This is how x ends…

My twitter experience is starting to reach the point where … well, it has no point. Like most, it turns out, I’ll tolerant a large proportion of a service I use being full of nazis*, as long as it can still do something FOR ME, but really lately it’s felt like it doesn’t do anything for me at all.

(*I know, I know, this paints me in a terrible light, in my defence, I’m not the only one, and it’s not like I follow any of them)

Having inverted the point of blue ticks (previously: sought after awards for notable/famous people, now anyone daft enough to pay so they too can have their replies highlighted on a trending topic showing just how much they’ve missed the point) to the stage where previously you might have spotted a blue tick and thought “Oh, someone worth following” to now “Oh, someone I should block” and having toyed with the idea of preventing the block from functioning. Gradually, I’ve found that the promise of a 15,000 people reach (roughly my follower count) really only ever reaches at most 100 people. To be fair, this was always true, twitter’s potential and actual was always a bit of a ratio and lately I’ve started to see people who I’d’ve followed finding themselves blocked from the ultimate free speech platform for … criticising the ultimate free speech platform.

I’ve now locked my twitter account. It’s still there, but like cutting the blood supply to a skin tag in order to kill it, it might take some time for my account to die and in the meantime I’m likely to keep prodding and poking it in a sort of morbid fascination of what exactly will happen there.

I’ve been trying to get out and walk a bit lately, as you’ll be unsurprised to find out my physical fitness is just dreadful. I was always fairly fit (working from 14, lugging giant boxes around I’d never walk any where I couldn’t run to) and never needed to consciously exercise because it was all happening at work, but it turns out if I don’t consciously get up and walk my body is more than happy to turn into sludge.

So me and my pal Jim have been going for short walks (his fitness is way way ahead of mine) First couple of weeks have been… not great. Muscles in my calf have quite hurt, which is a weird experience – as I still myself fit for walking, much in the way I still consider myself in my twenties – a sad dream belied instantly by looking in the mirror.

Using the apple health app on my phone I’m aiming for a modest 250calories of exercise per day – it’s about 5k steps (I know, I know, it’s nothing) and I don’t always get there. But I should.

I’m wondering if we’ve finally reached peak enshiffication yet? That term, coined by Corey Docterow to mean the process where a company ends up sucking first its users dry then its suppliers until the point is reached where users no longer want to use it but they’re trapped, having built a web of important connections trapping them and their valuable data in the hands of the enshittified company.

Docterow’s naming it is useful – in most fictional magic naming something means having a power over it, and I think there’s a logic to that. You can’t discuss something if it’s too nebulous for a conversation about it to mean anything. But you give it a name and the name sticks then suddenly EVERYONE knows what you mean. Now you can go: “Wow, google sure sucks now” “Yup – it’s been enshittified”.

What I’m wondering is will this became a bulwark for companies to stop that from happening. So many companies can be profitable and work well, but they’ve sold their souls to shareholders who want to maximise every single penny at the expense of the customers, other businesses and ultimately the company itself. In the 80s that kind of hedge fund management/vulture capitalism was the bad guy, and now it’s sort of lauded, we need to think of it as a deeply unhealthy thing when someone swoops in a says “I’m going to make this company a unicorn to maximise value” at least now someone can say “sure, if we can avoid enshittification”.

It is something I think about a lot, but it’s depressing how much more important who is President of America is than who is Prime Minister of Great Britain.

It’s coming time to update my passport, and genuinely I’m considering getting an Irish one. I’ve never ever considered it before, but it makes a lot of sense from a purely practical standpoint. Possibly I’ll end up with both. We’ll see.

So a couple of years ago now, I got a quick little scan done on my kidneys (the problem wasn’t there, and in the end the actual reason for it turned out to be nothing) which turned up a small – 3cm or so – mysterious growth on my left kidney … cancer! but cancer with a little tiny c. Almost cancer with a subscript c. Caught so early as to be no threat to anything. Anyway, eventually they operated (they froze it off with needles, so couldnt even call it an operation) and it was fine. So now I get a check up once a year for the next 10 years. If they hadn’t caught it by accident, chances are they’d’ve picked it up in a decade when it might have been too late (once a cancer like that shows symptoms then you’re body has it all over the place). Any way, wen’t off to a “hub” today to get my bloods done (quick needle, couple of millileters of liquid gold later and that was it). But, it was in a thing I’d never heard of, so I was “What does Phlebotomy mean?” “Oh it’s just the word that means this is where we take blood”. Ok.

Tomorrow, in my old man is falling apart adventure, emergency dentist appointment – because man have I got a sore tooth. More tomorrow!