More Twitter Skepticism

I’m following the lead of Garrick van Buren and making today a non-Twitter day. Instead I will go back to the mode I used to be in where I made a mix of long blog posts and some short ones. Twitter has definitely eaten the short posts out of my blogging queue.

I forgot to mention it yesterday but another big factor in my turning from Twitter has been this “Color War” nonsense. When I first heard about it, I asked on Twitter “Is this yet another Ze Frank exercise in antagonistic pointlessness for the bored?” and it turns out it is. Apparently it has its origins in some summer camp thing I’ve never heard of. All I know is that getting swatches of the Twittersphere to band into arbitrary groups and start opposing each other has less than zero interest to me.

On top of that, to begin a project called “Color War” just strikes me as distasteful, especially when we’re about to have our first black presidential nominee. There are really only two possibilities here. Either Ze was oblivous to the racial connotations of this name or he knew but didn’t care. Neither option is flattering. As it happens, I once met a man who was a complete cracker white supremacist. He was stockpiling guns in the wake of the Rodney King riots because he was convinced there would be a black uprising and when it happened he wanted to be prepared. I dare say if you’ve heard all this spoken to you in all sincerity by someone with a basement full of AK-47s who is gearing up to potentially kill people of color in large scale, for the rest of your life you will never find the term “Color War” to be that damn funny . To the extent this stupidness waxes on Twitter, my interest wanes.

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Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.

2 thoughts on “More Twitter Skepticism”

  1. Hi Dave,

    I think you’re being just a little curmudgeonly here.

    The connotation for me – and likely the vast majority of the people on Twitter participating in the color war thing – really is just the summer camp thing. That was absolutely without a doubt the first thing that popped into my head when I saw the teams – even before I knew it was actually being called color war. I don’t think anyone gave it a second thought – or needed to give it a second thought. The most popular entry on wikipedia for the term “color war” references the summer camp origin.

    I think your experience with that white supremacist skewed your view, but to be honest, I, myself have never heard the term used in that way. To take Ze to task for something meant as a fun diversion is really kind of silly.

    And that’s just it – one man’s “exercise in antagonistic pointlessness for the bored?” is another man’s fun. It’s silly, goofy, fun, and not meant as anything more. Do we all have to be so serious all the time? And if you don’t like it, just ignore it, and let everyone else have their game. And hey – Twitter is a “social media” platform – so we’re all just “being social” in a fun way.

    Come on now Dave. Aren’t there more serious things to bitch about? Like Bush II?

    –*Rob

  2. Rob, I think this is the same thing as Bush. For 7 years his focus has been to divide us in to “us” and “not-us” and convince us that it is worthwhile to bankrupt our nation to fight the “not-us.” Twitter is intrinsically all “us” until you go out of your way to artificially create sets of “not-us.”

    And if “Color War” as a term doesn’t make you sick to your stomach then that suggests you are sheltered from the amount of racism that still exists in this nation and the seriousness with which some people still pursue it.

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