FUCKING TWITTER

How I Learned To Hate Twitter and Use it Anyway

If you took a thousand chimps with a thousand mobile phones and then lobotomized them you’d have invented Twitter

I returned to Twitter a few weeks ago.

Well, I was never gone in the strict sense. Just on hiatus.

I was an early adopter of the inexplicably successful microbloggery so beloved by the attention-deficit disordered. In fact, days after Twitter launched, I blasted out a snarky blog post predicting its imminent demise, and then immediately signed up.

Twitter and I loathed each other. My best jokes were ignored (Sample: I’m a real dog person; there was a mixup at my mom’s fertility clinic.), and I considered most everyone else’s tweets as falling on a continuum of gibberish between “lies and narcissism” to “what the fuck are you even talking about”.

Hurt and confused, I took an extended sabbatical from tweeting.

But when I started spewing out reams of my own gibberish on Medium, it became clear that if I wanted maximum eyeballs on my surging sack of content I’d need to harness the full power of social media, including my 89 Twitter followers.

So I slunk back. And found that Twitter had evolved.

The sense of frenetic, meaningless activity had amped up in my absence. It was like a million bees stuffed into a sterile artificial hive, none of them making honey or feeding the queen or doing whatever bees do, but just flying around in circles buzzing at each other until they dropped dead.

More importantly, Twitter had found its niche in the media ecosystem as the place from which more boring outlets steal content to fill up space or create controversy.

Much of this came about as part of the American election cycle, when there’s no news most of the time but everyone has to pretend there is.

Here the new platform of choice for the illiterati proved a boon for old-school talking heads, providing an easy way to fill dead air while waiting to see which former Walmart greeter had won the day in North Huckleberry. Twitter also introduced a new breed of grinning half-wit specializing in insights like “In the last 24 hours, another seven people have followed Ted Cruz!”

Moreover, the tiniest molecule of news, however insignificant, could now be bloated to feature status with a sprinkling of random tweets, the more unhinged the better.

President of the United States lights a Christmas tree? “CUT DOWN THE TREES GLOBEL WARMING IS FAKE ” opines ButtNugget1860. Not so fast, says SlinnnnkyOnYourStairs, “Smash the Fascist Santa State!”

Terrific quotes for your drivel aggregator site funnyweasels.com. Dead-eyed stress junkies will scroll this stuff for hours!

Partisan media outlets soon learned to find the most insane, fringe tweets from the opposite side of the political spectrum and present them as mainstream thinking from their opponents. “Hmmm, I didn’t realize the Democrats wanted to force grade-schoolers to watch incest porn but why would lflynt195 lie?”

And let’s talk about the lies.

Propagandists on the right, in particular, learned that the platform had neither the means nor the desire to police users for accuracy, particularly if those users had a high profile. While former President Trump was eventually booted off Twitter, it took months of overt, egregious lies about election theft to make it happen. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the mad harpy of Tennessee, managed a healthy stretch of Covid-19 prevarication before getting “permanently suspended.” In both cases, public pressure forced Twitter’s hand.

That’s not to suggest that Twitter isn’t useful for some people. Real, reputable journalists use it to keep current and to find ideas for genuine stories about actual events. Organizations use Twitter to speak to their customers, and creatives find audiences for their work.

Or so I understand. That subsurface utility isn’t obvious to the casual observer. From ten thousand feet it feels like a grand public market for unfunny quips, uninteresting ideas, hackneyed content, and unfocused or misdirected rage, all expressed as loudly as possible.

That doesn’t mean the sense of feverish activity isn’t real. It just means that the same people who have always been interested in yammering about politics or culture are still talking at each other, except now they have a faster, more annoying way to do it.

This particular chunk of the social mediaverse can be likened to a giant coffee shop full of single-issue wonks and demented attention-seekers, high on conviction and Red Bull, shouting and gesticulating frantically but having little meaningful effect on the rest of the world beyond the occasional shout of “Freedom!” drifting through the doors to the street outside.

But if you’re Twitter-famous or even Twitter-famous-adjacent, you could be forgiven for thinking that people are paying attention, that the times are a-changing, that what you and your friends say MATTERS.

Or maybe you’re just pissing in the wind.

Follow me on Twitter — @RupertAffen