The power we use and the power we give

I spent more than a decade engaging on social media as a representative of The Post, explaining the news and presenting my perspective. I was there as Twitter collapsed into X (he offered with the affected world-weariness of a combat veteran) but even before that — even before Elon Musk’s accelerations — saw how toxicity poisoned efforts at discussion. There’s value to debate and conversation, of course, but that isn’t what’s fostered on Twitter or (in my limited experience) on Substack. Instead, conversation occasionally glimmers through a waterfall of bad-faith, uninformed trolls and attacks. It’s an effort to play a college football game after the crowd has stormed the field.

Really interesting piece about power and how you contribute to it and who you give it to as you use social media and other online software. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I’ve stepped back from being online as much and for me it also applies to how I use my time on any given day. I may not think in terms of power quite the same way, but I do liken it to the idea of what I give my attention to and how that affects me.