Platform THIS

I am so tired.

I signed up for Threads today.

As in the new new social media platform, not any kind of clothing or saffron or saffron clothing subscription.

I don’t know why. It goes with Instagram, which I also have but hardly ever use. Instagram has such inexplicable, trying-too-hard quirks as the “link in the bio” and the Stories that disappear and it just seems gimmicky and shallow and I hate it. It’s as if Kim Kardashian were an app. Except she has steadfastly refused to disappear.

Incidentally, I have never understood why anyone wants to post anything that disappears. Is that some kind of millennial version of a Tibetan monk mandala thing or like a mini Burning Man? I don’t get it.

My Facebook, which is populated mainly by my “IRL” friends and family—some of whom I block on a good number of my posts because I can’t mute them IRL—automatically posts photos to my “Insta” when I haven’t blocked anyone and the photo size and shape is acceptable to that high-maintenance b*tch of an application. Thankfully it no longer asks me to choose a filter like some kind of Sephora salesgirl before throwing it up there.

I did not sign up for Blue Sky or Post or Mastadon. I guess I was tired on those days.

I did sign up for Substack (obviously) and its Notes, where I double post from my two blogs, one on an ancient relic called Blogspot and the other on Word Press. I had previously started that second one on Medium, which is what all the cool kids seemed to be using for about five minutes, before I realized my mistake and migrated. Of course, I foolishly bought domains for those two blogs and now I’m stuck in a loveless platform marriage.

And I’m still on Twitter. Twitter has been good to me. Twitter is where I connected with some Big Name Writers and other Semi Famous People who have connected me to various other people who have helped me out in meaningful ways. And some who are really awesome people and have become friends IRL. I’m not leaving. Even as everyone complains loudly about how awful Twitter is, I can’t tell much difference (I also eat Taco Bell and drink cheap wine). Except for all the people making their dramatic exits, never to return as God is my witness, don’t bother to beg!

But I am tired of moving. And schilling and cyber-hustling and begging for attention so I can maybe be a Real Writer at some point. As everyone knows, you absolutely cannot write anything worthwhile until you build a cool platform (a cabin in the mountains or like a beach cottage might also help, methinks), and not just like a foldable platform that you can pop up in the parking lot and use to serve chili to drunk people, more like something the drunk people could actually pass out on or that a nearby evangelist could preach from to tell the drunk people they are going to hell.

As everyone knows, unless Gene Kelly can tap dance on your platform, you will not get a book deal.

As with any war, the egomaniacal Battle of the Social Media Titans has mainly hurt civilians, who are forced to flee into cyberspace with what little they can carry on their backs. Maybe a couple dozen followers and the memory of that one time one of their tweets got 2,000 likes and they thought that constituted a virus, like some kind of hypochondriac who gets a sniffle and spends the next week checking their blood oxygen level 500 times a day.

(By the way, I do not mean to minimize actual war refugees with this metaphor. Its purpose is to put my frustration into perspective for myself. I am fine. We are fine. We’ll all be fine. We have plenty of high-calorie junk food to eat.)

For some of us who are Justin Bieber, Big F-ing Deal, so there’s a new platform. You just go to the roof of the Embassy and wait for the chinooks to airlift you out of Saigon to recover at a spa in Phuket. You’ve got 10 more beach houses where that one came from. Also, you have People to deal with any troublesome logistics. One of your People will get a huge bonus for going back in to get the Tibetan prayer mat gifted to you by the Dalai Lama. Spread it out in a new meditation room, and it’s like nothing ever happened.

For The Rest of Us, we’re starting over with a Patriots hoodie we found discarded outside a gas station, a phone, and a jar of peanut butter. Oh look, there’s a chapstick in the pocket, what a lucky break.

So anyway, I think I’m done. I think I’m just gonna stick with this thing, plus my two blogs that very few people read, but at least I have them as an underground bunker when the social-media-nuclear-apocalypse comes and all the sites spontaneously combust from the Tech Bros sh*t posting each other.

I can sit there in the quiet darkness, re-read my best posts and be my own #1 fan and maybe wear some really awesome platform shoes. I’m really not sure why that’s such a horrible scenario now that I think about it.