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The internet never sleeps. It is tireless, relentless, and endless.

Or at least that’s the image I have of the internet in my head as an elder millennial, who remembers a childhood without it and then with it—the supposed “Oregon Trail” microgeneration.

Alan Kay once said “technology” is anything invented after you were born; everything else is just stuff.1”

And that’s true of the web, I think. People like me are endlessly fascinated by the promise and peril of the thing, whereas my child has no memory of life without apps or Netflix or her parents reading and watching stuff on their phones.

Being in the cohort I am, I think I feel the “weight” of the web in a way someone younger might not. I remember the 2000s when everyone was starting blogs and abandoning them. Inevitably, there would be a months-long gap, followed by a “Update” that would say “sorry I haven’t been posting! Lots has happened. I transferred schools and got a new job! More later! :)” followed by nothing.

This was gradually replaced by social media, where posting was just something you could do in the background. It didn’t have to be written pieces. The pressure was lower—and with the advent of smartphones, you could post whatever whenever wherever. If you wanted to post, you could.

If you got engagement, it could be fun or horrifying. If you wanted to hustle and build an audience, there was a chance you might be able to. There still is.

Along the way, there were bad actors who leveraged social media’s targeted, custom algorithms to flood the zone with disinformation, or dehumanize others.

Elon himself fell down a predictable alt-right pipeline, bought Twitter, tried to back out of buying Twitter, was forced to buy Twitter, and reduced it to its current form, X, while performing various acts of what Casey Newton called “cultural vandalism:”

“…this framing misses the true shape of Musk’s project, which is best understood not as a money-making endeavor, but as an extended act of cultural vandalism. Just as he graffitis his 420s and 69s all over corporate filings; and just as he paints over corporate signage and office rooms with his little sex puns; so does he delight in erasing the Twitter that was.

And yet we keep trying to replace it with something new: Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, et al.

This is all a continuation of the shift that started last year. I wrote this at the close of 2022:

“I do not think social media is dying. It may, perhaps, be changing—or perhaps the ways so many of us relate to these services is what’s really changing.

My heyday as a “poster” was 2016-2019, when #exvangelical was becoming more of a known quantity on Twitter. Then in 2019, a personal private loss, followed by a public drama, forced me to re-evaluate how I used these platforms myself. I lost my appetite for confrontational dunk-tweets or punching up, and I set a boundary against encouraging or participating in online “drama."

I would still post, but I am generally more measured and certainly less prolific.

But this latest chapter on Twitter has cast things in starkest, bleakest terms. When the world’s second-richest man kicks up drama for no reason, you start to question who has anything to gain from any of it.”2

What I recognize now, re-reading that piece, is how I highlighted the work of Tricia Hersey, whose work focuses on rest, and how soon after, I saw content online shift to posting about rest. The irony was not lost.

Anything can be content. Is everything cheapened by that? No, and certainly not universally by everyone. The same content that was giving fatigue to me may have invigorated some other soul.

What I realize, however, is that even though I am no longer a poster, even though my opinion of these sites and their power to change both individual lives and broader social realities has diminished, I still have that nagging sense of obligation to post. That need to post the message “sorry I haven’t been posting!”

I feel an urge to explain myself to a potential audience of the entire world about why I haven’t been active, when ultimately I’m just very tired after having gone through a very difficult period I’d rather not tell the whole world about.

But if the nature of the web is content, and nature abhors a vacuum, someone else’s content will fill the vacuum you left online in order to rest offline.

There’s a post in my drafts called “the social internet is a bad third place,” and I think I’m starting to figure out why that is—participation in them requires production or performance, and ultimately feels like or becomes work, and the point of a “third place” is to not be work. And the unspoken expectation we often have with content creators is that they should always be working. But they cannot. We cannot.

The “creator economy” is symptomatic of larger issues in our society about who gets to rest, and when, and who receives support even as their output diminishes.

We need our fallow periods. We do not make it easy to rest.

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For many years, I really wanted to be verified on Twitter. I’d apply regularly (when applications were open; I was never Big Time enough to get verified during the “paused” periods), and would always be turned down.

Regardless of whatever specious requirements Twitter had at the time, I’d try to to contort to them.

Press mentions? Sure, I’ve got them at VICE, The New Republic, the NYT, Splinter News, CBS Religion, Religion Dispatches, a Newsweek cover story, and in Australian and German media.

Bylines at already-verified publications? I had a few.

Association with a hashtag movement? Yep.1

Each time I’d be declined because I didn’t quite fit - my publication dates were too far apart, etc - and eventually I’d be barred from even being able to apply for the category I best fit into as “activists, organizers, and other influential individuals” because I “didn’t meet minimum requirements.” (Twitter’s process never said what those requirements were - engagement, follower count, off-network things. Nothing - the form just wouldn’t advance.)

What I never had were either of the two things that often lead to easy verification on Twitter—journalist credentials from a media company, or pre-existing fame.

It didn’t matter that I had helped jumpstart a hashtag on Twitter itself with incredible staying power, that would migrate to other social networks (#exvangelical at present has over 1.4 billion views on TikTok). It didn’t matter that I had interviewed high-profile people from entertainment and academia on my shows (Pete Holmes, Reza Aslan, Jeff Sharlet, David Bazan, Jennifer Knapp, Diana Butler Bass, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Anthea Butler, and many others). I just didn’t have the numbers or something.

Now, thanks to Elon’s epic mishandling and misunderstanding of Twitter, the blue checkmark has from from coveted to cringe.

But of all the takes I’ve read about (de-)verification so far, I haven’t seen any that reflect something like my experience - and the new verification products/statuses from Twitter, Instagram, and Substack confer something different than what those old blue checks did on Twitter.

Verification Before Elon

Before Elon reduced Twitter’s verification into a pay-to-play system, verification conferred two things:

1. the legitimacy of accounts that purported to belong to notable people or organizations, and

2. the vaguer legitimacy of conferring the status of “notable” onto an account to begin with.

The first service, of verifying that you are who you say you are, is a backstop against disinformation. It is a necessary function in a digital media environment where information can propagate at inhuman speeds. It made sense that people who made media for a living at a media organization had an easy on-ramp to verification in this context.

The second service, of conferring “notable” status, is a value judgment. Twitter’s prior management was lazy on this front. Notability provided by wealth, fame, and other forms of privilege was easily conferred to their system, and it made acquiring verification through backdoor access trivial.

It was the social-climber aspect of being deemed Notable Online™️ that made the blue check desirable for people like me.

I was, and remain, independent - I don’t make media for a larger organization. But perhaps, if I contributed enough to a platform, to enough of the public conversation, that spurred further conversations or commentary (even if they would not acknowledge existing or prior conversations), then maybe I’d “earn” this recognition.

This tiny piece of status, a little attaboy from an uncaring corporation might ostensibly mean you’d “made it” to some degree. This is more true outside the realms of journalism & celebrity, where such things were expected givens. If you could “earn” verification, then perhaps you could earn other things, like more of a following, more opportunities, more money, more acclaim—and yes, more algorithmic amplification, which meant more eyeballs.

That was the allure, anyway.

The lived reality of people with checkmarks were far more mundane. Over time, conservative factions would lambast “blue checks,” and it became another way to deride/dismiss/otherize people, just as has happened with other terms like “woke.”

Then Elon bought Twitter and made everything far more confusing.

A Verified Mess

Operating from the misguided conservative assumption that only liberals were verified, when he introduced “verification” to Twitter Blue, he weakened what a checkmark meant by failing to verify people are who they say they are. All of a sudden, a blue check was reduced to “I have $8 this month and can pose as Eli Lily and announce free insulin,” or make Mario look like he’s officially flipping the bird.

Elon also conflated the scarcity of the “notable” aspect of Twitter’s verification as something worth paying for on its face, with no other tangible benefits.

Every step Twitter has taken with regard to verification since has made the symbol more cringeworthy. They’ve introduced colors. They’ve required it for advertisers, and randomly increased the costs of API use and other features. They’ve stripped legacy checkmarks from journalists and anyone “legacy verified” and only made it available to Twitter Blue subscribers—except when Elon is paying for it himself. Even then, celebs are tweeting that they aren’t paying for it even though their Twitter profile says they are, because it’s embarrassing, and it could be legally considered false endorsement.

In a telling sign of where this is going, Twitter Blue’s settings may one day offer users the ability to hide the checkmark.

Elon’s galaxy-brained business moves simultaneously deteriorated both functions of Twitter’s prior verification program at rocket-speed—but not before introducing the idea of paid verification to social media.

The Paid Verification Shift

Shortly after Twitter added the verification badge to the Twitter Blue program, Meta would follow suit and offer a service for Instagram and Facebook called Meta Verified, which offers a badge, impersonation protection, and customer support, for $12-$15 per month. The customer support & impersonation protection may be worth the purchase for folks (like some friends of mine) who deal with impersonation. But the badge-for-bucks is just a copy of Twitter Blue.

Elsewhere, here on Substack, badges have come to mean that people pay you. The announcement of Substack Bestseller Badges was a bit of product-launch-as-trolling (if you have 100 paid subs, you get one badge color, with different badge colors the more successful you are), but with the subsequent launch of Substack Notes, the years-old muscle memory of Twitter’s verified badge once again confers that vague legitimacy, and invokes the same desire for status.

Shifting verification badges from both “this is really me” and “this account is notable for some social reason” to “this badge signifies a transaction was made with this platform” has drastically changed what the symbol means. In the case of Twitter Blue, it entirely sidesteps the literal act of verification now.

Coupled with the reckless and unpredictable actions of Elon, and his truly astounding ability to alienate his customers, backers, and anyone not impressed by his blatant desire to be the web’s baddest edgelord, it is no surprise that the status symbol has become a toxic asset that very few people want.

In Neal Stephenson’s Fall: Or Dodge in Hell, an elaborate hoax takes over the entire Internet that the town of Moab, Utah had been destroyed by a thermonuclear device. Doctored footage went viral online, the FAA restricted airspace around the area, and panic flooded the world. It was all fake. The reputational cost for the entire social web was catastrophic, and within the context of the book, the social web would be entirely supplanted by cryptographic services that could both verify identity/online activity and also provide anonymity if required—but “truthers” who would “Remember Moab” would still abound. Moab was a Rubicon-crossing moment. So was the the decline of the verified badge as both status symbol and proof of identity.

Twitter’s decline is sad for several reasons. But at least it freed us from wanting this form of validation.

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Other Writing on Twitter

I wrote about Twitter’s prior function that allowed a “counterpublic sphere” to flourish.

The Post-Evangelical Post

Twitter & The Counterpublic Sphere

As far as social networking sites that most people in my direct orbit don’t even use go, Twitter has played an outsized role in my life. In fact, it’s changed it many ways. Now Twitter itself is changing ownership, having been successfully purchased by the world’s richest man. Now is as good a time as any to reflect …

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4 years ago · 1 like · Blake Chastain

And when Twitter entered its Musk Era:

The Post-Evangelical Post

📱Twitter Enters Its Musk Era.

Twitter has officially entered its Musk era. This is leading folks to either leave, or to simply engage less, which for social media companies that live or die on continuous engagement, amounts to the same thing. FWIW, ever since Musk started this …

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3 years ago · 4 likes · Blake Chastain

I wrote about how Twitter didn’t survive the vibe shift:

The Post-Evangelical Post

📱The Vibe Shift That Was Foretold Came, & Twitter Did Not Survive It

This is an entry in Shaped by Tools, the PEP section on media & technology. Subscribe for free or $5/month forever. Back in February, a time that feels much farther away than a mere 10 months ago, The Cut published an essay called “A Vibe Shift is Coming…

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3 years ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · Blake Chastain

This is an entry in Shaped by Tools, the PEP section on media & technology. Subscribe for free or $5/month forever.

Back in February, a time that feels much farther away than a mere 10 months ago, The Cut published an essay called “A Vibe Shift is Coming. Will any of us survive it?” It was a piece meant to get people talking, and it did. It featured a lot of coast-centric media bubble trendspotting talk mingled with pandemic lockdown introspection. But some of it resonated further—that something was in the air, ready to change the zeitgeist. I’ll contend that the shift was about social media itself, but first, a quote from Sean Monahan, who is quoted at length in the piece:

“I feel like the trajectory of the 2010s has been exhausted in a lot of ways. The culture-war topic no longer seems quite as interesting to people. Social media isn’t a place where you can be as creative anymore; all the angles are figured out. Younger people are less interested in things like quote-unquote cancel culture. These were kind of, like, the big pillars we used to navigate pop culture in the 2010s. And we had the rise of all these world-spanning, like, Sauron-esque tech platforms that literally have presences on every continent. People want to make things personal again.””

A couple of months after this piece, Elon made his bid to purchase Twitter based on vibes only and no due diligence. Following that, the early deserters left the platform; following that, Elon tried to back out of the deal; following that, Twitter countersued to enforce the deal; following that, Elon feared a loss in court and closed the deal in October; following that, he has brought rapid and frantic change to the service and the company, reducing staff via layoffs and “hardcore” ultimatums, reinstating Trump’s account via Twitter poll and offering “general amnesty” to banned accounts, including neo-Nazis.

After Musk’s Twitter acquisition closed in October, another swath of folks deleted their accounts or abandoned them (my own modest follower count has fallen by about 400). Professional journalists (and headline writers) were quick to write obituaries for social media writ large. At VICE, Edward Ongweso, Jr offered an interesting analysis under the clickbait headline “Social Media is Dead,” which highlighted that users are gravitating toward networks that emphasize the one-to-many broadcast model:

“Instead, we're getting YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, and an endless number of streaming platforms that replace the more rhizomatic structure of polydirectional conversation with something essentially unidirectional: a broadcast model, which sees "mutuals" replaced by a creator and their audience.”

There has been also plenty of navel-gazing about Twitter’s value (or lack thereof) from high-profile journalists working at major outlets: Rebecca Jennings at Vox wrote about the folks “who rely on Twitter for work, exposure, for pleasure, for passion;” Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic wrote about how “in the media, a whole microgeneration of younger journalists owe parts of their career to the way that Twitter collapses social networks and allows people to find new and interesting voices.”

Musk’s actions at Twitter and on the platform itself feel like private-sector Trumpism—a regime run solely on personality and its concomitant cult. We’ve read this script before: a powerful man becomes the permanent Main Character of Twitter—his inner circle becoming enablers and his online audience hangers-on acting as a cadre of digital enforcers, using shitposting as apologetics. Musk even uses the same culture war tactics as Trump to goose engagement, and has the same unpredictable chaos/unquestionable loyalty management methods Trump became infamous for.

It has not gone unnoticed. On December 11, Musk tweeted this:

Warzel, mentioned above, put it plainly in his Atlantic article “Elon Musk is a far-right activist:”

In five words, Musk manages to mock transgender and nonbinary people, signal his disdain for public-health officials, and send up a flare to far-right shitposters and trolls.

Two days later, Gideon Lichfield at WIRED remarked on the Trumpification of Elon Musk, and how media coverage fell back into Trump-era patterns:

News coverage of what Musk is doing at Twitter betrays another trope of the Trump years. There’s a large category of stories that report with a kind of ghoulish delight on moves that will surely—surely!—sink the platform in short order, like alienating advertisers and influential users. Meanwhile, there’s a drumbeat of pieces from right-wing outlets that just as willfully ignore Musk’s worst behaviors to argue that his slash-and-burn tactics are literally the only way to rid Twitter of excess bureaucracy and make it profitable, as if it were such a pit of vipers as has never been seen in the annals of corporate management.

It’s tiring. And it’s got lots of people reconsidering how much time to invest in these platforms.

One such essay was published by Micah J. Murray, here on Substack. I recommend the entire thing, which I have linked below.

Micah J. Murray

seven seconds // a thousand words

i miss the old internet. do you remember how different it felt before everything became tiktok? the blogosphere was its own sort of dumpster fire but at least there was space for words. whole paragra…

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3 years ago · 27 likes · 8 comments · Micah J. Murray

Of all the passages that resonate, this one resonates most for me:

What we are experiencing is not an accidental state of decay or the inevitable cost of doing business online. The internet in which we exist was engineered to extract money from us at the cost of our souls. The richest men in the world have hired some of the best engineers and scientists in the world to build machines which consume our time, attention, and creative energy to produce valuable datasets and advertising streams and profit for shareholders.

I don’t need to tell you how it works; you probably know.

But I need to remind myself: the reason it feels soul-crushing is because it was designed to be soul-crushing. Because anger and fear and greed and ego make the machine run better, keep you there scrolling through endless content and throwing words into the void in hopes of human connection.

Because crushed souls yield more profit for the companies.

This is the “vibe shift” that was foretold. We know with ever-increasing clarity that the promise of social media is not worth the peril for most of us.

These changes have been brewing for years. The very introduction of Jenny Odell’s 2019 opus How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy speaks to it:

We know that we live in complex times that demand complex thoughts and conversations—and those, in turn, demand the very time and space that is nowhere to be found. The convenience of limitless connectivity has neatly paved over the nuances of in-person conversation, cutting away so much information and context in the process. In an endless cycle where communication is stunted and time is money, there are few moments to slip away and fewer ways to find each other.

Given how poorly art survives in a system that only values the bottom line, the stakes are cultural as well. What the tastes of neoliberal techno manifest–destiny and the culture of Trump have in common is impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than-obvious. Such “nothings” cannot be tolerated because they cannot be used or appropriated, and provide no deliverables.

How To Do Nothing is part of a genre of books that challenges the effects of media & technology that includes Neal Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus, and a host of others. These books, focused on the effects of media & technology on individuals are supplemented by books about media & tech on society: Tim Hwang’s Subprime Attention Crisis, Tim Wu’s Atention Merchants, Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction, Ben Tarnoff’s speculative Internet for the People, and many more.

But lately, it is Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance that speaks to this same impulse to question the entire endeavor we find ourselves in. Hersey writes:

But there is always an incomplete understanding when you are engaging on social media because it has been created to be an extension of capitalism. The designers of the platforms wants us there all day scrolling, spending money, and absorbing messages in a fast-paced, disconnected manner…..

To truly grasp the heart of the messages, we will have to put down our phones and laptops and rest. We will have to take an intense look at the ways in which grind culture has traumatized us and then begin the lifelong process of healing from this trauma. This work is about more than simply naps and sleep, it is a full unraveling from the grips of our toxic understanding of our self-worth as divine human beings. Grieving in this culture is not done and is seen as a waste of time because grieving is a powerful place of reverence and liberation. A grieving person is a healed person. Can you guess why our culture does not want a healed person in it?….

You are worthy of rest. We don’t have to earn rest. Rest is not a luxury, a privilege, or a bonus we must wait for once we are burned out….When we can begin to tap into the deep vessel of who we truly are, so many things would end about oppression. I believe the powers that be don’t want us rested because they know that if we rest enough, we are going to figure out what is really happening and overturn the entire system. Exhaustion keeps us numb, keeps us zombie-like, and keeps us on their clock.

Somehow, amid the rapid decline of both the business & culture of Twitter, Elon Musk has quickly and effectively destroyed the mythology surrounding himself and social media more broadly—and Twitter in particular. Through his crassness and played-out culture war posting, he has done more to disabuse faith in both himself and the system that has so richly rewarded him.

I have seen all this before. I have lived it. You probably have, too. And refusing to participate in this same sort of entrenchment is a valid form of response that more and more people are choosing this time around, a bevy of Bartlebys responding “I would prefer not to.” Odell writes:

In Diogenes, Bartleby, and Thoreau, we see how discipline involves strict alignment with one’s own “laws” over and against prevailing laws or habits. But successful collective refusals enact a second-order level of discipline and training, in which individuals align with each other to form flexible structures of agreement that can hold open the space of refusal. This collective alignment emerges as a product of intense individual self-discipline—like a crowd of Thoreaus refusing in tandem. In so doing, the “third space”—not of retreat, but of refusal, boycott, and sabotage—can become a spectacle of noncompliance that registers on the larger scale of the public.

I do not think social media is dying. It may, perhaps, be changing—or perhaps the ways so many of us relate to these services is what’s really changing.

My heyday as a “poster” was 2016-2019, when #exvangelical was becoming more of a known quantity on Twitter. Then in 2019, a personal private loss, followed by a public drama, forced me to re-evaluate how I used these platforms myself. I lost my appetite for confrontational dunk-tweets or punching up, and I set a boundary against encouraging or participating in online “drama."1 I would still post, but I am generally more measured and certainly less prolific.

But this latest chapter on Twitter has cast things in starkest, bleakest terms. When the world’s second-richest man kicks up drama for no reason, you start to question who has anything to gain from any of it.

I don’t know what the next step in social media’s evolution will be. The more successful companies like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have shown that they are resilient and are capable of perpetuating themselves and encouraging the use of their particular platforms. Yet no platform has found a way to help their most successful creators avoid burnout; every algorithm dictates that you must post or perish.

This is what must be resisted. Whether it’s through the rubric of rest as resistance or time well spent, or Schumacher’s “enoughness,” there is a growing discontent, and a growing desire to do something else with anger than to endlessly post. Decades of grievance devolve to dead ends. We know this path—it has been explored at length in conservative media—and we can choose to walk another.

This particular spell is broken. The vibe has shifted. Perhaps now another can take hold.

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Twitter has officially entered its Musk era. This is leading folks to either leave, or to simply engage less, which for social media companies that live or die on continuous engagement, amounts to the same thing.

FWIW, ever since Musk started this campaign to buy Twitter, engagement had begun to wane and the vibe was already there. This sentiment was captured earlier this summer by writer Annalee Newitz in their post “Twitter is becoming a lost city:”

This is not what’s happening on Twitter. I’m not seeing a flood of new people arriving, spouting memes I don’t understand. I’m just seeing less of everything. The point is, Twitter isn’t becoming a vibrant but different social space that belongs to a new group of people; it’s being abandoned. 

As someone who has written a lot about urban abandonment (in my book Four Lost Cities and elsewhere), many of the Twitter abandonment patterns are startlingly familiar. In cities, people usually start to leave when there’s a combination of political instability and infrastructure decay. On Twitter, you’ve got the corporate media equivalent of political instability with Elon Musk’s botched takeover attempt, coming right on the heels of the difficult transition from founder/CEO Jack Dorsey’s reign to current CEO Parag Agrawal’s. And if you think of the Twitter user experience as its social infrastructure, that too is falling apart. There’s the lack of moderation and selective rule enforcement, plus the company’s longtime inability to address user concerns about everything from edit buttons to abuse. (Its technical infrastructure has also had many problems.)

Over at Garbage Day, internet culture writer Ryan Broderick wrote this piece:

Garbage Day

Someday soon, you will tweet for the last time

Why Didn’t Twitter Become The TikTok Of Text? I feel more than a little vindicated this morning thanks to a Reuters report that went out yesterday revealing that Twitter’s power users — which are defined as people who log in almost daily and tweet more than 3 times a week 🥴 — have been in “absolute decline” since the start of the pandemic. Out of curios…

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3 years ago · 56 likes · 4 comments · Ryan Broderick

My own Twitter use has declined over the past year. Several years ago, when I started doing more public work, I gravitated toward twitter. It was public and text-based, and I don’t communicate as well via photos or video. I didn’t invest as much time in Instagram, or in recent years, TikTok—to my own detriment, it seems. The audiences on IG and TikTok are much larger and more engaged, and lots of people use the #exvangelical tag to create lots of interesting content and build followings. But especially in those first few years, leading up to my first hiatus in spring 2019, Twitter was a vibrant (if volatile) place. It was essentially in allowing counter-publics to flourish, which I wrote about here:

The Post-Evangelical Post

Twitter & The Counterpublic Sphere

As far as social networking sites that most people in my direct orbit don’t even use go, Twitter has played an outsized role in my life. In fact, it’s changed it many ways. Now Twitter itself is changing ownership, having been successfully purchased by the world’s richest man. Now is as good a time as any to reflect …

Read more

4 years ago · 1 like · Blake Chastain

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I always wanted Twitter to do better. It would show promise, then flounder, then take more steps forward. Its new owner’s ideas so far seem far too simplistic for a product that is used in such complex ways. The Verge’s editor-in-chief Nilay Patel summed up the challenges Musk and his merry band of musketeers will have to contend with in a piece called “Welcome to hell, Elon:”

Two weeks ago, David Dark posed the question “What do we talk about when we talk about Twitter?” This was my response:

Twitter is and has been many things:

• a communications protocol

• a microblogging service

• a vector for misinformation and harassment

• a meme source

It’s also been a place to meet people you’d never know otherwise, or get wrapped up in parasocial relationships, or learn by listening/following those different than you. We each have related to it differently, if we related to it at all.

Like so many things, its future is uncertain and far from guaranteed. Twitter, like so many digital services, has ingratiated itself into our lives and become a dependency. Whether Twitter’s users will agree with Elon that it’s indispensable—and whether they agree for their content & engagement to further enrich the world’s richest man & his business partners—remains to be seen.

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Regardless of what one thinks about the term & whether it’s cringe or not on a given day, the tag’s durability over several years across multiple platforms shows its value as a robust counterpublic POV.

Whether you use the term ex-evangelical, post-evangelical, ex-Christian, or whatever, it has been proven over and over that there are people who have left white/led evangelicalism and have things to say. From all manner of perspectives. With all manner of trajectories.

So yeah, if you’ve been Extremely Online for the past 6 years you may have had your fill. But there are folks discovering things in their own time all over the place. And they can join an ongoing conversation, if they wish, from the phone already in their hand. That’s kinda neat.

I'm well aware of some of the conflicts that can and have happened in some of these spaces. They are not immune to the same shortcomings of other online cultures or communities. All the same: new spaces have been created, and long-running conversations find new participants.

And bear in mind: much of this is still ad-hoc, organic, and relatively small & young in comparison to the evangelical public that has been cultivated by white evangelicalism for over a century, and which #exvangelical and a constellation of other hashtags help counter.

There's still so much to do to challenge the systems and institutions of white evangelicalism. #exvangelical is just one part. As an identity, it may be temporary or liminal or partial. As a method of identifying & speaking to an audience, it's something else.

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@brchastain_#exvangelical is on track to hit 1B impressions next month. Wild. #deconstruction #fyp

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In a recent piece for Salon, Brooke Erin Duffy detailed how influencer culture has become part of many careers, including journalism, academia, medicine and finance, even as influencers are still often singled out for their social media “hustling.” The expectation that one be “eminently visible,” as Duffy puts it, regardless of profession, is particularly salient against a backdrop of labor precarity, the gig-ification of sectors like journalism and higher education, and an always-on work-from-home culture. Remote workers may perform competence by organizing their work from home spaces into stylish, color-coordinated and highly “professional” Zoom backgrounds. Yoga instructors must take images of daring poses amid dramatic backdrops to build and maintain their following hoping that this online will translate to yoga-class attendance, which has slowed as people continue to work from home. House painters, carpenters, and vacuum-repair people can use their social media to demonstrate their skillfulness and trustworthiness to risk-adverse potential clients, who are nervously shopping around as we teeter on the edge of a recession. 

Although the metrics being chased may look slightly different, what was once a matter of professionalization specifically for influencers is now becoming a part of professionalization in general. If the phrase “mission creep” describes how a campaign’s objectives gradually expand until they entail unanticipated and boundless commitment, we might likewise call the expansion of micro-celebrity practice “influencer creep,” both for how influencing creeps into more forms of work and for how it creeps further into the lives of workers. The mark of influencer creep is the on-edge feeling that you have not done enough for social media platforms: that you can be more on trend, more authentic, more responsive — always more. It lodges in the back of your mind: film more, post more, respond more, share more. And as with mission creep, there is no apparent way out.

I’ve felt this nagging feeling in lots of different ways over the past few years. Concern that I’m not posting enough. Not keeping pace. Choosing the wrong platforms.1

At the heart of it, for me at least, is this concern that our cultural attention is so short and our conversation so rapid that we lack object permanence. If your identity is affirmed by your performance of it for the public, a lot of things become reductive in short order:

1. If you’re not constantly publishing, do you exist to the public?

2. What happens when you stop publishing so frequently?

   1. Do you make less money? (Almost certainly, unless you are an established Star™)

   2. Do you lose future opportunities? (Probably. Because someone else stepped into your niche.)

3. What happens when your identity expands beyond your niche—especially if that niche provides for your livelihood?

It’s perilous and precarious, and it is precarious precisely because other forms of social supports and safety nets have been cut. So while the reward can be high, it is uncertain, and is not readily attainable or guaranteed.

As the article states, it’s all become expected as table stakes. But should it? Newness is a poor judge, and the lifespan of art and literature and other cultural artifacts is far longer and far more unpredictable than what does numbers on the day it’s released.

How have you experienced this in your own work or life? Are there ways to resist it? Let me know in the comments.

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As far as social networking sites that most people in my direct orbit don’t even use go, Twitter has played an outsized role in my life. In fact, it’s changed it many ways.

Now Twitter itself is changing ownership, having been successfully purchased by the world’s richest man. Now is as good a time as any to reflect on how this relatively small site (in comparison to social behemoths like Facebook, Instagram, and now TikTok) made my world bigger, brighter, and bleaker.

When I first signed up for Twitter (13 years ago this month), it was primarily to follow comic book artists and writers. Following the demise of Google Reader, I started using Twitter as an RSS replacement, following my favorite sites and writers directly.

As someone who’s oriented to perusing text over perusing images, I was drawn to Twitter even as it began to be rapidly eclipsed by Instagram and other platforms. It was a way to stay “ahead of” the US English-speaking news cycles that would drive conversation elsewhere—a trend that still by and large continues today. Most cable/network news coverage of the Trump administration was driven by whatever fresh horror Trump would announce to the world via tweet, and the news/commentary cycle is still driven by the engine of Twitter, fueled on outrage and hot takes.

Via Twitter, I was able to learn by listening, or following, voices I would not have otherwise found. This became especially true in 2014, following the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO and the protests that followed there. I could follow Black people and learn about their struggle against police violence and other forms of systemic racism in America.

My own use and experience of Twitter would change in 2016. That year, I started the Exvangelical podcast, and from that would eventually start using the hashtag #exvangelical. It was there, amid the random chaos of Twitter, that I met strangers who related to being estranged from their faith communities. One of the original admins of the Exvangelical facebook group was someone who had found me on Twitter. It was via Twitter that I connected with Chrissy Stroop, who rapidly built a following in the aftermath of the 2016 election because of her expertise in both white evangelicalism and Russian politics. She would later create a series of hashtags such as #EmptyThePews and #ExposeChristianSchools that would trend and call attention to various aspects of growing up and living in white evangelical culture. We have become friends and collaborated in various ways ever since.

It was via Twitter that I met Emily Joy Allison, who would start #ChurchToo and kick off a reckoning regarding abuse in church settings. It was via Twitter that I would meet a parade of people whom I would never have known otherwise—so many (if not most) of the people who have appeared on my shows have been people I have met on Twitter.

I highlight Chrissy & Emily in particular because their work is public and widespread—and because they both used the simple tool of a hashtag and shared their stories on Twitter, which by default is broadly public and prone to viral spread.

A key asset of Twitter has been that it gives counterpublics a fighting chance. Counterpublics are an idea presented in 2002 by Michael Warner in their book Publics and Counterpublics. It is also a useful framework to understand the role of contemporary social media, as stated in the introduction of #HashtagActivism:

“In this book we argue for the importance of the digital labor of raced and gendered counterpublics. Ordinary African Americans, women, transgender people, and others aligned with racial justice and feminist causes have long been excluded from elite media spaces yet have repurposed Twitter in particular to make identity-based cultural and political demands, and in doing so have forever changed national consciousness. From #BlackLivesMatter to #MeToo, hashtags have been the lingua franca of this phenomenon.”1

Within the context of my own work highlighting the personal stories of people who’ve left white evangelicalism & critiquing the systems and institutions that support evangelicalism, this feature of Twitter has been absolutely crucial. Without Twitter, these stories would not have received the attention of the broader media starting in 2017 (this is a small sample, limited to things that mention my work).

Corrina Laughlin mentions exvangelical podcasts explicitly in the context of counterpublics in her book Redeem All:

“Like the hashtag movements chronicled in chapter 4, these podcasts have the potential to connect and galvanize counterpublics by highlighting and amplifying voices that speak out against the evangelical power structure represented by Bible colleges, churches, and parachurch organizations and other sites of cultural power.”2

The vague fear that many people have is that the types of challenges to the powerful will be undermined in a Musk-owned Twitter, and it is not entirely unfounded.

I am not a rosy-eyed techno-optimist, though I have been that before. Twitter itself, for all that it has brought me, also disabused me of such optimism and taught me a much more pragmatic and realistic way to relate to social media overall.

Over time, as early #exvangelical culture and content was posted to Twitter, it inevitably got chaotic/dramatic/traumatic. Some things—like the initial commonality being rooted in shared/similar traumas—were specific to this population. Other forms of conflict are more general to any interest-based group: a burnout on the part of creators, a burnout among consumers/the audience about niche content after their own interest in the niche waned or their need for the content dissipated, conflicts between people, etc—and exvangelical spaces have not been excepted from this.3 (I speak in generalities here for two reasons: specific instances of online conflict or “drama” are very difficult to summarize because they require backstory and preamble and a retelling of things, and revisiting them is generally fruitless and potentially re-traumatizing.)

After my own round of “drama” that coincided simultaneously with another trauma in my personal life, I changed my relationship to Twitter and social media. I learned to recognize when my own emotions became entangled in the reactions of others. I learned to become even more articulate with my language as well as articulating the purpose of things like “community” and “following.” It’s an ongoing process, and the dynamism of social media and its role as both personal communications and broadcast platforms means that those relationships are constantly being re-evaluated. In particular, I have learned to view social media explicitly as a tool to express aspects of identity, and not as one that is the summation of identity—in this context you can be both exvangelical & atheist or exvangelical & straight or exvangelical & queer or exvangelical & other-modifier. Most terms you use—online or elsewhere—to describe yourself are not totalizing.

In keeping with Twitter’s outsized influence on bigger sites, the #exvangelical hashtag jumped from network to network. While #exvangelical started on Twitter, it later jumped to Instagram, where it has over 82,000 public uses as of this morning, and TikTok, where it has 765M views. Accounts have generated followings, groups have created communities, and all have contributed to an overall culture.

Following the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 insurrection, when Christian nationalist imagery was abundant in the footage of the rioters who invaded the Capitol Building, white evangelicals began working to undermine the counterpublics that had sprung up in recent years via the constellation of related hashtags like #exvangelical, #deconstruction, #decolonize, #ChurchToo, #LeaveLoud, #EmptyThePews, and #ExposeChristianSchools, among others. Sites like The Gospel Coalition began running stories decrying “deconstruction,” David Jeremiah said exvangelicals were the sign of the end times from the pulpit, and Christianity Today ran cover stories about deconstruction.

They seek to counter the counterpublics, which is understandable from their perspective. However, the imbalances that exist in the world beyond the glass rectangles where culture wars are waged are stark, and while they are not visible in the information environment, they are visible in other areas—particularly with regard to access to political and financial capital. Entrenched white evangelical interests drive GOP politics almost exclusively, for example, and they have ample attention in and access to mainstream “liberal” media as well as their own media ecosystems and complementary coverage in the conservative media sphere.

It’s within the context of those real-world power & capital imbalances that my uncertainties lie. Will a Musk-run Twitter allow such counterpublics to flourish? Twitter already has imbalances, such as “blue-check privilege” for verified users, the natural way those with established platforms or celebrity accumulate “clout” in any new media environment they enter, etc. My fear, which you may share, is that the counterpublics that have grown on Twitter will run afoul of Musk’s supposed “free-speech absolutism” in the process of calling him or others who wield great power into account. Judd Legum has already compiled a number of examples of this:

Popular Information

Musk is a "free speech absolutist" except when he's not

Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, bought Twitter yesterday for about $44 billion. "Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy," Musk said in a press release announcing the deal. "Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity ar…

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4 years ago · 155 likes · 24 comments · Judd Legum

As far as Twitter the Company goes, anyone who guesses on its future is taking a shot in the dark. As far as twitter the culture, the living thing and the lively conversation it has enabled—that is what I’m worried for. Living things change and evolve constantly, so we will see what this new evolution brings and whether it can remain host to the types of dialogue or good content that makes putting up with all its bad aspects.

Twitter has always been small in comparison to its peers, but I have loved and loathed it—just as any chronic twitter user does. It is rife with abuse and beset with all manner of chronic problems, but it was what we had and we made do with it. So even if its role in society changes, and it is eventually no longer host to “public conversation,” I remain grateful for its role in my life.

You would more than likely not be reading this, or know who I am, were it not for Twitter. I’m sure many others can say the same. Whether that’s enough to get us to stay through whatever comes next? That’s the question we’re all asking.

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Journey is a game where you eventually travel up a mountain. The multiplayer is “basic” by many standards: you can’t chat or text or even auto-reply to other players with canned responses. All you can do is stick together (which replenishes the energy you need to complete the game), and “speak” in non-verbal chirps. All of this is intentional.

But it was this passage that struck me:

The goal for Journey was to “innovate how it feels between people on the internet,” Chen said. “Can we invent the right environment, the right feedback, to bring out something that we’re more proud of? And to have an online game where people feel friendly and compassionate towards each other?” He elaborated further later in our conversation. “We want to see two people going through the journey together, [like when] in our life, we meet someone special, and we travel with them, and eventually, we might depart from each other.”

While it was a profound ideal, “the reality is: human beings, unfortunately, are giant babies in the virtual world,” Chen said. “No matter how old you are, even if you’re in your 70s, if we move you from Earth and into a virtual space, [that person] would become a giant baby. A baby doesn’t know what is a good moral value versus what is a bad moral value. The baby only knows: if I’m in a new environment, I’m going to try to push the buttons and see what kind of feedback I can get, and babies are great at looking for maximum feedback.”

This gets to the emotional center of how we are still adapting to such persistent use of the internet. Even though we may be cognitively aware that there’s another person on the other side of our screen, how we respond to them emotionally as we’re scrolling or surfing isn’t very complex.1

That a game designer, who is tasked with creating cohesive & immersive virtual environments, would hone in on this is unsurprising. Games, especially FPS games like Halo, foster behavior like teabagging n00bs after a kill. But we see immature, “juvenile” behavior on every platform and in every age demographic, whether it’s Boomers sounding off in facebook comments, or millennials/Gen Z in Instagram and TikTok beefs.

It’s interesting to think of people’s behavior in online spaces in this type of developmental context/metaphor. Although an older person has had plenty of in-person interactions in their life and may have a level of emotional maturity about them in those interactions, does that translate to online interactions and places? How do factors like neurodivergence and mismatched abilities to read tone/style across generations work?2

All of these, to me, are fascinating questions.

In the context of a game like Journey, it meant 1) limiting things like voice chat, and 2) enabling a game mechanic that encouraged players to become cooperative companions by re-charging one another’s energy when you came in close proximity to another player. Again, from the article:

The challenges of making those mechanics work affected Chen. “At the time, I was like, ‘Is humanity at its core just dark?’” he said. But a child psychologist helped Chen see things in terms of the way babies view feedback. “If you don’t want babies to do something terrible, give them zero feedback,” he recalled learning from her. “Don’t give them negative feedback because they will misinterpret that as positive feedback.”

That led to a change that would have a huge effect on the game: when you got close to someone, you’d recharge their energy. (In the final game, you use your energy to fly.) “And so that makes people feel like ‘Oh, I love to stay near someone because I don’t have to run to find the energy,’” he said. “So they end up sticking together, and they travel together, and they form a companionship. That was just one simple change. From assholes who want to kill each other and dancing around their corpse, creating hatred, to ‘hey, they’re all lovey-dovey, they’re helping each other, and they couldn’t leave each other.’”

I don’t know that this is applicable to other parts of the internet - in particular the “networked publics” of social media.3 But even if it helps to illuminate our own tendencies in how we interact online, that alone could be useful.

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The Post-Evangelical Post

📱Discourse Whiplash & Social Media

Last week, I published another RNS piece that I shared here, called “Evangelicals must stop consulting themselves for guidance.” In that vein, I was trying (as I have before) to contextualize the current push from elite evangelicals to obscure just how deeply troubling the current state of evangelicalism is - and how they have rejected people who tried …

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4 years ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Blake Chastain

Here’s some of what I’m reading (disclosure: these are affiliate bookshop.org links):

All The White Friends I Couldn’t Keep by Andre Henry

Body Becoming: A Path to Our Liberation by Robyn Henderson-Espinoza

Digital Communion: Marshall McLuhan’s Spiritual Vision for a Virtual Age by Nick Ripatrazone

Here are two stories that I’ve come across that are worth sharing.

First, on the global scale, the Wired article “TikTok Was Designed for War” goes into detail about how both vital information as well as misleading disinformation thrive on TikTok and how - again - a social media company has created tools it cannot control or moderate.

From the conclusion:

Social media has long struggled with scale. But just as TikTok’s popularity has soared, collapsing the time taken to reach a billion users from eight years (in the case of Instagram) to four years, while also accelerating the speed at which video clips can go viral, so it has also found itself running into the same old problems.

When TikTok has worked correctly, it has helped the world understand the horrors going on in Ukraine. But when the app’s systems have been gamed by bad actors, it has tainted the world’s understanding of the war and sowed confusion far beyond the normal fog of war. Part of that, says Flores-Saviaga, could be a result of TikTok’s inability to process the scale of information it has created. She points out that on a platform where millions of videos are posted each day, an algorithm and content moderation system with 99 percent reliability would still let vast numbers of videos slip through the net. Fixing it is a million-dollar question, says Flores-Saviaga. “There needs to be a balance,” she says. “And this type of balance is why a lot of disinformation is slipping through the radar.”

Second, this article from Anthea Butler highlights the way elite, politically-connected white evangelicals have held Putin in high regard in the last decade - viewing him as an exemplar of conservative Christian values.

From the article:

Evangelicals are a long way from how they historically thought about Russia and communism. Back in the 1950s, white evangelical leaders like Billy Graham preached against the evils of communism and called then-Soviet states “godless” and a threat to Christianity and America.

Fast-forward to the 21st century, and today’s evangelical leaders, as well as Republicans, have embraced Russia — and, more specifically, Putin. In 2014, Putin made the cover of the evangelical magazine Decision in a piece in which Graham's son Franklin lauded his handling of the Winter Olympics and his protection of Christians. Franklin visited Russia in 2015, and ever since, has promoted Putin as a godly leader. A few days before the invasion of Ukraine, he asked people to “pray for Putin” but not for Ukrainians, creating a decent amount of backlash.

Both of these articles highlight how difficult it can be to maintain a sense of history when we are in a constant state of reaction.

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Last week, I published another RNS piece that I shared here, called “Evangelicals must stop consulting themselves for guidance.” In that vein, I was trying (as I have before) to contextualize the current push from elite evangelicals to obscure just how deeply troubling the current state of evangelicalism is - and how they have rejected people who tried to reform their movement from within many times before.

At the same time, it’s been difficult to situate the current State of Discourse surrounding “deconstruction,” the current catch-all evangelical bogeyman. The Gospel Coalition has published an article saying it shouldn’t “be redeemed.” Christianity Today’s current cover story addresses the subject (albeit without talking to anyone; it is an opinion piece). Skillet’s singer wants to “wage war” on it.

There’s also an endless conversation happening about whether “exvangelical” is a useful term to describe where one is personally. And all of these various things jumble into one single timeline, talking about very different things—or at the very least, the same thing but with very different lenses.

It’s a lot to take in, and I don’t always process it well. I feel my anxiety tighten my chest, I feel my codependent tendencies kick in, I feel the tension build in my shoulders. I feel my CNS become enmeshed in the words and feelings of others. And it’s then that I come back to the passage I quoted and sketched out above.

Because while I intellectually know my own intentions and can accept responsibility for my own role in harm & being harmed (I am reading adrienne marie brown’s We Will Not Cancel Us right now, which is where I learned this language and framing)…

…and while I know that #exvangelical as a hashtag has an SEO use…

…and “exvangelical” is valuable in creating what Corinna Laughlin calls “counter-publics” to “combat” evangelical rhetoric (to use General John Skillet’s metaphor)…

…and I believe “exvangelical” as an identity has limits…

…and I think we need to get better at delineating between cultures, followings, and communities-all of which have different purposes…

…that’s impossible to get across in any single tweet or interaction. It’s simply too much to take in simultaneously, mentally or emotionally. Especially at the speed of twitter.

Reading through some of my weekend posts, I can see how this played out within my own posts to twitter. First I was responding to elite evangelicals:

Later, I was trying to respond to evangelical characterizations of “deconstruction:”

Then I was trying to frame why, if this is supposedly a “war,” then it is incredibly asymmetrical:

Then I stumbled across a twitter conversation about folks who were formerly evangelical but don’t relate to or use “exvangelical,” and went deep into my feels:

Then I struggled with how difficult it is to talk about something as massive as the impact of evangelicalism:

Then I realized I should recognize when to log off. And that’s ok.

Then I made the sketch above.

These are the sorts of things I am processing as I continue to work on my book and participte in what danah boyd calls “networked publics.” But part of doing so, especially in a point in time where many of us are locally lonely, involves knowing when to step away from these networked publics.

It’s something I’m still learning, at least partially, in public—as these tweets demonstrate.

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How do you manage your emotions, expectations, and interactions? Let me know in the Discord or in the comments.

I don’t know how Marshall McLuhan did it, but he described what it was like to be Extremely Online™ in 1967.

In a series of pages from his book The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (co-written & designed by Quentin Fiore), McLuhan describes how the transition from a primarily literate society (ushered in by the printing press) to what we’d now call a “digital first” society has effected various spheres of life:

• you

• your family

• your neighborhood

• your education

• your job

• your government

• “the others”

His comments about each sphere are prescient. For instance, under “you,” he writes:

“The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions—the patterns of mechanistic technologies—are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank—that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early “mistakes.”

If that doesn’t describe the experience of “cancel culture,” well.

But in the past decade, as social platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok have become fully engrained in our social fabric, I am particularly blown away by his description of “the others:”

“The shock of recognition! In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained—ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.”

As I read this passage from the 1960s, another period of increased social awareness about inequality and injustice here in the United States, I see echoes of our own contemporary experience since around 2014, when the events surrounding the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO and all the events that have transpired since then.

The 1960s Civil Rights movement utilized TV and radio, the new & established media of their time, to show white America aspects of society they would rather ignore. Similarly, social media has made it possible for even more people to speak about their experiences using tools like Twitter & TikTok to shine lights on stories that would have been overlooked.

But those words—“too many people know too much about each other”—they ring true today. If anything, they are more poignant now, in an era where sharing has become a default mode for many people, and even those who do not share or post participate in the consumption of the stories people post online. We absorb one another’s emotions, relentlessly compare ourselves to others, and have to constantly check in with ourselves in order to know if it’s healthy for us to use these services because we’ve developed codependent relationships with people we don’t even know or don’t even know we have imputed this burden onto them.

And the next line: “Our new environment compels commitment and participation.” In that, I see the impulse for us to act as our own PR reps, to constantly “update our followers” on what they can expect regarding changes to our content calendars—and somehow, this expectation feels universal, regardless if it is our full-time job, regardless of whether or not there’s a lingering pandemic and a subtle background dread tinted with economic precarity & climate apocalypse.

All of this leads to another insight from The Medium is the Massage:

All media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical. The wheel is an extension of the foot; the book is an extension of the eye; clothing, an extension of the skin; electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.

I feel the truth of this more than I comprehend it. When I read these words, I understand why people and events that are so far away can feel so close, so intimate, so immanent.

And I wonder if the product designers and coders and business leaders who form these tools that have become so central to our lives—especially as we enter YEAR THREE of a global pandemic that forces us to rely on them more and more—recognize the responsibility they have assumed. Recent reports & statements indicate they do not.

These are not simple issues or questions. Cultivating a sense of what the philosopher of technology Shannon Vallor calls “technomoral virtue ethics” is a social imperative. This thread will be woven into my own book, and into my own writing here.

If all the “metaverse” hype is to come to pass in the next few years, we stand on the precipice of another computing paradigm shift even though we have seemingly failed to learn from the hard lessons of the current one. Yet I take solace in another McLuhanism: there is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.

“Progress,” that vague term that benefits the incumbent, is inevitable. What that progress looks like is not. I endeavor to contemplate how tools can make us more human, more just, and more equal & secure.

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Thanks for reading. If you’re interested in McLuhan’s ideas, one entry point to them is this absolutely wild album that he helped create in conjunction with his book. The fact that this is edited the way it is and was created in 1967 is a technical & artistic feat. It’s embedded below.