Get off Twitter

 I don't like command language. I find myself instinctively resenting it, and I don't think I'm unique in this regard. It presumes and/or demands acknowledgement of a hierarchy in which you are the low man on the totem pole. It's generally antithetical to respect when you're not literally the person's subordinate already.

People have become very comfortable using it too. I don't know when I started noticing it, and maybe it's not so much a phenomenon of growth in the culture so much as it is a growth of personal awareness of it. Nevertheless, it's a great way to start off on the wrong foot with me. I try not to use that language even with people who technically are subordinates to me in my field (which is a tradeoff, by the way.) 

That being said, sometimes command language is important. It can keep you from accidentally letting your adopted daughter eat your friend's legs, for example. I think of this as "break glass in case of emergency" command language.

So when you read the title, please understand that although I am risking starting off on the wrong foot with you, I do so with good intentions. Granted, good intentions as a concept has had a rough few years. I'm not sure what's worse; thinking that people genuinely think their good intentions forgive the awful consequences that can ensue, or thinking that those same people don't care so long as they get their way and are just shirking blame. All that being said, I hope you take me in the spirit I intend when I say that Twitter is cancer and it's ruining your life.

I don't mean that hyperbolically either. I mean it's the social equivalent to alcoholism in terms of what it gives versus what it takes. Let me count the ways in my meandering, pseudo-conversational non-scientific style.

Before I get started, I want to be very clear that I don't mean it's bad for society. It is bad for society, but I don't care about society. Society as a whole will never be worth the effort you pour into it. Society is a gigantic mass of baby turtles, and not all of them are going to make it to the ocean. I'm talking about you, the individual, who can conform to the microsociety of your choosing. Your mileage will vary. I have moved several times in my life. I will probably continue to do that for the reasons mentioned above. I highly encourage you to pick a different beach with less seagulls if the opportunity presents itself.

First off, Twitter trains your mind to shorten attention span. On the surface, that sounds benign, and in and of itself, it is. Reading micro-form writing is challenging in its own way. I think using Twitter as far back as 2009 was for me a net positive for most of it, in the same way that learning to read and write poetry is excellent for any would-be writers. That it's not in your wheelhouse is even more excuse to try it - it teaches you word economy and to appreciate the artfulness of literally every word and letter in your writing. You will become more intentional, more nuanced, more open-minded going down this path. And let's face it, even if you jump off Twitter before the end of this sentence, you're still going to be bombarded by ADHD shit from every other corner of the internet. Just look at fucking Tik Tok. 

Note: if you are reading this in the distant future and you have no idea what Tik Tok is, thank fucking God.

The problem is that thinking in short form for everything does not suffice for the messy truth of the universe and all its goings on. Short form's strength is potency; its weakness is nuance. And don't get it mistaken, you live in a very fucking grey world. And much like Master Li in Jade Empire, Twitter will train you to think you are becoming smarter while creating a massive blind spot for small-mindedness. 

Consider the content that does well on Twitter. Sarcasm, subtweeting, and aggressive disagreement in a tone almost no one actually uses with each other in real life (or didn't, more on that later maybe). Twitter feels like an underground river of internet consciousness. You get news incredibly fast. You are exposed to some of the smartest people on earth firing on all cylinders. You get lines of sight into politics, local and global, that you are not supposed to have. All of this helps foster this atmosphere of borrowed power. I'm smarter because I expose myself to the kind of people who use their intelligence like a weapon, annihilating the assholes of the world. And it gives the illusion of structure as well, and the worst kind of illusion - the one that appeals directly to your ego. I have curated a garden of knives. I have, through intuition and intelligence, created a window that I can see the whole world through as it truly is. My perspective pierces the veil.

But therein lies the problem, and if you don't use Twitter like this, you eventually will. Let's just say for argument's sake that you are correct, you have curated this immaculate eye of Kilrogg to gaze into the heart of your fellow man. Your fellow man when viewed through this lens is radioactive. Your mind is not structured to absorb the world this way. Negativity in the real world is simply one ingredient in a complex formula of experiences. Even in that context, it's not good to over-imbibe. 

One of the ways younger people are accidentally smarter than older people is by way of having ingested less negativity. Cynicism is for old people what inexperience is for young. As you get older, you get less open and more sure that you're correct. You were always correct, or at least always on the path headed towards being correct. This is only good when it is actually true, which you increasingly diminish your ability to distinguish over time. In a way, you're always a dumbass, you just transition from one kind to another and it becomes more your fault and your responsibility to manage. 

I'll give you a short example before moving on: at work, I have a coworker who is in his early 20s. His default state is happy and positive and trying to maintain both. He likes being happy. He likes having a good day. Every day is a good day. That's literally his motto - "today is going to be a good day." So when I dig up a story from Twitter about a child trafficking ring in a foreign country and crush his spirit right before my eyes, who is more correct about how they are living their life? Sure that thing is bad and evil and makes me look like Marty Hart from True Detective. And it reinforces my worldview on society being a flaming turd and me being a Good Person who is righteously disturbed. But am I going to fly to another country and throw a Captain America shield at a bunch of scum or really do anything to make a remote difference except say it's bad out loud? And if I'm not, what actual value is having that ugliness on my spirit? Is the pointless virtue signalling bringing some kind of added value to anything but my ego's perception of itself? My coworker certainly can't do anything about it. But now instead of thinking about how much he appreciates living and the fantastical mystical nuances of being, he's thinking about child slavery. Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying ignore the garbage of the world. What I'm saying is don't remove garbage from the world by pouring the contents of a dumpster down your throat. And throwing it up certainly isn't a virtue either.

OK, the example wasn't that short, but you hopefully get my point. And I promise, your Twitter garden is not curated perfectly. That's an impossible goal. The closest you get to that is creating a thing that feeds into what you perceive your interests to be. And that's an important distinction because that is what makes Twitter go from just generally awful and toxic into being specifically the cancer that will eat your spirit.

Twitter, like Facebook, is engineered to farm sellable data. It does this in a multitude of ways, and also like Facebook, one of those ways is by fomenting conflict. Facebook did a really sloppy job of it. It's why I quit the platform literally years ago. Facebook did two things in a very obvious clumsy way that gave away the goose for me. Is that an expression? I guess that's a bad thing.

One, after I got separated from my wife, it made sure that I literally could not escape her content. Whether it was her literal feed, or her art, or people communicating with her. I removed her, I blocked her (not personal but removing her wasn't working), I used literally every tool Facebook had to not see her, and absolutely none of them worked. In fact, I saw her more once I started trying to un-see her. 

Two, Facebook had a very obvious habit of only putting people I disagreed with on my feed. The way Facebook used to work 45 million years ago was you went to school, you graduated, then Facebook came out and for the second time ever (MySpace was first but geared specifically for teenagers) you could add people you knew that you would probably otherwise totally lose touch with. Classmates, family members, friends that went onto their lives elsewhere. The end result being that you had a lot of people who weren't exactly friends but were more likely people you used to know who could maybe become friends. And wouldn't you know it, Facebook had a talent for finding the ones who were the best at pissing you off and injecting them directly into your feed.

Twitter in a lot of ways is a refinement of that Facebook formula. Now the lens is much broader and encompasses every person on earth, not just the people you personally knew. So in a way it's less personal, but in another sense is far more curated by the end user. And Twitter has the exact same dynamic that Facebook did, but unlike Facebook, it's hitting you in your blindspot. Twitter is feeding you non-stop negativity and hierarchy content regardless of who you follow. It's showing you the people you agree with looking smart. It's showing you the people you disagree with looking stupid and getting dunked on. It's showing you the issues you care about getting worse. And because you choose and unchoose these people, you are lulled into a sense that you aren't getting the world through a filter, you're getting the world unfiltered. But this couldn't be further from the truth. Try making a new Twitter account and following literally anyone. Within a month, and likely far less, you will be in the same Chernobylesque dumping ground regardless of your political or social beliefs on anything. Because Twitter prioritizes conflict, because conflict is engagement. And look at this wonderful world we inhabit. There's enough conflict to drown in and always will be. And honestly, it feels good to attack it head on. Really good.

I won't get into the weeds of the crusader mindset that Twitter encourages you to engage in. If you have any familiarity with Twitter at all, you already know what I'm talking about. And if you don't, suffice to say that Twitter is a fertile breeding ground for the belief that if you join the chorus of stabbing, you will somehow cut the world into a better shape. The culture war has turned society into Starship Troopers.

 But like I said, I don't care about society. Society will ask you to sacrifice yourself for its benefit, and if you're too engaged, you'll find yourself chucked in an unmarked grave while some influencer steps on your head to get where he's going. Society speaks in command language. Society imposes artificial hierarchy. I don't respect that. There is only one garden in existence that needs to be curated, cared for, and loved - the one inside of you. And I don't mean that in the sense of every man is an island. Not everyone in this world is going to make it. That's just how it is sometimes. But the people around you who matter to you are your garden too. The people you haven't met or didn't expect but look at that, they fit right here are what matters. They're the baby turtles you need to be carrying to the sea. And how can you carry anyone if you can't carry yourself?

And more importantly, this brings me to the most insidious part about Twitter - if you're on the ride long enough, your cart is going to go in a different direction than your friends. No human I've ever met has perfectly matched any other human. The people who match me the most in my life match me 30% or less. It's fucking weird to think otherwise. Before the age of social media, you didn't know enough about most of your friends to be alienated from them the way you can now. The moral, acceptable friend was one who made you happy and didn't do bad things. You didn't have access to their thoughts on anything politically nuanced and potentially testy unless you got into a really fucking weirdly intense midnight conversation. But we've marginalized the former and made quite a purity ritual out of the uncovering the latter. 

The concept "the personal is political" is a cyanide capsule pretending to be medicine. I think we've all been downstream of this long enough to acknowledge that, and if you're lucky enough to be reading this from some hypothetical future where that isn't very obviously true, and good faith as a concept is something people strive to hold as the norm, then read carefully. Loving your friends and family cannot be conditional upon agreeing with them about everything. It's an impossible task, and you will find yourself twisting into awful shapes to try to achieve it. Your values are based on your experiences, on the life you lived. That is also true of the person directly counter to those values. They did not pick them out of a hat to act as a foil to your viewpoint. Very few people believe things because they are just bad people. Your most important data in this matter is context, and your primary tool for discovering that context is empathy. One very obvious thing politicizing everything personal has done is creating a meta-game in society where having empathy confers a disadvantage. Deciding that someone is not worth your empathy is a really, really fucking serious decision. You don't make it lightly over a four color political graph. You certainly don't do in your garden on a whim. Empathy is a very large part, maybe the whole, of your love for anyone who is not you.

I've got friends with some fucking weird, intense beliefs. I've got friends who in a less polite society would kill one another if they ever met and could get away with it. Part of that is the cultural zeitgeist we're swimming in. Everyone is an extremist now in one way or another. It's kind of refreshing in a way and farcical too, considering the corporate ideal that we're inundated with's platonic ideal of a human is a being with no beliefs at all, who merely consumes and anticipates further consumption. The other part is that I have a habit of not being put off by intensity or ugliness. You can learn something from every single person you will ever meet. They all have value depending on how you approach them and what effect you allow their gravity to exert in your life. 

I know every kind of major -ist in one form or another as of the current 2023 lexicon of -ists. Racists, sexists, anti-trans, anti-Semitic. In a black and white world, they're bad and my job as a Good Person is to convert or kill them. Or marginalize them if you believe in the longhouse theory. In the real world, shit is a lot fucking weirder. People are not content. Everyone is on their own journey. Some of those journeys go through some fucking stupid places. Every smart person you will ever meet will have some dumb motherfucker in their formula, past present and future.

Back in California I met a black guy who had a side hobby, a thing he did purely for himself, of reaching out to anyone who identified as a member of a pro-white hate group and trying to be their friend. It was fucking wild. He made actual friends. He changed people. I admire that. The wildest part about this story is I met him in a class that was called the race dialogues, the concept being "get people of different races in the same room and let them talk and try to find common ground." I can't imagine something like that being successful today. Just doesn't seem possible.

I wouldn't necessarily say I'm achieving the same with anyone I know, although I'd love to be proven wrong. The hard part for me is distinguishing when I'm showing grace versus when I'm curating my expression to the point of practically saying nothing except an echo of what the other person already thinks. And who does that make me, precisely? The minister of agreeable propaganda? It's not easy to do well, it's super easy to do poorly, and you probably won't know if you're actually any good at it until you're sitting in a wooden box and people are talking about you.

The point I'm trying to make is that people are long form writing. They have a lot of fucking nuance, even when they don't appear to. And even if they don't today, just by passing through your gravity might find themselves there tomorrow. Or a year from now. You never know, you might be one of many weird puzzle pieces that changes them. I've been changed by people, even ones I didn't want to. Especially ones I didn't want to. 

But not if you storm them like Normandy. That's how you make people more like what you hate about them. You're not converting them to a Good Person. You're teaching them how to lie to you. If you treat everyone that isn't a perfect flower like a fucking weed, your garden is going to suck ass. Please don't live your entire life in a shitty garden. 

And all of this goes against the grain of Twitter. It's possible, but you are swimming against massive undertow. And it is so, so easy to just swim with the current.

This whole piece is a totally unfocused mess, partially because I've used Twitter since 2009 (that's 15 fucking years) and partially because I enjoy just typing whatever comes out of my hands. 

The way I see it, I've more or less laid out the problems with Twitter. I think you really have two choices when it comes to Twitter: try and resist the current, or get out of the ocean. I got forced into doing the latter arbitrarily. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, one of the many genius ideas he had to improve it was to essentially disable third party mobile apps. And just like that, Twitter went from being in my pocket and therefore in my face several times a day to only once in the morning when I woke up and once before bed. And I agree, it was a genius idea, because it helped me see how profoundly negative the effect of being plugged into Twitter was for me. It inspired all you see here.

But hey, maybe you can make it. After all, opening with command language doesn't grant me authority in this matter. I'm only confident that I'm the one who can't hang. Maybe I'm the social media version of an alcoholic. But even if that is the case, the comparison is apt because alcohol isn't good for you anyway. You can find boons in it sure, but none that you can't find without it. And plenty of drawbacks to fucking dodge. And you will be dodging. Maybe you're a 20 something and you've got the agility to swing it, I don't know you bro, I only sort of know me. 

But just for shits and giggles, try taking a break from it. Take a week or two. Then come back and ask yourself how the first thirty seconds of being back feels. It might surprise you.