The magic connections that can change your trajectory (in a splintered world)

One of the joys of word-based social media is that you get to meet interesting people you wouldn’t meet otherwise. Experts and scientists, deeply knowledgeable commentators, or just all-around interesting professionals who live elsewhere or work in industries you’d have no connection to.

The information provided by *actual experts* is important, but perhaps even more important are the connections you make that have the potential to widen your horizons.

And so it happened this week when I suddenly found myself in conversation on Bluesky with one of the most successful female authors of the day, a writer whose work I greatly enjoy, whose NYT bestseller books have been adapted into star-studded and highly successful TV shows. She’s been kind and generous with her advice and encouragement on my fiction manuscripts and how to get them finished and published. It all started with a simple interaction.

The conversation came about because of Elon Musk, to some extent.

According to the Financial Times, every day since the election an average of 60,000 people deleted their accounts on X (Twitter). Many of these people are scientists, writers, and professionals who have used Twitter for serious discussions with fellow professionals. They are joined in the exodus by big names such as The Guardian and Balenciaga. The Guardian issued an editorial stating

“X is a toxic media platform and its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse”.

What a shocker. (Not really. There’s been plenty of research about this over the past two years.)

Sit tight. I’ll get to it in a minute why any of this matters for business leaders who are not “extremely online”.

But where does the non-ideological professional in search of their information-fix and interesting communication with strangers go?

Everything is political at the moment, which, frankly, I find both tedious and important. As if it’s not just the world at large splintering along values, but Western democracies themselves are too. Or maybe it’s just that American society, politics and tech giants have such an outsized and unavoidable impact on the world we live in. And the splintering over there is hard to ignore.

I’d been an early user of LinkedIn, but since it has become “business Facebook” it is so hard to avoid swimming in cringe posts and people congratulating those they otherwise never speak to through an endless loop of job changes that I prefer not to open it unless I must. And it sends the most ridiculous notifications. Although, now it has games so you can pretend to be doing serious networking on Linkedin while playing Tango puzzle. Yay?

Hang on, I’ll get to Bluesky too shortly.

I stopped using Twitter, a major source of news and information back when, about a year ago. It was already clear then that since Musk acquired it in 2022 Twitter/X had become a hate-filled dump due to the tweaks to the algorithm and the wholesale firing of the content moderation team. It was not a toxic conspiracist echo chamber then but it was undeniably becoming unpleasant to use for someone who values civilised discourse and abhors name-calling. Many big UK accounts exited this summer when Musk posted conspiracy theories about the UK and up-ranked posts that did so similarly. But enough big accounts kept making excuses for why they wanted to stay even though they were swimming in filth.

Well, whatever they said, the real issue was