Greetings from Melbourne, Australia. The weather is warm, the birdsong is different,¹ cars drive on the left-hand side of the road, and there are trams. Glorious trams.

Public transit turns out to be rather remarkable here, coming from Chicago. Swipes on and off basically work on the honor system, as far as I can tell. There are no turnstiles. There’s a free zone, where no fare is required. Supposedly you can get fined substantially if you’re caught failing to tap on or off a tram appropriately with your fare card, but I’ve yet to see it happen. And there are certainly no armed officers prowling the platforms, threatening to take a life over a missed swipe.

It’s a strange time to be abroad. My plane from LAX took off just as the TikTok ban went into effect, and by the time we landed in Auckland, New Zealand, for our layover, about 14 hours later, it had already been lifted. The messages kicking off the ban and reinstating the app were both obvious, farcical displays of fealty to the incoming president.

A few hours after that, we landed in Melbourne, checked into our digs, went to dinner, and then I dragged my jet-lagged ass to bed. When I awoke the next morning, Trump had already been sworn in, with TikTok’s Shou Chew and other social media CEOs (Musk, Zuckerberg, etc.) all making prominent inauguration appearances of one variety or another.

Even setting their leaders’ craven, obsequious behavior aside, I have a longer piece in me on why I’ve soured pretty much entirely on algorithmic social platforms and why I think we should all start to avoid them, but for now I’ll just say I’m off the big apps. They’re built to keep a user’s attention divided, and as the new administration pushes forward with another round of “flooding the zone with shit,” what we choose to focus our mental energy² on is only going to get more important.

I’d stopped using Twitter a while ago, I deleted Instagram from my phone a couple of weeks ago after posting a Story committing myself to doing so, and having already left a goodbye video on TikTok just days ahead of the ban, I went ahead and deleted that, too.

What remains on my phone are the federated, decentralized platforms: Bluesky, Mastodon, and ActivityPub’s new photo app, Pixelfed. There, user control is more granular, the attempts to manipulate and direct me far fewer and far less powerful. Plus, I’m having a lot of fun on vacation posting to a photo app where the focus is back on the photos!

I’ll try to find more time to write about all of it once I’m back in the States, but for now I’ve got more trams to catch.

Footnotes

1. The common myna is as ubiquitous here as the American robin is back home, and you can hear its call all throughout the city. ↩

2. And physical energy, come to that. ↩