The fabulous Carol Vorderman got me briefly hooked last week in watching a particular number increase by the second. The number was the user count for the social media site Bluesky, the chosen distraction engine for those who can no longer stomach the toxic inanity of Elon Musk’s X. Most days, the ticker on the screen suggested the number of new Bluesky users had grown by about a million. And, of course, the newbies, inevitably myself included, revelled in the latest online promised land, a place where things would be done differently – with kindness and respect – without quite acknowledging the fact that, as yet, no platform which confuses a venture capitalist’s favourite metrics – scale! reach! influence! – with something that anyone might, say, care about, has yet avoided a descent into banal or shouty extremes.
The great migration reminded me of the brilliant work of the American tech artist Ben Grosser, whose most famous inventions are his “demetricator” apps that offer versions of Facebook and Instagram and Twitter stripped of numbers of likes and shares and followers. In the absence of those tiny ego-boosting dopamine hits, the sites quickly reveal their essence: an endless stream of random commentary from those most desperate to be noticed (not least oneself).
I spoke to Grosser a couple of years ago about another of his prototypes, a social media platform he called Minus, which allowed its users only a finite number of posts: exactly 100 across a lifetime. His student group of testers were reporting some rare qualitative anxieties: “They almost feel like there’s so much weight on a post,” Grosser said. “It’s like, ‘I’m only going to get 100 in my whole life, what if I blow one on some bullshit?’” Minus is still very much available. Who knows, one day it may take off.
Inherent inhumanity
The forensic psychiatrist Gwen Adshead will deliver the first of her Reith lectures this week on her understanding of the nature of violence.
Adshead is the author of a genuinely mind-changing book, The Devil you Know, about her work in rehabilitating those individuals incarcerated for the most monstrous acts – serial killers, child sex abusers, perpetrators of gang violence. Her work starts from the fundamental belief that the capacity for such “inhuman” acts is actually a human part of all of us; her case studies make a powerful counterweight to those strident voices who believe prison exists only to punish “evil”, confronting the consequent scandal of our reoffending statistics.
Adshead’s go-to first question to her lifers makes a useful benchmark for any human or journalistic inquiry: “If this was a story,” she asks, “where would it start?” The answer is never contained in a tabloid headline.
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Don’t look back
Watching the trailer of Timothée Chalamet’s turn in the forthcoming Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, made me feel weirdly queasy. Apparently, the response to the first screenings of James Mangold’s film have been so positive that there are plans to rush it out to catch the awards season.
Rationally, I’ve got no problem with such a reconstruction – I loved Joaquin Phoenix’s Johnny Cash in Walk the Line – so I can’t quite work out why this feels wrong. I guess it has something to do with the fact that the real footage of those early scenes of Dylan’s career has become so mythologically ingrained over the years as to feel like stations of the cross. Watching the trailer made me sympathise just a little with the bishop of Southwark when first confronted with Life of Brian.
Tim Adams is an Observer columnist
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