. With a variety of reader formats you could design because of the open nature of its data, there’s really no telling what kinds of interesting stuff you could do with the Mastodon protocol; for example, it'd be easy enough to take the data that comes in from one and convert that HTML and CSS into an ebook format for a Kindle, for real-time newspaper updates delivered straight to the front page of your ebook device or tablet.

So yes, I’ve decided to really embrace the future possibility of Mastodon (or Bluesky, or however the “open social media” movement ends up shaking out), and to do so in a way so that I can’t come back, and that shows these companies that I’m really serious this time about leaving and never returning. I don’t want my shadow account to still be among the “3.2 billion registered members” or whatever these dwindling companies will still be crowing about as they fall apart. I want there to be at least one less when it comes to that 3.2 billion, and to delete all my old intellectual content as thoroughly as I can before doing so. And that’s why I’m also quitting Flickr at the same time, extra-sad in this case because it’s literally the oldest social network I belong to (going all the way back to 2005, which is…gasp, 17 years ago now). That poor sad company has been bought and sold for its parts several times at this point, neglected and beaten-up and not deserving the slow downfall it’s experienced; it finally ended up with some photography printing company that at first had all these high ideals it was spouting about preserving such a large chunk of internet history, but then the people with the money prevailed and said, “Yeah, you gotta start shutting down huge parts of this massive server farm Flickr has built up over the decades in the name of storing all these images.” (At its height, the company had over 6 billion images for either public or private display, all of them connected to a single pervasive search engine and graphic global map.) And I figure I might as well shut down my account at 500px as well, the newest social network I’ve joined, which was supposed to have been an alternative to Flickr, but it’s just too exclusively filled with semi-cheesy commercial photographers who commit Murder By Photoshop on nearly every overly filtered picture of a skyscraper or tree leaf they post. Chop them all out of my life, I say! Drain the swamp and et cetera and so forth!

So that then finally just left my out-of-control streaming life to deal with, because at the same time I’ve been thinking about all of the various Web 2.0 social networks scattered all over the place that I no longer enjoy visiting, I’ve also been thinking about all the money I spend to belong to so many different video streaming services. I don’t want to say that any of them have been a “waste” of my money, and indeed, that’s part of the problem, that the movie industry has fragmented into so many different streaming services now, with each having an exclusive roster of movies not seen anywhere else, you really do have to belong to five or six different services to truly have access to, like, 98 percent of what you might possibly want to watch (compared to, for example, my own youth of watching television, where simply turning the set on immediately gave you access to 100 percent of what you might possibly want to watch). But that’s simply too much money for me to be paying just to have access to 98 percent of everything in the world I would want to be watching at these streaming services, especially given that a giant part of what I in particular want to be watching these days is old and obscure movies that generally don’t run on streaming services to begin with, but that I have to rent through Google Play or torrent through The Pirate Bay. I think it’s time to pay, like 20 percent of that growing annual fee, to instead have access to…hmm, 90 percent of whatever I might want to be watching in the world of streaming these days. I can’t keep up with any of it anyway—at all five of these services, I have watchlists that are each up into the three digits apiece.

So, I’m going with HBO Max, because it has the best ratio of classic old movies to blockbuster modern ones and interesting unique content. And because Netflix has just been wearing out its welcome with me more and more with just the endless parade of crap they’ve been putting out there in recent years, while reducing their content of anything else made by Hollywood more and more to make room for it all. If you want to be primarily a content company, Netflix, you better start putting out some better freaking content and do it soon, because this whole “creativity through algorithm” nonsense ain’t cutting it for you anymore, and you’re driving away people like me in droves who have been longtime customers since all the way back in the DVD days. If I’m only to deliberately pay to belong to one streaming company, which is my goal for 2023, it’s going to be HBO Max, because it literally and quite simply has more stuff I want to watch. When the Netflix original content is good, it’s always popular enough that I can easily find it at The Pirate Bay. If I can’t find it there easily, most likely I wasn’t going to want to watch it in the first place. Meanwhile, there’s not too terribly much other a reason anymore to actually subscribe there.

Meanwhile, then, I’ll pair up my HBO Max account with my Amazon Prime Video one, which I get “for free” as a bonus to the Amazon Prime membership I pay for each year, which primarily and mostly (I can’t emphasize this enough) is so I get free two-day shipping all year, often free one-day shipping, sometimes literally free overnight shipping for the next morning, or of course free shipping at any time to the Amazon lockers just a two-block walk from my apartment. Amazon Prime Video ain’t great, but I get it for free as part of all this free shipping, and it especially always has a nice back selection of strange older titles worth visiting again or sometimes for the first time. And then ironically enough, one of my favorite streaming services of all is actually a completely free one from the get-go, in return for advertising; it’s a place called Tubi, which has essentially taken the place of the cheesy low-budget syndicated UHF channels that used to snowily populate the “weird dial” of old analog television sets of my Mid-Century Modernist early childhood of the early 1970s. It has all the strange, forgotten stuff from the ‘60s through ‘90s that always made it fun to sit back on a Saturday on your couch with a bag of Cheetos and watch three movies in a row on Channel 30, where a big part of the enjoyment was just seeing what random strange shit got plopped in your lap that particular Saturday.

Cutting way down to just one paid streaming account, then combined with the collapse of all my old Web 2.0 destinations to instead bring them all to one open-source feed at Mastodon, while outputting all my creative work next year at my various blogs at my Write.as Pro account, feels like a very good direction to be going here on what feels like a very momentous time right now for the history and development of this so-called “web3” movement for freer, more open, less commercial online interactions. This, right this moment, is really feeling like a right time to finally quit these companies for good that it hasn’t felt like in the past, and really embrace the idea instead of social media now being just another common way we all communicate, and that there deserves to be a way to share these social media updates as easily as we currently swap emails back and forth to each other, or texts on each other’s phones. I look forward to joining you all in the coming months over at mastodon.cloud/@jasonpettus , as we all hopefully put these increasingly icky Web 2.0 projects behind us for good.

But hey, don’t forget, I’m doing a free newsletter about being a book editor over at jasonpettus.substack.com these days! Yeehaw, getting almost a thousand pieces of engagement with each new issue over there these days! I’m just doing what I always do over there, talk with interesting literary people, share my opinions of recent books I’ve read and movies I’ve watched, and share interesting little lectures or tutorials on grammar issues or sometimes editing issues, sometimes self-publishing marketing and sometimes the history of an American idiom. I’m really grateful that the newsletter has taken off in a way that I wasn’t expecting, and I invite you to take the journey with the rest of us there if you’re a literary person yourself, especially someone who’s self-publishing or part of an indie-press community. And, phew, I got so much else that I need to get started with or over with or more often with or more adept with—Cities: Skylines, Amtrak trips soon to quaint little towns in the Midwest, my possible NaNoWriMo political thriller I’ll possibly be writing possibly this November, and just all kinds of other stuff too—so I will hopefully get more on the ball about getting more up to speed on this journal and regular updates of it. I’ve been paying for a Pro account here for almost a year at this point, so I think it’s finally time to get it set up, and to create a new set of HTML and CSS for displaying the blog contents you’re currently looking at. All of that coming soon, and of course the shutdown of all my old social media accounts, so I hope you’ll continue following along for all the latest.

#Deaf #community #culture #history #anger #politics #StupidHearieTourist #Chicago #ASL #signlanguage #SwitchedAtBirth #DisneyFamily #TV #series #Netflix #LizzyWeiss #writinglesson #characterization #SeanBerdy #EbayShipper #EmmettAndBayForever

[WARNING: Spoilers abound today for the Disney Family TV show Switched at Birth. Put off reading this until later if you're in the middle of watching it yourself.]

So did you hear? At the age of 50, I'm in the middle of learning American Sign Language (ASL) for the very first time this year! Longtime readers will of course be familiar with the saga regarding my hearing: how I had my left eardrum surgically removed in the year 2000, due to an infection known as a cholesteatoma, effectively turning me completely deaf in one ear; and how the hearing in my right ear has been slowly degenerating in middle-age, mostly because of too much punk rock in my youth. Even with my cutting-edge $5,000 hearing aid system (four mics in my ears, an external fifth mic that the other person can wear, the whole thing Bluetooth-enabled), I'm still at the point now where I can essentially no longer hold a conversation inside a bar, and am getting closer and closer to no longer being able to do so even inside a coffeehouse.

When I did my annual big-picture overview of my life for my 50th birthday a few weeks ago, I realized with some alarm just how much my social life has shrank away in the last decade to almost nothing, which I lament because I used to love meeting and talking to random new strangers so much in my twenties and thirties. So for me, learning ASL is not some interesting new hobby or experiment, but literally an attempt to completely shift my life into a whole new group of friends and lovers, now among the estimated 20,000 people in the Chicago metro area who can converse in ASL, and by extension the approximate half a million who can do so nationally. And so in this regard, I'm not only learning the language right now, but also taking a deep dive into the culture and history of what's known as the “Deaf community” with a capital “D,” as opposed to lowercase “deaf” which simply indicates a person with hearing loss, but who hasn't made this hearing loss a core part of their identity as a human being.

It's a complicated subject that deserves its own journal entry later this year; but the most basic, fundamental tenet of the Deaf community is that they don't see their lack of hearing as a disability or handicap — that is, something that deserves pity and that permanently limits them from fully participating in human society — but rather the way that you and I might see, for example, high blood pressure — a simple imperfection that can be easily compensated for, using a combination of lifestyle, technology, and shifting social mores. This is just the start of the Deaf rabbithole, and please be aware that this simple recap doesn't do it justice — for one good example, most Deaf people don't just see their Deafness as a “lack of a problem,” but rather as an asset that provides benefits that hearing people don't have, the argument being that Deaf people's relationships are more powerful and intimate, that they have a greater sense of their surroundings than most hearing people do, better concentration, a bigger curiosity about the world, more tolerance and empathy, purer political beliefs, etc.

Or for a more troubling example, another hallmark of the Deaf community is that they're extremely quick to anger, and tend to lash out at hearing people for making mistakes no matter how innocuous. This can be baffling to hearing people at first, until you take a deep look at history and realize that Deaf people have been treated way more appallingly than you ever knew, and that this horrible behavior has lasted until way more recently than you would ever guess. For example, the Supreme Court didn't recognize ASL as an official language until all the way in 1989, which means that as recently as the George Bush administration, it was perfectly legal for police to arrest a deaf person then refuse to provide them with an ASL interpreter during interrogation, or for the court to provide one during their trial. So if you one day make a remark to a Deaf person that seems perfectly innocent to you (for example, “I think sign language is so beautiful!”), and that Deaf person jumps all over you (“IT ISN'T MY JOB TO ENTERTAIN YOU, HEARIE”), be aware that there's several centuries of human-rights abuses that justify that quick and seemingly irrational anger (in this case, for example, the fact that from the 1920s to '70s, the official position of the US government was that ASL was actually a form of theater but not language, beautiful to look at but that essentially forces deaf people to talk in caveman pantomime, and that will never be able to express nuanced and sophisticated intellectual thought like English does, a theory that was disproved only after being recognized as a legitimate language worthy of academic study).

So before I start attending my first Deaf social events beginning next month, I'm trying to learn as much as possible about the norms of the Deaf community, so that I don't make a bunch of beginner mistakes and get dismissed as some “stupid hearie tourist” before I can ever go deeper into the community. And that's where the Disney Family teen soap opera Switched at Birth comes in, created by TV veteran Lizzy Weiss (who you may know from her cultishly loved surfing movie Blue Crush), which ran for 103 episodes from 2011 to 2017 and can now be found in its entirety on Netflix, which is rapidly bringing it a whole new audience in reruns. The central gimmick behind the show is that two couples in Kansas City (one rich and white, the other poor and Latinx) have their babies accidentally switched at the hospital after birth, which the families don't learn about until the girls are 15, leading to all kinds of chaos and eventually the Latinx family moving into the poolhouse of the rich family's McMansion compound so that everyone can finally get to know everyone else better.

What's gotten it so much attention, though, is that Daphne, the red-headed white girl who grew up with a Latina single mom, got meningitis when she was an infant, and is now functionally deaf; and so not only does ASL play a huge role in this show, as everyone around her slowly learns to sign so that they can communicate with her, but an entire half of the show's milieu is set at the Deaf school that Daphne attends, and the producers made the unprecedented step of hiring actual Deaf actors to play all the roles. This then infuses the series with all kinds of trendy issues that come directly from Deaf culture, a way to enrich and deepen the world that surrounds the family mechanics that lay at the show's heart, and has turned out to be a fascinating way for those of us in the hearing world to understand many of the issues that the Deaf community grapple with, from discrimination in the workplace to the pleasures and pain of a Deaf person dating a hearing one, the controversy within that community over cochlear implants, the perils Deaf people face when, say, confronted by the police, dealing with the myth of lip-reading (that is, the myth that lip-reading is an actual realistic alternative for Deaf people), and a lot more.

This is why I started watching the show, to learn more about Deaf issues and to practice my ASL; so imagine my surprise when it also turned out to be one of the smarter, more subversive shows I've seen in a long time, with a much bigger embrace of darkness and sexuality than you would ever expect from a series endorsed by Disney. And I don't say this lightly, as a childless middle-ager who's spent his entire adult professional life in the indie arts, and whose usual viewing habits skew much more along the lines of shows like Mr. Robot and Black Mirror and Lodge 49. The secret here, and what makes Weiss such a brilliant showrunner, is that she started on day one with super-complex characters to populate her universe, which then over six years allowed her to take these characters in all kinds of unexpected directions and let them do all kinds of fascinating things, while still making it all feel organic and natural and unforced, turning the show into something riveting and at all times surprising.

Take for example the teen girls at the center of the show, the aforementioned Daphne (played by Katie Leclerc) and also Bay (Vanessa Marano), the half-Puerto-Rican, half-French girl who grew up in the lily-white Kennish family. Weiss and company show that some of the girls' personality traits come from straight DNA — for example, Daphne's natural talent for sports (which mirrors her biological dad's time as a Major League Baseball player), or Bay's natural talent for art (which mirrors her biological mom's similar talent) — but they also demonstrate that some of the girls' traits come from their upbringing — Daphne is much more fiercely confrontational and unafraid of danger than she probably would've been if growing up in the posh suburbs, while Bay has an appreciation for refinement and talent for negotiation that clearly comes from her adopted family. It results in a delicious frisson between nature and nurture when it comes to the two, giving Weiss and co. ample opportunities to send either careening off in unexpected directions^, but in a way that it never feels forced or unnatural.

[^One of my favorite moments, for example, was when Daphne had a meltdown after the unexpected death of her adopted father near the end of season 3, and the notorious goodie-good ends up doing cocaine and having sex with a Latino gang leader from her old neighborhood, among other delightfully transgressive behavior. I tweeted about this at the time, and Weiss actually responded, reminding us that her behavior came from a place of grief and that there was a heavy price for her to pay for it in season 4, which I agree with; but still, I love the idea of Daphne in her forties, having too much to drink at a suburban dinner party one night and blabbing all about that summer she did cocaine and had sex with gangsters, which would instantly make her the coolest mom that suburb had ever known.]

This can all be applied to the show overall as well, from Lea Thompson's mousy soccer mom who eventually becomes a bestselling author of steamy “herotica,” to Constance Marie's journey from a home-based hairdresser to the owner of an interior design firm. But perhaps my favorite aspect of all about Switched at Birth is the breakthrough performance by Sean Berdy, who might possibly go down in history as the world's very first deaf teenage heartthrob, a designation I'm sure he's grappling with now but that I bet he'll look back on with fond amusement when older. He plays the rebellious, motorcycle-driving Emmett, who starts the show as Daphne's best friend but then eventually gets into a tumultuous on-and-off epic romance with Bay, the details of which turned me for the very first time in my life into a non-ironic, unapologetic teen-girlesque 'shipper. (Goddamnit, Bay and Emmett, why can't the two of you just fucking love each other like you both know you want???!!!!?????!!!!11!!!1!!!)

Emmett serves as our stand-in for the Deaf community at large, personifying many of the political and social issues that that community grapples with (at one point he's beaten by the police for not being able to hear their demands to put down a wrench he's holding; he starts the show angrily declaring that he will never date a hearie or talk out loud, just to eventually do both; he emotionally grapples with his divorced dad's decision to get a cochlear implant), and Berdy brings a cool, firm finesse to it all, an impressive performance that hopefully bodes well for his future in Hollywood. (This is not to mention that he's hilarious in real life, away from the show — for example, to see one of the fastest and wittiest ASL conversations ever recorded, check out this improvised talk he once did with his TV mom Marlee Matlin, in which he riffs comedically on her 1987 Oscar win for Children of a Lesser God, and as a surprise whips out a cheesecake photo Matlin did in her twenties for a lad magazine.)

I'll undoubtedly have a lot more to say about my adventures this year into ASL and the Chicago Deaf community, and of course I hope you'll follow along for the latest (and also feel free to drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com to let me know your own thoughts — this goes for you as well, Ms. Weiss, if you'd like to send along any corrections or clarifications to this essay). But for now, if you have Netflix and haven't watched Switched at Birth yet, I don't know what you're waiting for, a mind-expanding Peabody Award winner that just also happens to be one of the most entertaining shows you'll watch this year. I thank everyone involved for the care and consideration they put into making it, and I'm excited to see what Weiss and co. have in mind next.

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