Maybe Twitter was always a bad idea
Constant exposure to arena of debate is incredibly draining
Twitter these days is aflame. The niche social information network, so precious to journalists, writers and politicians, feels a bit like the fall of Saigon — a sort of mad revelry before it all ends.
Now that Tesla CEO Elon Musk looks poised to purchase the company, along with an ill-defined plan to “unlock its potential,” many Twitter users are ready to jump ship.
I am unsure if or how Twitter will change, since Musk has been quite vague on the idea, and fixing Twitter is a problem no one has yet been able to solve.
It is of particular import to me, however, because I have been a nearly daily user of Twitter for — gulp! — just over 15 years. And maybe it’s time to go.
Perhaps the purchase of the company by someone who I neither like nor have much faith in is thus a wake-up call — a chance to realize that Twitter is in fact something that not only I would be better off without but that we would all be.
It’s a question far bigger than my small life. After news broke of Musk’s intention to buy the company, Renée Diresta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, suggested that despite lofty rhetoric about Twitter being a global public square, it’s increasingly not clear that such an idea is desirable. The impossibility of a global set of rules or norms, in addition to the novelty of being connected to so many people at once may in fact not be all it’s cracked up to be.
It is a notion I feel deeply ambivalent about. Twitter is not only the reason I have a career, it is also how I have made real friends, connected with the like-minded, and plugged in to the intellectual debates of our time.
But using Twitter nearly every day for a third of your life has its consequences. While the idea of constantly being exposed to a rollicking arena of debate sounds invigorating in theory, in reality it is incredibly draining.
Every day, you are exposed to not merely different points of view, but adversarial ones. While that is obviously fine and even productive in small doses, over time it has the effect of chipping away at the stability of one’s relationship to the world. Add in the constant fighting, the tendency to ridicule rather than engage, and the incessant desire to get engagement rather than say something honest or true, and Twitter is a natural venue for both the worst in us and the worst of us, too.
Could it be then that a global network where you to try and plug into the whole world is in fact too much — that an idea that sounds brilliant in the abstract is, in the nitty gritty of its day-to-day psychic and emotional toll, a colossal historical error that we should not try to save or fix but should abandon?
It was that idea that ran through writer Robin Sloan’s widely circulated thoughts on the topic this week https. Sloan is no mere technaysayer, but is a longtime online citizen who also worked at Twitter on media partnerships in the early 2010s (full disclosure: Sloan is also a personal friend).
Chief among Sloan’s complaints about Twitter are that “more than any other social platform, it is indifferent to huge swaths of human experience and endeavour.” Further, he calls the Twitter timeline a distorting factor that warps our experience of the world and one another. The only option? To abandon it now.
Still, Sloan is a New York Times bestselling novelist who has a dedicated audience. He can also afford to not be on Twitter, because unlike those of us who are self- or precariously employed, he does not need Twitter for what it can also be — a pathway to an audience, and with that audience, a livelihood.
That more than anything is the trouble with Twitter: not just that it is too much, a miasma of sentiment and thought that often injures those who use it, but that its centrality to the media ecosystem makes it unavoidable for a small but significant slice of the population. And with unavoidability, there come knock-on effects down the line in which public discourse is also poisoned by Twitter’s ampedup form of social discourse.
If there is a wake-up call here, it is that social media is currently a Faustian bargain at best. It is a mess, but also the only mess we have — and it traps us in a dynamic that is at once untenable but inescapable.
That is a problem a capitalist entrepreneur like Elon Musk is unlikely to fix.
What we need is an alternative to profit-oriented social media — and that will require far more than a billionaire’s angry tweets.
Instead, it will require the bravery and creativity to imagine something new.