Day: May 6, 2024

Jack Dorsey has left the board of social networking service Bluesky, which he helped fund and popularize a year ago in the wake of regret over the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk.

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The Twitter co-founder took to the Musk-owned platform, now rebranded X, to tout his new philanthropic grants to open internet protocols, which he described as “freedom technology.” He also added X to that class of tech, elaborating only to say that corporations can build upon open protocols too.

Dorsey whittled down the list of people he follows on X to just three: Musk, Edward Snowden and Stella Assange, wife of the imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher. It suggested an apparent warming of relations between X’s owner and Dorsey, who had posted on Bluesky a year ago that “it all went south” after Musk’s takeover and radical transformation of Twitter.

Bluesky is a network and protocol launched to pursue Dorsey’s platonic ideal for Twitter as a service without central control, and it opened to all interested users in February. The social service made a splash in its early days as a way to escape the upheaval at Twitter after Musk’s acquisition, though it has since been overshadowed by the launch of Meta Platforms Inc.’s Threads as the most viable alternative. Dorsey responded to a question on X as to whether he was still on the Bluesky board with a “no.”

The two countries have been been at odds over the centuries. But could there a better symbol of our link than this engineering coup?

The first passenger train from England to France carried Queen Elizabeth II to Calais on 6 May 1994. Trains carrying less exalted passengers would not set off until November of that year, and the more arresting image of English and French engineers shaking hands beneath the sea had come four years earlier. Officially, though, today is the day: the Channel tunnel is 30. It is almost too old to be going to nightclubs, and is starting to worry about its back.

Its existence remains, by any sensible standard, astonishing: a physical link between Europe and its largest island, the first since the drowning of Doggerland around 6500BCE. It wasn’t just an engineering achievement, either, but a political one, the realisation of an idea discussed for nearly two centuries, and the moment that Britain would stop pissing about and accept it was a part of Europe. This feels, nearly eight years after the Brexit vote, both a lot funnier and a lot sadder than it did at the time.

Jonn Elledge’s new book is A History of the World in 47 Borders

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