They look less and less like recognizable humans, these billionaires buying everything we care about: books and newspapers, transportation and the moon. And now Twitter.
I have no moral objections here. Perhaps I should, but I’m not sure if Twitter was any more righteous when it was governed by shadow corporations that bankrolled nuclear weapons and cluster munitions. Maybe it’s better if social media is delisted from Wall Street and no longer pressured to maximize revenue through attention hijacking and outrage mechanics. But now that this space I once loved belongs to an unstable billionaire, it might be the kick in the seat I need to rethink how I spend my dwindling time on this planet and who it serves.
We tend to talk about social media in binary terms—follow/unfollow, like/block, share/mute—which warps our thinking and, not coincidentally, mirrors the language of addiction. We talk about quitting, even detoxing from social media. I’ve never heard someone say, “I’ll just check it on Wednesday afternoons.” And like an addict, I’ve been languishing in the uneasy state of knowing Twitter is terrible for me, yet using it anyway, hoping to rekindle the golden days of making new friends, exchanging minutiae, and getting turned on to new movies, music, and ideas. But the scene turned sour years ago. Now it feels like retching in the street.
And so, after fifteen years of broadcasting on somebody else’s airwaves, I’ve decided to let my channel rot. It’ll be a dead station, auto-posting hyperlinks to my own patch of the Information Superhighway until the lights go out. I’m not going to look at Twitter anymore.
But habits are hard to break. My lizard brain is a ferocious beast. Whenever I get stuck in my work, my fingers twitch, eager to launch a new tab and type “tw…” for a dose of distraction or attention. I physically twitch. What on earth have I been doing to myself all these years? So I’ve had to block Twitter at the root level.
I’ll continue to tend my little garden here, maybe even compile some of the writing I’ve accumulated into small books. Something concrete. And I think I’ve managed to switch on the comments in case anyone wants to say hello or recommend a movie or a song.
Adam Arthur’s new live set for Interdimensional Transmissions is perfect concentration music for me: a long stretch of ambient drift that slowly gives way to sparkling synthetics that remind me I was once optimistic about a techno-future.
