Sorry if this is disjointed, I’m writing this in fits and starts between day job shit.
While no evidence currently exists of this thanks to account deactivations, I’ve been a twitter user for the better part of 13 years. I joined the site when it was still a regular hotspot for earnest information on resistance movements; I remember the green revolution, the Pittsburgh and Toronto G20 protests, and even the opening salvos of Occupy and the Arab Spring primarily through the lens of twitter.
In fact a lot of how I remember the last 13 years in general comes from the interactions I have had on Twitter – everything from “emoprogs” to gamergate to covfefe and the insurrection. You can still read a whole list of my thought vomits through the pandemic, the post-George Floyd BLM protests, and so on. I’ve never not posted through it, so to speak, so you can right now read a record of how I’ve been doing going back at least to 2019.
And it’s going to be weird to no longer use that site as I did.
There are a lot of good reasons to quit twitter right now. A major one is that I’m tired of what it’s become. Rather than being an echo chamber where “extreme right” and “extreme left” further make our interactions polarized, as the site’s new dingbat owner Elon Musk would have us believe, the problem I see with twitter is that it is too attuned to the bullshit discourse wheel, too good at manufacturing outrage in every direction, and too keen on making sure we take every statement in the worst possible faith forever. I’ve been on this site for 13 years. I’m absolutely guilty of falling for twitter’s traps. And it’s not healthy – never has been, but it’s only getting shittier. And right now, with fascists closing in on the very institutions supposedly designed to keep them at bay, maybe we don’t need a set of jangling keys hanging over our heads to keep us fixated on whatever dumb bullshit a random 15-follower tenderqueer said yesterday. I know I don’t.
That’s not the only reason I have but it’s the only reason I feel like I need to give.
Twitter sucks. It has sucked for a long time. It is good to acknowledge that we don’t need to personally feed into the poison, even if some folks will swear up and down it’s the only way to build a community. I’m gonna be glad to be free of it. I’ll also miss it for when it was rad as shit, for like two or three years. Fuck Elon Musk, twitter forever