Mark Sinker

Above Côte Brasserie in Kingston upon Thames, overlooking its Riverside Walk, there was for a week in mid-November a very long billboard depicting crowds in sackcloth and red hats trimmed in white, wading across water towards us. Yuletide synapses fired first: here was a Victorian Christmas card rerun of a Renaissance nativity painting, snow-covered fields in the distance, past-times rural types massed up front. Happy shopping! Except: that was a really big crowd. And a lot of stables. Look closer, and the smiles were smudged and strange, more feral than festive.

As the microblogging site proposing to supplant Twitter, Bluesky at first ignited pundit suspicion, with columnists denouncing echo chambers – as if the first thing you’d do to improve your online input wouldn’t simply be blocking them. Indeed, what the wild west internet of yore mostly offered was escape portals from the opinion-making complex, towards unplanned surprise.

‘Thanks to the internet,’ the Bluesky user Bobby Bungus (formerly Twitter’s @internethippo) wrote last month, ‘I don’t need to wait for the evening news to learn about recent events. I can read 2000 posts from the most deranged people on earth and make up my own mind.’ In the year since Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X – at, well, deranged cost to himself, financial and reputational – it has largely dispersed as a useable medium and as a quasi-community. 

In Revolution in the Head, his otherwise loving guide to the music of The Beatles and the potential of pop as respectable art, the late Ian MacDonald was troubled by what he saw as John and Yoko’s irresponsibility in adopting the techniques and ethos of John Cage: all that randomness, all that self-conscious unmooring from meaning. How, MacDonald grumbled, could bad things not be unleashed, when listeners could supply (at unprecedented scale) their own reading? Plug the masses into the raw avant-garde and out slouches Charles Manson – or else @dril (1.7 million Twitter followers), that comedy performance at once prescient and archetypal. Point-missing and mispunctuating, forever under attack from his imagined haters, @dril is all our foes when the heat is on – and also all of us, gamely bellowing, wounded and belligerent. The spirit of the platform: Twitter as Goblins’R’Us. (Though Yoko is here too, with 4.5 million followers, and seems content, mild and neighbourly, herself but also unremarkable. The site has a Fluxus vibe, and she fits right in.)