X Marks the Apocalypse
This too shall pass
I finally picked up an old copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I was reading through the introduction, struggling to learn the importance of his poetic voice, when I hit the scroll and saw the news. The “X” was going to roll out in the morning, and Twitter, as we knew it, would be no more.
After 14 years on a platform, I had to admit what I had loved was gone. I also had to accept that in these many months of lead up, there was still no exact replacement for a place that I like millions, had called my own. There were other spaces and types of social media where I could migrate, but now, despite the lackluster choices, I had to choose one. At least I had to wander around properly, and with persistence until I found one. This is what pushed me back to my book and back to this matter of Ovid.
Without boring myself and hopefully not you, I started to pick up the wormholes of knowledge and found myself landing on the most poetic clue of the evening. The mystery of this move, one I could easily ascribe to individual hubris, was something bigger. I realized then, that Ovid, a Roman poet known for his amoral love of the gods, was following in the steps of the ancient Greeks. He was not however, following in the footsteps, at least not formally, in the footsteps of the Mycenaeans. You see, the Mycenaeans were a cultural group spread around what was and is “Greece.”
The Greece we know and trace ourselves back to in the west was in fact preceded by another group, a society known as the Mycenaeans. From the ages of the Mycenaeans to the Greeks there was a time of shift, of adjustment, and this threshold of time is now known as the Greek Dark Ages. I bet you thought the dark ages only happened recently, but they are in fact, recurring features of how societal structures collapse and reform. Dark ages are birth canals.
The Greek Dark Ages lasted a bit, from 1050 BC — c. 750 BC. It’s a few hundred years of disruption and assimilation, years that probably created angst and confusion. In many ways, that must have been an apocalypse, a major shift, one that rattled and shook the course of many generations.
Tracing back from the Mycenaeans to the Archaic Greeks to our modern times I noticed something I hadn’t. It was something that rattled my cage because it signaled to me that between dynasties, various periods of stable greatness, and ages of social cohesion, there have often been these types of “Dark Ages.” These are the lulls, the pauses in between huge, historical breaths. And this model sums up neatly where we are now. We are in an apocalypse; and this is the portal from one ending to an inevitable beginning.
As of today gone is the bird, replaced by the X and our relationship the platform that dare not speak its name is altered. Like a raw mark on a treasure map, it blazes in the way of the Russian “Z.” Hubris and intentions to erase others from the treasure map is surely a unifying feature of both of these emblems. The use of letters in lieu of something more substantial, something tangible is enough to make at least a few of us balk.
We are in an age marked by human expansion, one that has lost much of its sense of proportion and so the letter scrawls are the result. The use of the alphabet symbols marks the time of collective human narcissism, the one that has lost all sense of temperance, and puts it on display. It also signals the shift away from this time, because that’s how things go. That’s how complex pendulums swing.
Besieged with sensory overloads we know we are changing, too. Yet we can not do much to stop this swell of time, of history writ very large. In fact, we do miss nature and the blue bird of Twitter was a way for each individual user to relate to that open space we have been missing.
With Twitter we were happy to translate ourselves into the roles we understood as belonging to birds. We the users of Twitter, set out a song. We chirped alone and together. We moved in information murmurations. We sang freedom songs for each other by virtue of the solidarity found in a re-tweet. We even saw ourselves as the sometimes unfortunate sounding “Tweeps.” We are now expected to act as X’s, as mineable resources on a map. It’s not a distinction in today’s social media models, but it is a codification of a pathetic user role. The old paradigm of open space seems gone both on our planet and in our cyber/information spaces. The dynastic intentions of the current lords are now appearing clear as can be.
These current rulers are riddled with individual egos that can not stand to think of creatures that move at will in open skies. This is exactly the time when we should understand ourselves as people not only belonging to our individual or family lines, but to entire periods of civilization. Our tiny bird identities matter, or at least they did. Our voices were stronger together and now they will scatter. The voices will move on. We will migrate and murmur and we will reshape.
Maybe some of us want to align with a tyranny, and in those cases, the letter glyphs feel empowering for now, although they feel rather static, abstract and seriously lacking in mythological attraction to me. Only time will tell how it all leads us into the next age.
History moves in a spiral. Dark ages are not actually uncommon. Names change and so do identities. Disruption of the order is par for the civilized course and in many ways is healthy. The issue is not if it is good to change the status quo, but who gets to decide on the change. Do one or two voices get to decide how generations of people live and perceive their lives?
The bird can go as it has, but to forget the bird forever would be to forget ourselves. For a society in a frenzy over AI, it’s amazing that most of us are blind to the power of naming. We simply deem this rebranding a new face on the same cage. However, the name does indeed change the cage. That is how storytelling and immersive design, that is how all social platforms work: by name and by symbol, by this powerful thing known as myth.
The collective myth of Twitter is now lost in a sea of nothing. Our social platform birds are croaking as surely as living birds are falling from overheated skies. Still, there is a persistence of something bigger than these details. Life, ever changing and evolving does continue.
I prefer to align my technological self with the meme of the bird, because this symbolic way of being activates me to be part of the technological world, of the new landscape in a way that recalls the organic. The bird allowed me to symbolically understand myself better than an X. The bird allowed me to place my psyche in motion, relating to past and present, relating to my own voice and to collective sense-making.
Ovid placed his stories of rapid transformation in the lineage of mythology found in the peasants as well as the temples, stating, I call to God, under “whatever name” we are using now. In a similar and less exalted manner, the bird acknowledged a lineage to voice, to making sounds. To me the bird was an epochal, technological version of the dawn chorus. It was a mating field, one where the end goal was to connect people to ideas, to make matches that in an instant could transform the fate, of corporations, countries and individuals.
So, these are the dark times, the shadowy joiners that keep history’s spiral intact. In these days we dance and sing and we comment, and yet we know we are doing so in a kind of state of collapse. Of course in this collapse we can also see the beginning of something new. Participation is key in the dark times. We sense this to be true.
In this vast runway to the turning of history’s arc, the X and the Z are points on the map that get us from this last age of civilization to the next. So, now I will let you get back to your day, but not before I leave you with a quote from the defenseless poet I have invoked.
Here we start at his beginning, to his invocation. It is here that we are reminded that his story is one of things that change. Ovid’s invocation reminds us that things do change, often quickly, and in too many places all at once for us to see or notice. We only understand change as we experience it ourselves. We only remember change if we talk about it and make note.
What we call disruption now is merely a bridge to the world that lies on the other side of a the massive technological and environmental horizon, a geo-technology grid of reality.
To allow that yesterday’s patriarchs will decide tomorrow’s paradigm is nothing more than lazy idea, since their fortunes and ideologies, even their glyphs, are based on the outgoing models. Nature does endure, life does persist, well after entire civilizations have faded into the mist. The glyphs of the exploitation masters will not endure, even the rejection of those masters will not endure. The only thing that does endure is change. The only thing we can hope to do with that change is to illuminate our experiences to how they unfolded.
So, I invoke my desire that in an age of visual literacy, the bird persists. I align myself with that iconography as though it were a sacred lineage, one connecting the real blue birds of this planet with the manifest desire of hundreds of millions of people to speak to each other in real-time.
Go ahead, invoke the spirits of what you love, and I will do the same. First, I will go outside and listen to the sparrows, reminding myself that although they are fleeting themselves, they do not speak in temporary glyphs.
These are dark times upon us, and these too, shall pass. Let’s have fun anyway.
