PART ONE - The origins.
Every day, I learn more about myself and the values that allow us as human beings, to collectively shape the world in which we live. In the last month, It feels good to be given an opportunity to share my thoughts with a growing audience of people armed with the critical thinking skills to understand why we should be concerned about the direction of travel in our world today.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not so arrogant to believe that my words will be remembered for changing anything. However, I will depart, knowing I was given an opportunity to have a conversation with a micro global community. A audience who might share, my passion to support values which provide an opportunity to make the world a better place for our children and our grandchildren.
We are a deeply flawed species. History tells us, we often find difficulty working together for the common good. There’s something about people that makes us susceptible to the most primitive, cruel and selfish behaviour. We often seem incapable of coexisting with a sense of respect for each other, when competing for an objective. We know fairness and equity are laudable ambitions to hold. We also understand war and conflict are never good for anyone, yet we just can’t help ourselves. Underneath all the noble ambitions for a fairer society, we can’t seem to get past our thirst for power and control. Darwinism will always be our guilty pleasure.
In my generation born 15 years after the end of World War 2, have lived through 80 years of fragile but largely sustained peace. Though there may be some who might argue, there’s always war in some part of the world.
We as a society, have lived through a technological revolution. One every bit as important as the Industrial Revolution. Critically, we have seen an explosion in the information space and more recently, AI has become part of our everyday life. This has created a tectonic shift in our perception of the world around us. We are an inherently self destructive and I fear many of us, are now on the path to a world that has to date, been the stuff of science fiction.
Few could argue, wealth all too often corrupts. It’s rarely earned and often taken. No more is that evident in society today. Trump is just the symptom of a much larger problem we are yet to come to terms with. For generations, we have settled our disputes on battlefields around the world and we are still doing it today. However, change is coming and Trump is at the forefront of pioneering that change.
As humans, we are susceptible to addiction. Through the ages, we have sought escape from the real world by seeking temporary refuge in opiates and alcohol. We are in constant search of the next dopamine hit and this my friends, is our Achilles heel. This is how we have arrived in this uniquely dangerous moment. A moment where even without alcohol, drugs or any traditional form of stimulus, we are surrendering our minds to those who want to control the world.
One thing we are all born with, is a hidden supply of GREED. It’s completely free and I’m convinced it will lead to our eventual destruction. We’ve gone from millionaires, to billionaires and it seems likely, the guy who is taking a chainsaw to the US federal government, will be the first trillionaire. Just to wrap some context around this. It took Warren Buffet 25 years to transition from being a millionaire to becoming a billionaire. In contrast, it took Mark Zuckerberg just 2 years.
So what’s the difference? It’s very simple, the social media giants are our new drug dealers. They supply us with value reinforcement hits. It’s the new modern day crack cocaine. Just as drug addicts carry needles, we carry our mobile phones. Each may provide a very different delivery mechanism, but both provide a hit we simply can’t live without.
If there’s one takeaway from where we are, it’s that elections in the U.S. have changed forever. As a software engineer working every day with AI and social media APIs, I have a really good understanding of what’s possible in this space. Plummeting legacy media audiences are a game changer. Surveys suggest that people now use social media to get their news and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand how potentially dangerous this is.
The one thing Republicans have succeeded with, is using social media to dominate the political narrative. It’s ironic then, that it was Barack Obama who first used it to win an election in 2008. Rather than build on what they learned in that campaign, they ceded the space to Trump in 2016 and he’s never looked back. This represents the moment when Democrats lost the narrative war and they have never retaken that ground.
It got MUCH worse for Democrats when Musk bought Twitter. He had absolutely no intention of retaining an expensive moderation team. So, when he subsequently joined the MAGA movement and threw his weight behind Trump, he had the ability to decapitate the liberal voices on his new acquisition. Instead of Dems recognising the threat and repurposing the platform to organise, they all began rage tweeting in their own Twitter echo chamber Elon had created for them. It demonstrated a frightening lack of political awareness that unquestionably contributed to the loss of the 2024 election.
It got even worse, when Mark Zuckerberg stepped in and replaced moderation with community notes in response to Trump’s election win. In this one move, Trump captured control of around 80% of the social media space. While still being in the hunt for TikTok. This means that Musk and Zuckerberg can now tweak the algorithms to push any narrative Trump chooses. Of course they will deny ever doing it, but I can assure you, this will and has happened.
Liberal voices needed a new place to live and there were many attempts to court them. It seems most have settled upon BlueSky. This is I believe, the only game in town in the traditional social media format. It’s built on the AT Protocol (Authenticated Transfer Protocol) which is open source. It provides a framework for building social apps, allowing for interoperability and user data portability. This represents a much better option than the traditional closed platforms.
There are however, some significant problems with this new home. As of March 11, BlueSky had a little over 33 million users with around just 3.5 million daily users in the US. In comparison, X has close to 106.23 million daily US users, although it’s difficult to assess how many might be bots. This is a stark reminder of the current reach of BlueSky in comparison to X. It gets worse if you add in Facebook and Instagram. In short, BlueSky has just nominal reach in the US right now. It is simply Twitter reconstructed on an open source platform with a similar character count. The big problem for me, is it only allows videos up to 60 seconds long. In a world where video is a key component of effective political messaging, this does present a problem for narrative driven content.
So my question? Is BlueSky anything more than a Liberal dorm where users think they are getting messaging out to voters, when really, it’s going no further than a circle of like minded friends?
Whichever way you look at it, we are going to need some serious out of the box thinking to be anywhere near competitive in 2026. That’s assuming elections will still take place.
In Part 2, I’ll be exploring what the options are to reach voters where they live online.