An ode to blocking

This is another invitation to join Bluesky and avoid those intrusive thoughts coming from outside of our brain

My brain keeps messing with me.

What am I supposed to do with the thought, “If Taylor Swift had done for Kamala Harris what Elon Musk did for Donald Trump, we could have won the Blue Wall”?

What does it change? What does it mean? Why is my brain choosing this thought to help me avoid and dismiss the emotions I should be defragging? Why am I again imagining her doing ten free concerts around the Great Lakes in ten days to turn out the vote? Why do I continually return to the nonsensical conclusion, “Well, she wouldn’t do that because she doesn’t have a trans kid she hates”?

And why am I putting this useless tripe in your head? Blame intrusive thoughts.

“Intrusive thoughts refer to repeatedly occurring, unwanted, and difficult to control thoughts that are generally accompanied by subjective discomfort (Rachman, 1981),” David Maillet and Daniel L. Schacter explained in Neuropsychologia.

Now, what if you could press a button and block a thought from ever recurring? And what if you could press another few buttons and significantly reduce the chance of similar thoughts popping up? Would you do it?

Or would you say, “That mewling nonsense must be essential to my life. I must learn to tolerate, debate, and empathize with it!”

I hope you won’t. If you would, Bluesky isn’t for you. Stick to Elon’s Twitter, where you can hear the “one joke” the right makes about trans people on repeat, with various misspellings for eternity. It’s what Beckett or Ionesco would want for you.

But for everyone else, there is Bluesky, where the block isn’t just a block. It’s a nuclear block that erases that person from your feed, your mentions, and—eventually—your brain. And it does so as Elon makes the block on Twitter even more useless as he ramps up his Nazi-Making Machine to enjoy his side throne in the MAGA court.

We are in the season where we are told to do what the right never does: graciously accept defeat.

We have every right to say: Fuck that noise. Or better yet, we can avoid that noise as much as possible.

We are about to enter another four years, at least, where it will be impossible not to know what the right is thinking because Donald Trump tells them to think it. If the right comes up with a clever way to talk about strangers’ junk or how rich white men have been put down for too long by your email signature, you’ll hear about it. Believe me.

If you care about democracy and surviving what’s next, and you’re online enough to be reading this, I advise you to come to Bluesky. It’s not just better than Twitter is now. It’s better than Twitter ever was. That could change fast, but I don’t think it will because of the culture of blocking. You can and will be blocked for any reason. I mostly block people who don’t follow me and who decide to annoy me in my replies. But I also block lots and lots of people I’ll never even know I block.

Ok, let me explain how to save your brain on Bluesky.

1. Try my Twitter replacement Starter Pack; you’ll have a whole feed to follow with a single clickity-click.

   

2. Probably unfollow this News Feed that I include in that Pack.

   

   On Bluesky, you might see something strange happen; your feed may be empty, especially if you wake after everyone on the West Coast of the US goes to bed and before the East Coast wakes. This News Feed scrapes the genuine news of Twitter and gives it to you in various languages. I like it; this feed feeds my urge to make sure I don’t miss anything, which is probably a sinister urge. Your feed will never be empty, but this News Feed is a firehose and may be too much for you.

3. Block proactively with these block lists
   What makes Bluesky great is its great tools and the great people who use them. This makes excellent moderation possible. I have to praise Bluesky user Comfortably Numb—who invited me to the app in the invite phase—like I should. Numb creates and curates these excellent block lists.

   

   To use them, go to Numb’s profile, click on Lists, select one, click “Subscribe,” and select Mute or Block. You can guess which I choose.

   

And there are plenty of great people with great block lists. Like these from skywatch.blue.

Banish more fascists with Lists from ‪@cheesecakechik.bsky.social‬‬. And you can avoid a bunch of content spammers and content thieves with the Air Pollution List from ‪@danielhuckmann.com‬.

And if you’re in this deep, here are even more tips to help you enjoy the bluer skies I found via @bigesqbae.bsky.social that was created by @joabaldwin.com:

That’s enough to get started. Now post. Follow Steve Martin’s simple one-step plan for success: Be great.

Or just be there, be with people you like, admire, or kinda like or admire, and have a conversation. And if anyone annoys you, block them.

We live as we dream—in our brains. Keeping our own intrusive thoughts out is hard enough. We don’t need anyone else’s.