Backed into a corner

🌟 Editor's Note

Thank you so much everyone who came out to my book talk last week at People’s Book! We had a lovely discussion, and I personally only purchased one more book than I technically should have. Wins all around!

The latest news is that there is a TikTok deal, that it will be sold off to Americans who will, somehow, have um….other Americans’ best interests in mind on the app. Wait, never mind. They will not have anyone’s best interests in mind but their own. Perhaps they will…they won’t…ok what they won’t be is a Chinese company and that is apparently what matters.

There are already worries that once there’s a takeover of the app by people who are tamely nodding along to everything the current administration does, TikTok will quickly become filled with far-right content creators and bots. You know, X, but for video.

And so i’m already seeing, just as I saw when the original TikTok shutdown loomed, people saying “I’m also on ThisOtherApp.” Again, it’s X but for video, the same type of posts I saw, and posted, before I left X for good in 2023.

I create on TikTok. Quite a bit. I’ve had some modest success there with a series called Insomniac Anatomy Academy. I have been reading an anatomy textbook when I can’t sleep because I’m a dork, and started making videos about the cool facts I learned. The account arose out of the same instinct that has driven every professional social media account I’ve ever had: I love learning cool things about science, and I am utterly thrilled to share it with other people.

The series gets a thousand or so views per video, which isn’t nothing, but is far from the millions and even billions that others get. I’ve amassed about 43,000 followers on there. It’s a small audience, but some of them are learning about their own bodies for the first time, and they’re just as fascinated as I hoped they would be. They ask questions, make jokes. Sometimes I beg them to go to the doctor. I also post the videos to Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook.

Should this TikTok deal go through, and the app become a sad sackscape like X has…I’d probably end up leaving.

Again. Like I, like we all, have had to leave every app before, every site before, every where before. But where, then, would I go?

There was a time, so far back it feels like a myth. When I would write something, post it to a blog (Wordpress somehow had the vibe of being most “professional” at the time, apparently because people who were more professional than me used it), share it on Facebook and Twitter, and something akin to magic happened. People would find the post, find me. They would follow me and we would talk together. I would network with other writers, comment on other people’s posts.

Over time, I amassed more than 60,000 followers on Twitter, just writing about science, life in science, etc. We often had fun conversations! I made friends and made a whole career.

But some of them were probably bots. Lord knows almost none of them bought my book. I posted elsewhere, of course, I had a page on Facebook. I have a LinkedIn, for all the good it does me. But none of them held a candle to the time and followers I spend and had on Twitter.

Then Twitter turned to X, and became an attention machine for Musk. People began to leave out of principle, often for Bluesky (where I am now) or Mastodon (where I also am). The most famous of the people who left didn’t seem to lose much. People followed their accounts wherever they went, subscribed to their newsletters, listened to their podcasts.

But for me, leaving Twitter meant leaving about 2/3 of my “audience” behind. I’ve never had the same success on Bluesky. Perhaps Twitter overinflated me somehow, made me seem more interesting than I really am. Perhaps it was all bots. Who knows.

Something very similar occurred with Substack. I moved my newsletter to Substack in an effort to network with more writers, get more people to take a look. Previously, I’d had about 600 readers for my newsletter.

Substack began to work, a little. I ran up to about 1000 followers in about a year. But then, it became clear that Substack was offering monetary incentives to far-right creatives, and paid no attention to the many polite, and less polite, requests that they not reward people who were actual Nazis.

I felt it was necessary to leave out of principle. I did. I came here. I’ve lost about 100 subscribers and counting. A few more leave every day. Nothing has changed about what I post. I’m still writing about coyotes and elephants and wilderness. Of course we’ve all got too many newsletters and too many people to follow. Maybe it’s that. Maybe the numbers were always inflated.

Will I leave Tiktok too? If so, then what? I post to Instagram, where I have less than half the following. I have fewer followers on Facebook than I do for this newsletter, even though I’ve been posting there for more than a decade. Even if I didn’t…loads of people tell me they won’t use Instagram or Facebook anymore either, out of principle. I post to YouTube, but I had to shut down comments after…well people aren’t very nice on Youtube.

Every social media bargain is a Faustian one. I can educate people where I find them…but the places where I find people are cesspools. The places where I find people are owned by people who think that my loved ones shouldn’t exist, and are trying to tear down everything I love.

I have begun to feel like a rat in a maze. I go somewhere and there is a huge pile of cheese. Success! Then, oh no, the cheese has become poisoned, I have to go! Another, smaller pile of cheese awaits elsewhere, if only I can find my way to it. I finally do, and yay, I love cheese! Oh, wait…this cheese is also poisoned. That cheese over there is a trap. That other cheese will poison all your friends.

And so I flee, place to place, with the tattered shreds of my following. Fewer and fewer every time. A rat backed in a corner.

And I wonder: Where is the place that isn’t Problematic? Is there one? Is there a place where people can post, and chat, and network, and succeed? I am beginning to think it’s a pipe dream, any one of those places is that glorious dream only so long as it is not subject to the whims of venture capital. When it is, inevitably, vultures descend. The deals are made, the content is monetized.

And we, the rats, scuttle away, ever smaller. We have our principle. But we no longer have a place.

Where have I been?

• I got to write about the latest breakthrough in Huntington’s disease. It’s very early days, a very small sample. But scientists and patients are filled with joy and hope.

• I also have a feature on the Nobel Prizes! What do they have to do with dynamite, and actually reading your own obituary? Quite a bit.

• And I got to write a piece for Templeton Ideas about transferable elements, jumping genes that may, or may not, act like prey, fleeing across the savannah of the genome.

• I also got to write a big feature asking: What IS lithium doing in the brain? Scientists think it might help prevent Alzheimer’s…but why?

Where have you been?

• "you have digits because a bit of the genetics that help you form your butt was used to activate the right genes where they're needed" Thank your butt for your fingers. I guess.

• Wake up babe an adorable new dome-headed dinosaur just dropped.

• Some people think ChatGPT has a place writing things like news briefs, stuff written to a specific style and tone and, y'know, kinda boring. So Science did a study. ChatGPT failed. Why? It got stuff wrong. "Also, extensive editing for hyperbole was needed."

• It’s fall and time for important groundhog facts. Because never fails people are surprised to see them!

• Here’s everything you need to know about Tylenol and autism risk. The link is small, it is flimsy. Autism is primarily genetic. And Tylenol is the only over the counter painkiller approved for women after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

• My lovely friend Misty offers the pep talk you need today. “This is a reminder to move in the world like you have a right to be here. Because you do.”