The Loss of a Real-Time Feed on Twitter Endangers Social Movements

We have lost a very important piece of infrastructure since recent changes in management over at Twitter. There is officially no globally-accessible, chronological timeline on the playing field. 

This is a dangerous position for us to be in. 

Chronological timelines enabling free, open, real-time communication between humanity, are absolutely vital. This is how most social movements have been organized over the last 10 years — from a global scale, to a national scale, to a community scale. Real-time communication on Twitter allowed us to ignite social movement and resistance and vitalize movements for social progress. This was key for Occupy, for Ferguson, the Arab Spring, which have been momentous and historical events. 

Twitter has moved even further than the prior administration, in the effort to subordinate the chronological timeline and instead install an algorithmically-produced timeline. The Twitter timeline today is extensively manipulated, distorted, and jumbled. They are inserting a huge array of content into the feed that is indistinguishable from actual information that the user has opted-in to seeing and actively wants. Adding in tweets from random algorithmically selected accounts, is something people fucking hate. They specifically hate that. And trust me, the sick fucks over at Twitter know that. 

We have a right to platforms where we can talk to each other in real time. This is just a fundamental and mandatory. The tech industry has made an insane amount of money off of us using these platforms yet they are allowed to totally capture and demolish communications infrastructure that social movements around the world are relying on. This is NOT a viable way to run the technology industry and indicates the need for serious and deep change. 

In my mind this is a disruption in our RIGHT to freely and openly communicate with each other. The fact that we do not have any viable, mainstream social media platforms where we can openly and directly, without tampering, communicate with each other, in real time, is a huge fucking problem. Period. It is NOT okay. 

 Twitter has made a lot of people a lot of money over the years and specifically on the backs of social movements. The chronological timeline, without tampering, is important to the spread of social ideas and social communications about movements and about participating in them. The major vision of this service, HINGED on real time communication and that was widely understood and promoted as the most important property of the platform and its foundation. It got us right into on-the-ground situations in real time. 

Now the entire purpose of the platform has been subordinated to fascist agendas, and guess what, providing a communications platform for social movements is not on the agenda. 

In a related phenomenon, global hashtags around the world related to social change were constantly breaking out around when the last tech bubble started in 2009. Significant community-driven hashtags efforts were made in the 2012-2015 era, that shaped subsequent movements on the platform. Some of the ones I remember are #FastTailedGirls, #GiveYourMoneytoWomen, #YesAllWomen, #MMIW and #DecolonizeDVAM. On a smaller basis within the industry we had the #TalkPay hashtag around this time, there was the #FBNoExcuses hashtag, and so on. 

In fact, there were a number of hashtags organized to fight with Twitter the corporation itself, across multiple administrations, regarding the fascist hate groups on the site. So already you know that tech and venture capital is a target for these social movements and it’s important to keep that in mind. Social movement is NOT what they want, because it directly challenges the power structure and thus all of their vast riches and power. They might have rode the wave on the way up — Jack Dorsey was on the ground in Ferguson immediately — but now they are bringing the hammer down. 

 Hashtags also served as a platform of mass education in the form of a community dialogue that was happening in real time. Back in the day (on a much smaller Twitter), we would spend the day discussing one of these topics and communally developing analysis, knowledge transfer, assembling projects, allocating money, bridging movements and people together, talking strategy and making plans, putting together events, wealth redistribution efforts, etc. Another great example of the utility of the real-time feed was times where a ton of users would come together to all watch a show at the same time and talk about it. It’s not as serious of a use case perhaps, but it is another example of what the chronological timeline makes possible and why it is so serious that they are disappearing it. Even that little application of hashtags brought a smile to people’s days, and that alone is everything. 

What happened is they essentially took hashtags out at the knees via selling them to corporations, downgrading and disappearing clear, good-faith organization under hashtags, making it extremely difficult to organize in real time and to have group discourse and to have real time communication with each other. We were losing the ability to quickly organize around ideas. Via the algorithm, organic trends totally disappeared. 

What I am trying to establish here is multiple instances of Twitter making fundamental changes in its platform that actually interrupt our ability to organically communicate with each other, without multiple layers of tampering. Our ability to directly, and in real time, without interference or tampering or contamination, communicate with each other. In real time. Like humans. 

This is why Twitter needs to be made a public utility and its fundamental property, the real-time feed or chronological timeline, clearly held as a binding contract with users. 

Frankly, this is a safety issue. We MUST be able to reach each other. We NEED a way to communicate with each other in real time without tampering. We are living in extraordinarily dangerous times and there is political and economic and cultural upheaval all over the world, all of the time. There are constant natural disasters, there are constant changes in political events, in elections, now there are constant plagues. We NEED to have open comms with each other. Not having them, puts us in serious danger as far as being able to engage with the world, organize with others, and get vital information fast.

Beyond just demolishing our fundamental ability to communicate, this new model opens us up to an absolute league of whatever psyops they’ve come up with for that day. Your feed is their fucking playground, baby. Open sourcing the code doesn’t mean shit, they can stream anything they want at you and without an intact, chronological, real time feed, that can be independently verified, this is a fundamentally unsafe platform and opens us up to a huge range of experimentation and ops, even blackouts on us. 

Instagram and Facebook are not real-time platforms and their product is mainly about experimenting on users, and so fundamentally they are always shifting around the variables and the knobs and dials. Twitter had attracted a much more dynamic, engaged, productive audience, not because Twitter the corporation was ever good, but because the chronological, real-time stream of HUMAN COMMUNICATION, WITH EACH OTHER, works incredibly well, and people find it generative, engaging, relevant and connective. There are a number of fantastic attributes of the chronological feed that just naturally appeal to people and that catalyze and spur human creativity and so on. It should be available to everyone for free. It must be specifically protected from nefarious and in this case, fascist capture and control. It is merely a mathematical instrument that was not invented by Twitter by any means, this is just the capitalist structure that was set up around the idea and then defended violently, making sure that no other alternative was around when this moment came. No one there to give people what they actually want: chronological timelines, real time feeds.  

So over the years we’ve seen a consistent pattern of fucking with the feed, distorting it, pushing the untainted chronological feed further and further back, and now so egregiously that this is simply not a viable experience on the platform. The mass experience is not based on the chronological timeline and is instead built around tampering with information and reconstructing a new timeline using algorithms, advertising, various political agendas and so on. 

The thing that makes real time communication really vroom vroom is when it becomes a mass experience. That is where the coolest stuff happens. 

This has a larger context of VCs openly attacking, well, information; the same VCs that now own Twitter are overseeing artificial intelligence generating hundreds of thousands of fake research papers on the internet, millions of fake pictures and videos, and so on. And these are the same ones who have bought up all the media. So we have a serious issue here and one that is about free speech. The VC class loves to bitch and wail about free speech, but they are literally destroying the only globally viable real-time communications platform we have; THIS is an assault on free speech as it interpolates a fascist conspiracy in between one person and another!!!!! 

And I must also point out that it is very much actual fascists who are running Twitter. So when we talk about tampering with information and tampering with the flow of information and its integrity, we are specifically talking about tampering by fascist sociopaths. 

Social movements are everything they hate and want to stop. The constant bitching about “the Wokes” is truly a response to the existential threat to them, of revolution and overthrow of their power and control over the production of technology. These were movements that they have had a first row seat to, with more access and information about them than any of us had, behind their own internal dashboards. They’ve watched them happen and they are very determined to stop any kind of movements from coming about both from within the industry and outside of it. They also have a vast network of shady alliances all over the world so this very much applies to the viability of GLOBAL social movements. 

Social movements are directly in the line of things that they want to stop. Removing the chronological timeline is a massive step towards that. The chronological timeline is a way that we can ensure open and direct communication with each other and to do it in real time. We are also entitled to it. Frankly, this is a safety issue. We MUST be able to reach each other. We NEED a way to communicate with each other in real time without tampering. 

There is no option on Twitter as of right now to see a chronological feed of people you follow without adding everyone you want to follow to a Twitter list. This makes it hugely unlikely that people with adopt this methodology. By not making it the default experience or even an accessible experience, Twitter management knows damn well that making it a 3rd order, manual, interface-unsupported experience, is giving it the death knell for mainstream adoption. They are fully away of what they are doing and what this means overall. The chronological timeline is effectively dead. 

This should be the first-order experience in the application. It is honest and has integrity. Whatever the fuck the new feed is, is NOT an honest product. 

The tech data model goes like this: they take our stuff, do a bunch of psyops on it, mash it up in fascist memes and advertising tricks and elaborate psychological experiments, and then send it back to us. 

Oh and now you have to pay for it. 

Any positive impact from the accrual of data is not made available to us. And at a most basic level that means even ALLOWING COMMUNICATION BETWEEN PEOPLE. REAL TIME COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN PEOPLE. That is not on the fucking menu. Much less the ability to see ORGANIC (generated by humans talking to each other) trends and conversations that are coming up. The bare minimum of data accrual benefits we are entitled to. 

In the current environment, huge barriers are put in between us and actually finding and getting the information that we need, from the people we want to get information from, in a timely matter. The door to data contamination is wide open. The sense of time is distorted, the sense of movement of time has been lost. Continuity of conversation disappears. The value of Twitter is that we could get information to people very quickly. The most important part of the site is about allowing people to share information with each other. In real time. This is what allows us to respond as a body to events in the world as it happens. This was vital to the spread of Occupy, to the Arab Spring, to the uprisings against police violence in Ferguson, Oakland and other cities, to #MeToo. So you can see why they would want to fucking kill it. 

Some things that real time, chronological, non-contaminated feeds have been used for by us: 

- Mobilizing around shootings by police in cities around the country

- Coordinating protests in real time across multiple geographic areas

- Gaining international support for social movements and connecting social movements to global struggle

- Directing, on the ground, things like marches, vigils, demonstrations, protests, using real time communication         

- Urgently raising funds for community needs, something we often did by organizing to get this done as a group through giving circles, “Fund Fridays”, #GYMTW Fridays, and so on. These were group activities that happened in real time. 

- Building ad-hoc coalitions in response to major global events, such as the global response to news of the Queen’s death

There are many others. But these are ALL contingent on a real-time communications mode and a non-contaminated feed. What we have now? The corporation is just force-feeding literally any kind of bullshit to us and it becomes harder and harder to even see content from the people you want to see content from. 

Fundamentally, having a distorted feed is highly dangerous by design and as an architectural solution. What are you going to do, pray that the algorithm allows your tweet to reach your own followers? Hope that the fucking FASCISTS will allow this shit to fly? The user’s ability to ORGANIZE even on a small scale with OTHER HUMAN BEINGS, and to truly use this as a COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORM, is massively impacted and precarious and importantly — the fascists can change the rules literally anytime they want. Without a chronological feed, it’s a free for all and our communications with each other are made into a VC experiment. 

And I want to particularly emphasize that the chronological timeline is indeed a PLATFORM, an extremely strong platform with a lot of underlying virtues. With this kind of platform we can build higher-level and more complex types of communication, as we’ve seen in social movements on the platform which have found absolutely a dizzy array of ways to mobilize and create and push back and build. Yet though it enables this huge wealth, the chronological timeline is very simple, very clear, consists only the facts of what happened when, and allows you to build all kinds of things off of that very simple principle. The peer-to-peer connections are decisions made by people themselves, not manufactured by an algorithm. Especially when you are talking an in-progress event where you need to reach everyone that is following you right then, which is such an obvious and important use case, the hopelessness of getting through the swamp is pretty serious. This just… isn’t even possible on today’s Twitter.  The idea of a real-time feed gives you control over where and who you are getting information from; this destroys anything of the sort.  

This makes it much harder for real human information to spread. There is no organic spread of information anymore and no higher levels of organic organization on the platform, that is simply not possible with all this bullshit VCs keep doing to our comms platforms, scrambling the order of tweets, scrambling the people you are following in with others, tying your ability to communicate openly to you purchasing a fucking stupid blue check, constantly fucking with the algorithm for whatever sick goals they are trying to achieve that day.

This is a classic case of brutal and ugly betrayal of users with the motivation of money but more importantly for this use case, the motivation of influencing global social movements and to disrupt them on a very deep level, including by removing the most natural design pattern and instead deeply compromising the flow and spread of information by putting it through all kinds of blunt force engineered distortion, that, by the way, they can change at any time and they have shown us that they will do that. They can use it to suppress, disorganize, confuse, distract, censor, dampen, and be doing that to everyone on the platform simultaneously. The chronological timeline is a natural guard against this type of manipulation as it is easy to verify and confirm. The default setting is integrity of information, not information-put-through-a-fascist-engineering-blender. 

A chronological timeline makes it very easy to see if tampering is being done by the company, and what and how and to who information is spreading or being suppressed. They are putting the ultimate chokepoint on an extremely vital piece of global infrastructure. This is why Twitter needs to be a public utility with a binding promise of free, untampered with, real time communications.

VCs want to talk about a universal law that crypto assets can’t be seized? Let’s talk about universal laws like blender feeds are illegal and real-time feeds are supported as the mass experience. 

 VC fascists love to talk about free speech on the platform but interfering with people TALKING TO EACH OTHER is fine with them. Fascist technology is disgusting, by the way. Whole post on that for another day. 

All of this, very much proof that there is zero social contract between us and the venture capitalists who are literally seizing movement infrastructure and making it completely unviable for use for social movements and actions (though I have a feeling the upcoming fascist movements are going to spread just fine). Twitter would be fucking nothing without social movements and the ultimate betrayal of this legacy has arrived. 

The feed we are getting now is fucking spaghetti. It is a mass of people we do follow and people we don’t follow and various advertisements, promoted tweets, spread out over a 12 to unknown-hour timeframe, and presented with no useful order whatsoever and no explination and no context. Information from last night is mixed up with that from 5 minutes ago, now six hours ago, with no rhyme or reason. Content you don’t want to see and don’t give a shit about is put as a first-class citizen, while you are only seeing a fraction of the things people YOU ARE FOLLOWING have to say. Your tweets may or may not ever even be displayed to your own followers. Within this, so many opportunities are lost and so much manipulation is being done. 

What if you opted in to following me because you want to stay informed   about tech information, something that you know I can provide you because we have an understanding and trust there and have seen each other across the chronology? That you want to know when important things are happening? Well, what if something very serious happens and now we can’t get the fucking word out? 

We follow each other in large part to mobilize when mobilization is required and to be able to see things happening and to respond to them as a body, all in real-time. This is called “the speed of human”. This tampered-with timeline prevents rapid mobilization and I argue that this is done purposefully.  Social disruption, revolution, and protest, has been relying on this piece of infrastructure, which has gone through a serious of gross interferences and now finally has been captured and neutralized as a viable platform for social change. This is a very fundamental blow as it removes the attributes of Twitter that make it valuable: organic spread of information between people that is delivered in real time.

And that is why it was worth $44 billion. For what they are willing to do with Twitter? That’s a bargain. 

A consistent part of what is happening in tech is the generation of chaos. We are in the middle of an assault on information by VCs. (Fascists, are anti-intellectuals so all of this is extremely consistent). 

As of now, they have the reins firmly on social movements and thus insurance that their platform will not be taken over by… the Wokes. This is what we are truly in the fight about. Social movements. What they are talking about with their little “war on Wokes” is removing social movements and stopping them and making them utterly non-viable, destroying and commandeering infrastructure, squashing all attempts at independent infrastructure and even competitive infrastructure at all. They are the ones who decide what can be built. And only them.

The VCs are talking all the time about the integrity that comes from the blockchain, which is also a fundamental design principle, about specifically  being able to store and make accessible and independently verify events on the blockchain. Yet in their social media architecture they express a totally opposite rationale that proves how disingenuous they are in their values, and their values aren’t values at all but rather opportunistic lies. And naturally we are seeing this in blockchain efforts by venture capitalists to capture control of the blockchain and to put all kinds of centralization points and all kinds of financial crimes and criminal enterprises around this technology and thus utterly pervert its possibilities, as we see also with Twitter. Different technologies, same foul tactics and same foul goals. 

VCs know that the social movements that threaten it started on Twitter. They were constantly undergoing battles with these movements and they were constantly sabotaging these movements, even on a personal level. They sabotaged taxi unions, unionization of its contract workforce, anti-gentrification efforts, anti-rape work with the industry, and various efforts made to stop tech from super-charging cops and the military with surveillance and weapons. 

With access to unending amounts of data about us, they have very much seen and watched as movements propelled by real-time chronological communication came to dominate the global consciousness. As they come into a new stage of their power, they are MIGHTILY aware of the risk that international movements pose to them and their enterprises personally, as well as their various business partners and investors and politician puppets and the countries they are courting for their rapid international expansion. They are fucking fascists, they know what awaits their kind. As they attempt to rig the upcoming election and openly participate in all kinds of movement ops and interferences in global events, they are also flipping the script. 

When it comes down to it, we’re not even going to be able to talk to each other about what is happening. And the movements that WILL rise? Will be the fascist ones that VCs have been incubating on a number of platforms across the last 20 years and are getting ready for their mainstream debut.