Some Wackadoodle History along with a personal update...
August 19, 1991; December 3, 2024, and Nothing But BlueSky from now on...
A Day to Remember
August 19, 1991
On August 19th 1991, the Soviet people woke to news of an attempt to overthrow President Mikhail Gorbachev, the architect of "glasnost" and "perestroika". The coup, led by the so-called "Gang of Eight", brought Red Army tanks onto the streets of Moscow. Russian leader Boris Yeltsin led attempts to rebuff the coup plotters, and would go on to become the dominant force in Moscow as the Soviet Union crumbled and a restored Gorbachev lost his grip on power.
Here you can watch Emmy-nominated coverage from Moscow on Day One of the coup for "World Monitor” the nightly newscast then produced for The Discovery Channel by The Christian Science Monitor newspaper.
While watching, please notice how the people of Russia help stop the coup through their acts of resistance. With official news outlets taken over by the coup leaders, information about the coup was spread through leaflets, and people organized using something new at the time—the Internet and email.
I still remember how newspapers here in America published excerpts of those email posts. Post full of information, calls for gathering and protesting, people begging that email only be used to pass on useful information so as not to crash the then young system. It was inspiring to watch and read about.
Slate Magazine has an excellent article entitled An Act of Courage on the Soviet Internet, detailing how users and programmers jumped into action to stop the coup.
Now we jump forward in time to
December 3, 2024
On December 3, 2024, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol declared martial law, sparking political uncertainty and backlash from lawmakers. The move was made in an apparent self-coup, reflecting the president's plummeting popularity and mounting pressure from South Korean elites.
As in the Soviet Union fourteen years earlier, it was the people’s reaction to the attempted coup which saved the day, eventually leading to the the President’s impeachment and a warrant being issued for his arrest. As of this posting, the arrest warrant has been suspended.
Substack contributor Heather Cox Richardson wrote a wonderful exposé on the day. You can read her story below.
While read her story, I was taken once again by how the Korean people reacted to the attempted coup. How they reach out through the Internet to spread accurate information and organize massive protests within just a few hours. In this case, they predominately used an Internet Social Media Application called BlueSky. As Ms. Richardson put it in her article:
The events in Seoul also cemented the shift in social media from X to Bluesky, where news was breaking faster than anywhere else, in a way that echoed what Twitter used to be. Since Twitter was a key site of democratic organizing until Elon Musk bought it and renamed it X, that shift is significant…
And
…Journalist Sarah Jeong found herself entirely unexpectedly in the middle of a coup and, recognizing that she was in a historic moment, snapped to work to do all she could to keep the rest of us informed. “I’m f*cking blasted and hanging out in the weirdest scene because history happened at a deeply inconvenient hour,” she wrote on Bluesky. “[S]o it goes.”
And finally my news…
Discovering how much impact BlueSky had in foiling the coup of course got me interested in learning more about BlueSky.
Turns out that Bluesky is a microblogging social media service, similar to Twitter (now X), where users can share short text messages, images, and videos in short posts. It is owned by Bluesky Social PBC, a benefit corporation based in the United States.
For those of you who don’t know what a benefit corporation is, benefit corporations are a type of for-profit corporate entity whose goals include making a positive impact on society. Benefit corporations explicitly specify to their investors that profit is not their only goal.
Although Bluesky was initially the brainchild of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, in 2022 Bluesky register itself as an independent company. It’s new CEO Jay Graber cited Twitter's "very entrenched existing incentives" as a reason to operate independently.
I also found a pretty interested article about what makes BlueSky different, the main differences being that it is a decentralized, privacy-minded network, which is not run by an all powerful algorithm, plus uses open source coding and user created feeds.
Bottom line, I never was much of a Twitter user. I mean, can you imagine ME saying anything in less than 300 characters? Ha!
But I have joined BlueSky, and I invite you to follow me there.
Lynn Marie Sager (@lynnmariesager.bsky.social) — Bluesky
And now for something completely different: