None Of The Above

It occurred to me years ago that the ancient Christmas carol “The Holly and the Ivy” really has nothing to do with ivy, even though ivy is mentioned side by side with holly in the title and the refrain. It’s almost as though something was left out of the lyrics:

“The holly and the ivy, when they are both full-grown,”

Ok, I give. When the holly and the ivy are both full grown, then what? The holly has the berries, the blossoms, the thorns, and in the full version, the bark. Of all the trees that are in the wood, the holly bears the crown. The ivy has…nothing.

I haven’t thought about that silly little issue in a lot of years, until KBAQ played a song this morning called ”Ivy, Chief of Trees, It Is,” by British composer Sarah Cattley (with a little help from Yoda, there might be.) You can find a very nice performance here with great harmony. Lyrics are here. The Latin “veni coronaberis” means “Come and be crowned.”

So here we are: Two Christmas carols about trees that wear the crown. Will there be civil war in the woods? A duel? A fistfight?

Wait. Hold on. Something weird is going on here: Holly is a tree. Ivy is ground cover, or at best something crawling up the sides of elite college buildings. A little snooping on Wikipedia yielded a clue: An older carol that may have been originally penned in Middle English, called “The Contest of the Ivy and the Holly.” The lyrics in modern English are these:

Holly stands in the hall, fair to behold:
Ivy stands without the door, she is full sore a-cold.
Nay, ivy, nay, it shall not be I wis;
Let holly have the mastery, as the manner is.

Good ivy, what birds hast thou?
None but the owlet that cries how, how.
Nay, ivy, nay, etc

(A quick query shows that “laverock” is what they called the lark in Chaucer’s era.)

Wikipedia suggests that holly and ivy are emblematic of the male and female principles. So it’s not a fight over a crown; it’s the battle of the sexes, with the deck severely stacked against women. I also wonder if “The Holly and the Ivy” as we sing it today was sanitized back in the 19th Century, leaving out the verses that slander poor ivy: Holly stands inside, warm by the fire; ivy is left outside to freeze, and so on. If such sanitizing was ever done, I see no mention of it online. So the mystery remains.

I’m looking around for interesting Christmas-related topics and will post the best here. So stay tuned.

I’m fascinated by the Victorian/Edwardian period of history, which is where steampunk is usually set, as well as weird westerns. My WIP drumlins novel The Everything Machine is in some respects a space western. But quite apart from a lot of other fascinating things from that era (The Great Eastern! Brunel!) there is the puzzle of spiritualism. It’s that time of year again, so I can ask and perhaps answer a question that popped up as I read about the phenomenon of spiritualism, which was quite the thing in the Victorian era and for some time after, from roughly 1850 until 1940. It came out of nowhere and spread explosively, then vanished almost as quickly. Yes, there are a few spiritualist churches still in operation, but they’re notable not because of their ubiquity but because of their scarcity.

Here’s the (double) question: Why did spiritualism appear? And why did it vanish?

My tl-dr answer: Lotsa deaths. Also antibiotics, and television. Let’s talk about that.

Most people agree that spiritualism began in 1848 in the farm town of Hydesville, outside Rochester NY. There were two young sisters living in a small house with their parents. As you’ll note if you read Colin Wilson’s excellent Poltergeist (see yesterday’s entry) having pubertal girls in a house is practically begging for poltergeist activity.

And so it was. In the house of the Fox family, there began all the usual: scratchings, bangings, growls, raps, and more bangings. Some of the booms could be heard over a mile away. (Subwoofers didn’t exist in 1848.) Katie, the younger sister at 12, was a bit of a snot. The general assumption was that the noises were the work of the devil. So Katie jumps up in the midst of audio pandemonium, and yells, “Here, Mr. Splitfoot, do as I do!” She then pounded the kitchen table twice with her fist. The noise stopped for a moment, then two loud raps answered. Katie and her older sister Margaretta listened to the invisible whatsit echo their own noises, then established a sort of code for answers: noise (of whatever sort) meant “yes.” Silence meant “no.” Using this code, they questioned the family poltergeist, and soon established a more complex code for spelling out words. The poltergeist claimed to be the spirit of a dead peddler who had been murdered and buried beneath the cellar of the house. He gave his name as Charles Rosma, and a little digging in the cellar and behind a wall turned up bones and a peddler’s carry box used for door-to-door sales work.

The story spread like wildfire across America and then across the Atlantic to Europe, and soon lots of other people were talking to “spirits” via pounding on tables or—later—making the tables tap out codes with their legs. After that came the “planchette,” which is a kind of pointer, to be used on a board printed with the alphabet. (These were not called “ouija boards” for quite awhile after.)

Certain people had a talent for talking to whatever was tipping tables or moving planchettes around. Other people didn’t, but tried it anyway—and in some cases, got some minor interactions. By the 1860s, formal spiritualist groups coalesced around the world, many claiming to be parts of a new religion. By the 1880s, spiritualism had also become a sort of parlor game played by groups of bored teens and young adults, some of whom freely admitted moving the planchette or table with their own muscles. After all, you had to touch the planchette or table with human hands to make it work. Faking it was easy, and getting laughable answers was the goal of the game.

Down the years after 1850, different methods of talking to dead guys appeared: automatic writing, trance mediums, and direct voice, among others. Despite being a game for many young people, it was taken seriously by many adults, and a spiritualist canon (most produced by automatic writing) appeared, explaining what spirits do on the job and off, where they go to school, and what sorts of surroundings they live in. Spirits claiming to be deceased relatives of the “sitters” (the people attending what later became known as seances) came through often, sometimes to say very little more than “I’m all right! It’s beautiful here! Can’t wait to see you again!” Despite a slightly grim edge to such communications, people were ecstatic to hear from their dear departed. There was plenty of religion abroad in the Victorian era, but spiritualism offered something none of the other religions could: Messages from departed loved ones.

Something people now in the 21st century generally fail to understand is that there were a lot of departed loved ones back then. And not just old people. Many children died of diseases like diphtheria, pneumonia, or that hideous killer “consumption”: the Victorian term for tuberculosis. Spouses became widowed far earlier and oftener than now. Death in childbirth was common, and supposedly happened to one in twenty pregnant women trying to give birth. Stillborn children and infants who lived for only a day or even a few hours were quite common.

If you read the contemporary literature of spiritualism (I have) it becomes obvious that everybody back then had deceased loved ones: parents, children, infants, grandparents, spouses, close friends.

Everybody.

There was a huge market for Spiritualism (I’ll cap it now because it had become a global movement/religion and not merely an idea) and Spiritualism catered very well to that market. Spiritualism cruised along at full roar (or maybe full bang) for decades. It reached what might be considered its peak during WWI, when a great many new deceased love ones happened. After WWI and the Spanish Flu of 1918, death rates continued to fall due to chlorinated water, indoor plumbing, sanitation in medicine and the first vaccines. Penicillin appeared in 1942, and it was the first antibiotic of many. People no longer died from infected minor cuts and scratches.

Once WWII was over, death was no longer an everyday thing in American life and elsewhere in the developed West. People were (mostly) living their threescore-and-ten, and death in childbirth was not the scourge it had been in the 1890s. The demand for talking to dead people was nowhere near as strong. The supply of seances and mediums thinned out. Little by little, people lost interest.

That was Spiritualism’s first whammy. There was another.

In the last quarter of the 19th Century, entertainment was scarce, and mostly confined to the well-off. There were concerts. But there was no broadcast radio, and until the 1920s, few phonographs. For music in the 1880s, it was concerts or nothing. (Or in some cases playing your own piano.) Concerts cost money, as did plays. So what did bored young people do for entertainment?

Table-tipping. Planchettes. It was a craze. It was cheap. Modern histories generally don’t state this, but if you read the contemporary reports, seances had become a parlor game.

Fast-forward to 1930. There was radio. There were movies. Not free—but increasingly inexpensive as time went on. Seances had competition. Then, in 1948, TV happened in a big way. Sets were still expensive, and until the early-mid 1950s people often watched them in bars. But demand brought down prices, and by 1955, TV ruled the entertainment world.

How could seances compete with Sid Caesar?

They didn’t. Spiritualism became an eccentric current in an increasingly distant past. Now, there’s an asterisk to this story: In the early 1960s, Parker Brothers (the game people, makers of Monopoly) bought the rights to a product called Ouija, which had been produced and sold since 1910 or so by a William Fuld. It was basically an inexpensive prefab planchette system. By 1965 Parker Brothers was targeting Ouija at tweens and teens with commercials on both radio and TV. I was there; I saw them. The girl down the block got one for her birthday and twisted my arm into trying it with her. Nothing happened. She was annoyed. I was relieved.

Many millions of boards were sold. In 1968, in fact, Ouija outsold Monopoly, which boggles my mind, at least. I wonder how many people actually treated the “game” seriously. I also wonder how quickly the damned things went into the trash.

That’s the story as I understand it. When death was an everyday thing, the demand for Spiritualism was high. As death rates went down and death became a sad but uncommon occurrence (compared to the midlate 1800s) the demand went off a cliff. Parker Brothers tried making it a game, and although I have no real data, no one I knew except the girl down the street had a Ouija board.

As with poltergeists, I take no particular position on Spiritualism. NDEs and channeling have taken over nickel-and-dime afterlife exploration. A couple of weird events in my life suggest that there is an afterlife, and it’s a fundamental concept in Catholicism, if not described well. I’ll take author John Hick’s opinion as my own: It’s there, but we won’t know what it’s like until we get there.

I’m good with that.

• It looks like we’re closing in on deciphering the Linear A script, which was the written form of the Minoan language, spoken between ~2000 BC and 1450 BC. We don’t know much about the Minoans, who were mostly displaced or absorbed by the Mycenaeans, mostly because we can’t read what survives of their writing.
• I’ve been using Windows since before there was Windows, and I never heard of this until last week: You can pause updates in Task Manager by pressing and holding the Ctrl key. It’s that simple: Just the Ctrl key. This is useful if your tracking memory or CPU usage of processes, because the display updates once per second and processes jump around as their resource usage changes. This applies to Windows XP, 7, 8, and 10—and possibly more, but those were the versions I had on hand.
• Now that they’re ducking and dodging lawsuits from doctors, the FDA finally admits that MDs may prescribe Ivermectin, whether on-label or off-label. Now it’s time to purge the FDA of those who tried to ruin the careers of MDs for legally prescribing Ivermectin.
• Dropping salt to lower blood pressure may not work without a balance between sodium and potassium. My godmother was healthy but had some hypertension. She stopped using salt cold-turkey. A year later she was dead.
• Researchers at City of Hope have discovered an anti-cancer chemo compound that targets solid tumors and only solid tumors. Oh, and not just tumors in one organ or location, but all of them. This could be a game changer if it can be tested and checked for side effects.
• What isn’t a game-changer is LK-99, the supposed room-temperature superconductor that’s gotten a lot of ink (pixels?) in the last couple of months. This doesn’t mean we should stop looking.
• Invisible supernovas that were once invisible stars made of invisible matter are called bosenovas. If you know your ‘60s pop music, the jokes write themselves.
• Here’s my own weird theory: Dark matter and boson stars are invisible because they are in fact 4-dimensional matter bending our 3-dimensional space without actually existing within our 3-dimensional space. My proof is this: Ya got any better ideas?
• Here’s what I consider the strangest list of books ever: The 20 Best-Selling Assembly Books of All Time. My own assembly book is #2.  SolidWorks gets several places in the stack-rank. But #1, egad: It’s a popular fantasy novel about werewolves. Hey, with the title Assembly, how could it not be there?

The inimitable Don Lancaster has left us. He died on June 7 in Mesa, Arizona, of complications following hip surgery. He was 83.

Anybody who was there at the dawn of microcomputing knows who Don Lancaster was. His seminal TTL Cookbook sold over a million copies. He also did cookbooks for RTL and CMOS ICs. He was famous among early mirocomputer fanatics for his books on “cheap video,” back when video boards were just emerging and (can you believe it?) some folks rolled their own from loose parts. He wrote about the Apple II, including one or more books on Apple II assembly language. His book The Incredible Secret Money Machine was an eccentric guide to starting your own small-scale home business.

When I began using Don’s books in the midlate 1970s, I never gave any thought to actually meeting him. His CMOS Cookbook was critical to my ongoing COSMAC Elf project. I built the original Elf from Popular Electronics in 1976, and over the next several years expanded it in several ways, including a wire-wrapped memory system totaling 2,560 bytes of CMOS memory, as ten banks of paired 5101 CMOS 256X4 RAM chips. I doubt I could have managed that without the CMOS Cookbook.

I also used his TTL Cookbook to learn how the various TTL chips worked and could be hooked together. I’m not exaggerating when I say that without Don’s books on ICs, I would never have learned digital logic to any useful degree.

Don had a strong interest in local archaeology, especially the ways that indigenous  peoples used and stored water for irrigation. About that I know little or nothing, but looking for tinajas was one of his hobbies.

As I drifted toward technical writing in the early 1980s, I realized that I was imitating Don’s style without consciously doing so. This is an odd talent called “pastiche” in literary circles, which is the art of writing in another writer’s style. I discovered this talent in college, when after reading the whole (thick) book of e.e. cummings’ complete works, I began writing what were recognizably e.e. cummings poems. They weren’t great poems, but they were definitely in his style. When I began writing Pascal MT+ From Square One toward the end of 1983, there was a lot of Don Lancaster in it.  (That book eventually emerged as Complete Turbo Pascal in 1985.) I later found myself pastiching Isaac Asimov when I wrote the “Structured Programming” column in DDJ. Asimov almost always started an article with a funny story, and so did I. (See DDJ for September 1991 for my well-known intro about the Pizza Pride girl.)

Don Lancaster and Isaac Asimov taught me more about technical writing than anyone else, ever. Furthermore, neither had any idea that he was teaching me. I met Asimov at LACon in 1984 when Carol and some friends and I won breakfast with him at a charity auction. But unlike Asimov, Don eventually became a personal friend.

I don’t precisely recall how I was introduced to Don. I think my PC Techniques art director Barbara Nicholson’s brother somehow pulled me into Don’s network. Flukier still was the fact that Don lived within reasonable driving distance from Phoenix, in Thatcher, Arizona. Although Don never wrote for my magazines (and we published none of his books) we invited him to our monthly author parties. He attended quite a few, generally with his wife Bee and his dog.

And we went down to visit him a time or two. Don took us up the side of a nearby mountain in his VW microbus, which was scary at times but otherwise wonderfully scenic.

Once Carol and I left Arizona for Colorado in 2003, Don and I fell out of touch, but he was still working to the very end, and produced a boggling body of work including 44 books and over a thousand technical articles.

He was a little eccentric (though he had nothing whatsoever on Wayne Green) and I’ll freely accept the tag for myself as well. His skill with words and his rampaging curiosity were like nothing I’ve ever seen elsewhere. I am honored to have known him, and to have learned from him. He really was a guru, and the world could use a few more (or maybe a lot more) like him.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.

Back in January I published a list of things that had once been common and are now fading into the mists of history. It got a lot of attention, so here comes another one. A few of these came from readers and posted in the comments.

1. Typewriters. Ok, these may already be well and truly vanished, but there are times when I miss them. I kept my IBM Selectric until we left Arizona in 2003. Mostly I used it to type up adhesive labels and addresses on business envelopes. All of that stuff comes out of my laser printer now.
2. Wing-tip dress shoes for men. I admit, I never had these myself, but I was still seeing them here and there until ten or fifteen years ago.
3. Pantyhose. Apart from older women who may have been wearing compression stockings, I almost never see sheer hosiery anymore. Weirdly, the last place I saw it regularly was at dog shows, where male handlers wore business suits and female handlers wore skirts and pantyhose. This was true well into the teens, but we haven’t been to a dog show in some years now.
4. Car keys. Our 2014 Durango was our first car with fobs instead of keys. All the rental cars I’ve driven since then were the same thing: Key fobs without keys. It took some getting used to, but now when I try to drive Carol’s 2001 4Runner, I almost always try punching the (nonexistant) button on the dashboard rather than twisting the (real) car key.
5. Women wearing hats in (Catholic) church. Back when I was a kid this was a very serious business. I saw teen girls wearing a sheet of Kleenex atop their heads during mass when they forgot their hats. Girls at our Catholic grade school had beanies to wear during mass before school started.
6. Paper routes. I delivered papers for a little while when I was 13 or so. It was a weird little paper that was ad-supported, but I was asked to ring doorbells and see if people would pay for it. Almost no one did, and it was enough of an embarrassment that I stopped after just a couple of months. (Thanks to Rick Kaumeier for this one.)
7. Penny (or nickel) toddler rides in supermarkets. Usually by the front windows, usually a horse, though I’ve seen ones where the ride is a stubby little airplane or even a cowbow-style covered wagon. (Again, from Rick Kaumeier.)
8. Card parties. (Yet again, from Rick Kaumeier.) My father had these now and then with his gang from work. They all smoked so much that the air was mostly unbreatheable on the first floor of our house. My mom slept upstairs with my sister and there were a lot of open windows for a couple of days.
9. Ash trays. These used to be almost everywhere, because when I was a kid almost everyone smoked. There were even ash trays in my college classrooms, and a few students smoked. (Tthankfully, only a few.) (Thanks to Jim Tubman for this one, which should have been obvious to me.)
10. Cigars. The last time I saw anyone smoking a cigar it was a couple of people in my writers group in Colorado Springs, circa 2014. Tobacco kills. (It killed my father.) I think maybe we’re finally catching on.
11. Mercury blood-pressure cuffs. And, for that matter, needle -gauge blood pressure cuffs. It’s all electronic now.
12. White-wall car tires. I had totally forgotten about these, which were in decline even in the 1950s. (Thanks to reader TRX for the reminder.) It makes me wonder what people who restore classic cars do for white-walls.
13. Newspaper vending machines. (Thanks to Rich Rostrom.) Not only the machines, but the papers themselves are getting scarce. Now I only see them at the customer service counter in supermarkets.
14. Neighborhood mailboxes. (Again, thanks to Rich Rostrom.) We had one at the corner of our street, near Edison grade school. Now you only see them in high-traffic areas like in front of supermarkets.
15. Balsa-wood model airplanes. (Thanks to Spencer Arnold.) We used to get balsa gliders for a quarter at Bud’s Hardware Store in the Sixties, and you could get a balsa plane with a prop and a rubber-band “engine” for 50c. My father built a lot of balsa planes when he was kid, and built a few when I was in grade school. These may still exist, but see the next item:
16. Hobby shops. There was always one within reasonable biking distance when I was a kid. There was still one in Colorado Springs circa 2012, but that was the last time I saw one. They varied in emphasis; some sold stamp albums and sometimes stamps, others did not. Most sold model airplanes, and the .049 engines that I couldn’t afford. Craft stores absorbed some of that business. The bigger Ace Hardware stores still have small brass & aluminum sheet and tubing. Beyond that, most of the business has moved online.
17. Reel-type power mowers. These were just like hand-pushed lawnmowers, but they had engines. My grandfather Harry Duntemann had one. Once the rotaries came in around the early 60s, the reel models quickly slipped away. My uncle gave me a rattle-trappy old one about 1966 and my friends and I made a bizarre go kart out of it.
18. AM radio. (Thanks to Tom Byers.) As a teen in Chicago I listened to AM a lot, especially WLS and WCFL, the rock stations in their time. As rock got harder, I listened more to WIND, which played a gentler kind of music that I preferred. Of course, once I had an FM radio (college) I dropped AM and never looked back.
19. DJ chatter. DJs were celebrities when I was a kid. They’re now an endangered species, especially those who did a sort of fast standup comedy between songs and commercials. Radio is heavily automated these days, and most announcements are prerecorded. Weather and traffic reports are mostly gone as well.
20. Cable TV. (Thanks to Bill Beggs.) We still have cable, but internet-only. People are moving their TV viewing to streaming sites in droves. Carol and I don’t watch a lot of TV, with a smidge off the air, and rest from streaming sites.

There are a couple of things that I thought had vanished that are coming back. Whether this is a good thing or not is an open question:

1. Bell-bottom pants. Yes, they’re coming back. I’m of seventeen minds about this.
2. Big glasses. And I mean big, mid-late ‘80s big. I had those, and used to joke that my cheeks had 20-20 vision.
3. Vinyl records. (Thanks to Don Doerres & Rich Rostrom.) The reasons I dumped vinyl were pragmatic: CDs did not wear out and you didn’t have to turn them over. Now Wal-Mart and Target have racks of vinyl. Wow.

There may be more, but 20 is a good round number. Maybe we’ll come up with enough to do a third installment.

• Our longtime friend David Stafford stopped in for an evening on 5/27, and we took him to Tutti Santi restaurant at 64th & Greenway. It’s one of our favorite eateries here, high-end Italian, and we ate on the patio. David took some photos, which turned out pretty well, as you can see above.
• Could the ancient Greeks see the color blue? This is evidently a massive, long-term fistfight in certain circles, as ridiculous as it sounds. Mostly, the best guess is that the Greeks didn’t have a word specifically for blue tints. Matt Iglesias posted the best discussion I’ve found. It’s apparently more about linguistics than color vision.
• I’ve posted some of my weird experiences dealing with modern AI here. AI images often have the wrong number of fingers or toes, and sometimes bizarre body proportions. Now an AI has created an entirely fictional governor of South Dakota, whose term in office was 1949-1951…in its imagination, or whateverthehell creates AI weirdness like this.
• Carol and I have three Intel NUC computers, which are both small and quiet and yet still manage to do pretty much anything we do in terms of computing. (We are not gamers.) I’m not entirely sure why, but you can now buy a lid for a NUC machine that is a Lego base plate. I gave what Lego I had to our nieces years ago, or I’d be sorely tempted.
• I’m a sucker for robots, so an article stack-ranking the top 100 movie robots was a must-read, even though my all-time favorite film robot, Kronos, only made it to #57. (I do agree with the very high quality of #1, which may be my second favorite movie robot.) Some of the robots are very old and/or very obscure; I think there were fifteen or so that I’d never heard of and another four or five that I’d simply forgotten.
• A study published in the Lancet shows that natural immunity to COVID19 is equal to and often greater than what the supposed vaccines offer. The paper is a real slog if you’re not a researcher, hence the link to City Journal‘s overview.
• And another City Journal piece I enjoyed, about Rod Serling and some of his struggles during the rise of television as the premier form of American entertainment.
• A cow got loose in Carol’s thoroughly suburban hometown of Niles, Illinois (just north of Chicago) and CBS News described the results as “Udder chaos.” Points for that one, guys.
• Some lunatic stole two million dimes from the US Mint in Philadelphia. That’s not as much money as it sounds like (do the math) but the bigger problem is how to spend it. Unless you’re getting a burger and fries at McDonald’s, paying for things by the pound (of coins) will attract a great deal of unwanted attention.

• Here’s a fascinating take on Substack, which I’ve been watching for a while and read frequently when I identify someone there worth reading. Independent (i.e., non-partisan) news journalists have been gathering there, and it could become a new source of (mostly; entirely is impossible) unbiased news reporting.
• Stability AI, the firm behind the Stable Diffusion image generator, is burning through lots of cash and struggling to find a tenable business model. I may try using it to make book covers; I hope it survives.
• This is an excellent article about Intel’s monumental failure with their iAPX-432 CPU (introduced in 1981) which was so slow and expensive nobody built machines around it, leading to its cancellation in 1986. Intel’s engineers learned a lot from its failure. (This is a good example of a Substack post, BTW.)
• Ok, this is weird: Some guys cultured woolly mammoth meat in a lab and made a mammoth (though not woolly) meatball with mammoth DNA and elephant DNA. They won’t eat it because they don’t know how our immune systems might respond to mammoth DNA. Duhh.
• Raspberry Pi competitors are popping up all over the place. Here’s the Orange Pi 5, which has 8 ARM Cortex-A76 cores and up to 32 GB RAM—with a Mali G510 GPU thrown in for good measure. The 16GB board costs $138USD.  It comes with a Linux distro specific to the Orange Pi, and can run other ARM-based Linux distros.
• I just finished and am polishing my first piece of short fiction since 2008. It’s called “Volare” and clocks in at 10,600 words. That’s too short for a paperback, and I’m still considering how and when to publish it. I’ve got a little more polishing to do still, and may take the op[portunity to use an AI image generator to make a cover. We’ll see. I’ll post details on Contra when I get a few things straightened out.
• Methane’s behavior as a greenhouse gas isn’t near as simple as the alarmists make it out to be. Read the whole thing; it’s too complex to summarize here.

Yesterday was the end of the line for the Twitter bluecheck. You can still get one, but you’ll have to pay for it. And anybody who has a bluecheck but won’t pay for it will lose it, as of (ostensibly) today. If you can pay for it, you can get it. (I believe you only have to prove your identity.) It will cost you eight bucks a month. What’s that? Two lattes at Starbucks? Cheap! But as it happens, paying for it isn’t the point.

Duhhhh.

There are a couple of problems with the pre-Musk bluecheck. It was free, but bestowed only upon those judged worthy, via a process completely opaque outside of being politically slanted. This led to a noxious side effect: It created a sort of online aristocracy with a built-in echo chamber that dominated the whole platform.

Elites are always a problem, because they consider themselves above the condition of ordinary people and not bound by ordinary people’s limitations. On Twitter, they’re mostly just stuffed shirts who lucked into Harvard and scored a job in a newspaper somewhere. (Or just happen to be celebrities famous mostly for being famous.)

Much bluecheck dudgeon has been hurled around about having to pay for what was once free, or (way worse!) knowing that any prole with 8 bucks to spare can have the same badge. The connotation of the badge changed, from “I‘m a demigod” to “I support the new Twitter.” OMG! NO WAY! I’M LEAVING!

The big question now, of course, is whether the malcontents will actually leave the platform. We all know how many people threatened to quit Twitter when Musk bought it. The Atlantic has an interesting article on the phenomenon. (Nominally paywalled, but they will give you a couple of free articles.) I’ve posted here about the supposed mass migration from Twitter to Mastodon. Mastodon grew hugely after the beginning of the Musk era, to the annoyance of a lot of long-time Mastodoners. The open question is how thoroughly the emigrants burned their bridges as they went.

This month we may finally find out.