“Hey everyone. I’ve decided the toxicity of this hellsite has gotten too much since Musk got his mitts on it. I’ll be joining ‘Threads’ and shortly resuming all of the usual compulsive behaviours that I had with Twitter which I am now, for some reason, falsely remembering in its pre-Musk era as a chaotic but ultimately utopian marketplace of ideas.“
I’ve seen a lot of posts on X/Twitter over the last year to this effect. Most of them are by people I’m at least vaguely positively inclined towards. The replies to these posts seem to be divided equally in sentiment. On one hand, friends and generally like-minded people empathise, ponder whether to follow suit and thank the person for the years of hearty companionship (and I’m not denying there are some lovely people and interesting posts on there). Simultaneously to this, political opponents and anonymous accounts shovel a final scoop of mockery and abuse onto those they perceive as their vanquished foes.
Not expecting much of the former and assuming there’d be at least some of the latter, I didn’t tweet about leaving the site to my handful of followers today as, reeling from the US election result, I went into self-imposed “X-ile.”
I locked my account, changed my password to a series of mashed keystrokes (saved now on an old phone in a filing cabinet) and installed a site blocker to make sure I didn’t end up back on the site through any links sent by friends or whoever.
When I think about why I left (the same reasons as everyone else, pretty much), I suppose I should also consider why I joined… and why I stayed.
From what I can tell from the sign-up email in my inbox, I joined on a (presumably) cold November evening (8.05pm on 21/11/11, to be precise). It was on a friend’s recommendation. My intention was to network and connect with musicians, filmmakers, orchestras, composers and so on. I don’t think I really understood what its pull was otherwise and was quite bemused by Follow Fridays, hashtag challenges and the like. It just wasn’t my thing, but I wasn’t compelled by it so didn’t feel the need to delete it. It felt vaguely worthwhile to be there, just in case someone contacted or discovered me.
So yes: there was no harm in staying, for the time being. Not for me, at least. By that time I had at least one friend who used Twitter compulsively – innocuous in a sociopolitical sense, but certainly distracting from any coherent conversation between us at the pub.
I can’t remember when I shifted to being a much more proactive reader of Twitter content but, as with most online platforms, I was only aware that it had happened after the fact – and aware that it brought very little joy or value to my life. By 2016 I was browsing Twitter every day and saw the twin upheavals of that year largely via the journalists and activists I followed on there. I was hyper-informed in a hyper-selective way and felt connected to a vague international community of people with similar(ish) values. But seeing things pan out minute-by-minute doesn’t give one any greater power to prevent them from happening. Watching things unravelling alongside your ideological comrades doesn’t do anything to stop them, however many of you there are who feel the same dismay. Heartwarming moments of companionship and solidarity within the tribe are themselves marred by cortisol-inducing abuse and mockery in the infamous ‘Hidden Replies’ segment below any tweet with traction.
The news being delivered from everywhere at all times doesn’t make it easier to digest. It just makes it more likely to distract you from your own life and real world friends, family and community, as well as any more fulfilling endeavours- reading a book, conversing, campaigning or demonstrating, playing football, listening mindfully to an album, learning to paint.
Sure, there’ve been a couple of nice collective moments. Seeing Trump defeated in 2020 at the end of a grim, solitary pandemic year was accompanied on Twitter by giddy humour, moving anecdotes and adrenaline-inducing swing state analysis.
But, to paraphrase the late Daniel Kahneman, our experience of these uncertain things is often retroactively coloured by the outcome. A Schrödinger’s memory, if you will. I’m sure that, if things had gone differently that time, I’d remember any Twitter-based scrolling as just part of the unpleasantness. That’s certainly what last night’s Twitter-based scrolling quickly became.
But the unpleasantness is more than just the experience of using the app and the events we witness through it. It’s also the sheer quantity of time we lose to apps.
Ultimately, I think Twitter is just one part of a dystopian tapestry which, deep down, we surely know can’t carry on like this. No matter who owns Twitter (and, yes, the current owner has driven it into a hotbed of open racism, misinformation, misogyny and prejudice) it’s the fact that we allow Twitter, or Instagram, or Facebook, or anything else to own us that is the greater problem. To freeze us in space and time like a gorgon, often in the presence of our own friends and family, sifting through an endless stream of possibly interesting, probably virulent content. To make us think through sheer repetition that it’s normal to slip into some endless virtual chasm while someone is talking to us – or to slowly, bashfully stop talking to someone when you realise they’ve done the same.
I hold my hand up to all of it, too. There’s no precedent for any of it and we have no collective societal framework- yet- to unhitch ourselves from this wagon- or any wagon that a wealthy suitor can seize and repurpose on a whim. I want to remain informed, to remain empathetic and attempt to make the world a better, kinder place in the ways I can. Attempting to do these things on a platform owned by someone pursuing the opposite goals is probably not the best way to do it.
As a convicted criminal and aspiring demagogue returns to the stage for the greatest gig in the West, who knows what’d be different today if social media hadn’t been involved? Maybe it didn’t change anything. Either way, it’s a deeply sad moment for those of us who continually hope for better.
On a day like today where things seem so far beyond your control, maybe deleting Twitter is a minor way of trying to grasp onto some personal agency in the chaos of the 21st century.
Whatever the motive, at least I’ve ditched Twitter- 13 years too late.