kookie
/
nomicon
1
0
Fork 0
Code Issues Projects Releases 1 Activity

website: draft of xxx_kill_twitter.md

Browse Source
main
Katharina Fey 2 years ago
parent 5e6f73a72e
commit e974eead93
1 changed files with 355 additions and 0 deletions
Show all changes Ignore whitespace when comparing lines Ignore changes in amount of whitespace Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL
Show Stats Download Patch File Download Diff File
  1. 355
      infra/website/content/blog/xxx_kill_twitter.md

355
infra/website/content/blog/xxx_kill_twitter.md
Unescape View File

@ -0,0 +1,355 @@
Title: Why I deleted my Twitter, and why maybe you should too
Category: Blog
Date: 2022-10-18
Tags: culture, tech
I deleted my Twitter account this month. It was a decision that I had
struggled with for months (if not years), and one that I want to talk
about. This article is a collection of thoughts gathered through
conversations with friends on this topic. I was advised to turn these
thoughts into a blog post.
If you are struggling with your relationship to social media and
having a hard time cutting ties with some platform (in particular
Twitter), maybe this blog post will be helpful to you.
## Background
I got addicted to Twitter in the run-up to the 2016 US election. I
was going through a bit of a moderate phase back then (sandwiched
between the punk days of my teens and the anarchy of today) and I
became part of "liberal twitter", consumed liberal memes, and enjoyed
dunking on conservatives. Of course I didn't think Trump would win.
After the election results this behaviour intensified. I sought
refuge from the world that had shattered my understanding of society
by sliding deeper into the filter bubble that had sheltered me from
reality in the first place. And so I revelled in making fun of Trump
and his supporters, celebrating the "cofefes" and body shaming, and
intensively following the discourse (TM). Of course it didn't make me
any less miserable.
The band-aid for the pain that I felt, the realisation that the world
didn't work the way I had swindled myself into believing, soon didn't
satisfy my need for comfort and so I became more dependent on instant
gratification through social media. *I was unable to truly comprehend
the extent to which I was addicted to the thing that was hurting me.*
_Doom scrolling_ is a well known phenomenon in our terminally online
society and we talk about it as if it was unavoidable. As if it was
an individualist problem. We _know_ that it is bad for our mental
health, yet rarely do we talk about it on a systemic level. Why do we
all put up with these circumstances and why do we all keep making
excuses for the systems that make us miserable? This, to me, is the
core of how many people engage with modern social media platforms.
I had taken longer breaks from Twitter before, deleting the app off my
phone, bargaining with myself about how much I wanted to share. But I
always fell back into its orbit. I feel it's appropriate to use the
language of addiction around this subject. And it wasn't until I
truly admitted to myself that I had a problem that I was able to let
go and examine the frameworks through which I had engaged with online
society, and the impact that these systems had had on me and my life.
In the following sections of this article I want to outline some of
the mechanisms that have kept me hooked for so long and have made it
_extremely difficult_ to escape its consequences. Lastly I also want
to talk about a possible way out and some alternatives as to how to
engage with _the online_.
## The fear of missing out
Social media weaponises "FOMO", the _fear of missing out_. Twitter is
particularly good at this, advertising itself as the platform "to know
what's happening". _Twitter users know it first_ is the actual
current tag-line to entice you into signing up.
I believe social media has had the strangle-hold over our collective
psyche at least in part because "we" have designed a society where
being outside your own home is miserable, exhausting, and toxic. To
have a good time outside you need to spend money, or you need to
engage in some kind of social event. Merely the act of *being
outside* is punished through car-centric design and architecture. Not
to mention the noise that personal motor vehicles cause and their
effect on the mental well being of city dwellers. I have been
fortunate in a way, living in the suburbs of Berlin (for the time
being), meaning that I only have to walk for about 5 minutes before I
end up in the Brandenburg forest.
This has actually been a life-saver. It has meant that I was able to
escape stressful situations over the last few years (of which there
have been _too many_) by going for a walk, disconnecting through
nature, and re-grounding myself in a very basic way. It seems silly
to even talk about this but having the ability to _go for nice a walk_
has been linked to a significant improvement of mental health
[^nature].
The unfortunate reality is, that many people do not have access to
this basic human need, and so, social media can often seem like an
enticing alternative. This is an especially important angle
considering the way addictive design is used in social media apps to
give you a false sense of gratification.
Over the last decade we have all become more _and more_ aware of
global events to the detriment of our collective mental health.
Permanently wired into "what's happening" creates the illusion of
control, where none is possible. _I'm not arguing for ignorance here
either_. I don't think that shutting yourself off to what is
happening in the world is a reasonable alternative. But we _must
examine_ the ways that our current modus operandi is damaging to us.
We must especially become aware of how the _fear of missing out_ will
drive us to engage for longer and beyond our personal limits to handle
the stress that knowing the horrors of the global capitalist system
causes within us.
## Becoming a brand
When I created my Twitter account back in 2012 it was for me to
shit-post about video games, and to keep in touch with various friends
around my life. Around 2017 a slow shift started to appear in the way
that I used my account. It was gradual, and imperceptibly to me at
first. Over time I was changing from _being a person_ to _being a
brand_. This will probably not be everyone's experience. I know
people who are 100% the same in person as they are on Twitter (even
with large-ish follower counts) and I assume this is not a problem
that everyone is going to have.
Still, it is something that I have struggled with, and that I _know_
people much "larger" than me are also straggling with. My audience
on Twitter was still relatively small, yet I stopped feeling confident
in being able to share myself as-is on the site. In one part this was
because it made me uncomfortable to share intimate and private parts
of my life with thousands of people online that I didn't know. In
other parts it was because my political and societal outlook shifted
and radicalised. My views became less socially acceptable, and so, I
started filtering myself online. This was small at first, but over
time it built up a wall between me and my Twitter brand.
On one hand I felt this weird obligation to use my platform, *to
leverage* the following that I had for the work that I was doing and
that was important to me. On the other hand I felt repulsed by the
idea of having to pretend to be someone I wasn't to be accepted.
I want to quickly explore the shape and form of online communities
(through my experience obviously -- I have done some research into
this but sociologically things are more complex than this) because I
think it will be helpful to explain how this shift from "person" to
"brand" happened.
Broadly speaking, internet communities fall onto a spectrum between
*specialist* and *generalistic*.
Specialist communities are those built around a specific common
interest. This could be part of your identity, it might be a hobby,
or it might be a shared profession. It's important to know that this
is only a _part_ of you and while it's easy to find people who are
also into _this thing_, often any other overlap is coincidental or not
guaranteed to result in connections that you will want to maintain.
In my experience these communities end up feeling shallow because the
social overlap is limited to a particular subject. It is certainly
possible to build otherwise nuanced relationships with people in these
spaces, but it's not as easy.
(Again, this model has its limitations, especially for communities by
marginalised folks, where a shared life experience provides a common
backdrop to society that influences every other aspect of someone's
life.)
Generalist communities are those that are polymorphic, meaning that a
(more or less) diverse crowd of people come together (maybe under a
_very_ loosely defined banner) to talk to each other. While it will be
possible to meet people who share a wide variety of interests to you,
it can also feel like searching for a needle in a hay stack because
there are a lot of people, and finding potential friends in a huge
diverse crowd of people who you may not have many things in common
with can be difficult.
Most social media sites will reflect any number of community
variations on this spectrum and Twitter is no exception in that.
There are subtle differences in how these categories work depending on
how you engage with the platform. In my time on Twitter as an
individual I felt like I was building multiple sets of specialist
communities. Once I _became a brand_ however this shifted and the
focus relied more on building a generalist audience. No longer could
I assume that my followers were sympathetic to me, and so came the
consequences of presenting my authentic self in front of an
ever-increasing crowd of judges.
## The algorithm & the timeline
A few years ago social media platforms started pushing for
algorithmically curated timelines. At first this caused an uproar,
when users stopped seeing their friends' posts in their feed and
instead started seeing random sponsored content; whether someone had
paid for it or merely _engaged with it_. At this point you will also
see content recommendations from groups and hashtags.
But this controversy died down over time, as could maybe have been
expected. Ironically running a poll on Twitter these days whether
people use the algorithmic or chronological timelines yields in a
heavy filter bias, which "shows" that most people are using the
chronological timeline. Of course, most of your followers won't
actually see your post in the end.
Algorithmic timeline design is at the centre of modern corporate
social media sites. The goal is no longer to facilitate meaningful
exchange between users and instead the focus has shifted to keeping
users "engaged" for longer. The customers are ad-buyers and the
commodity is your time. This is another open secret that we all
conveniently ignore. _You may think that you are above this_, that
you can't be manipulated into spending more and more of your precious
time on this planet in front of your phone or laptop, refreshing,
scrolling, refreshing, scrolling, but considering that the designs of
these tools fall prey to their own creations [^sd], you are not.
Importantly algorithms are also arbiters of content, and in the ideal
case, equalisers. Someone with very few followers can have a post
"blow up" if the algorithm blesses it, and someone with many followers
can have their work buried if the algorithm deems it unsuitable.
This might not be a problem for your shit posts. But when you try to
use a platform to advertise your work, especially when you are
financially dependent on it, this can be a scary prospect.
Twitter is by far not the worst platform for this, nor is it the one
with the worst effect. Sites like YouTube, where artists spend
hundreds of hours creating videos, are much more affected by this.
But the mechanisms are fundamentally the same.
## Social capital vs. Perceived social capital
Algorithmic timelines on Twitter feed into the dilemma between our
_perceived_ social capital and our _actual_ social capital. Social
media has largely become mandatory for branding, for advertising your
work in some way. Especially if you are self employed or an artist of
any kind, your livelihood may depend on your ability to promote your
work and getting whatever you are doing in front of the eye balls of
other people. Having a large following on Twitter will definitely
help with this, but it's by no means a guarantee. Other platforms
suffer from this too (again: see problems that smaller YouTube
creators face[^salari] that those who have "made it" no longer do).
I think this is the aspect that I struggled with the longest. I
didn't judge my Twitter account by the actual social capital that I
gained from it, I judged it by the _perceived social capital_ that I
thought to gain from sticking around. The reality of the situation
was that any time I would genuinely talk about my work, advertise
something that I had made or was proud of, my Twitter audience was
useless. Almost as an insult the most popular of my posts were shit
posts. Having recently talked about this with some friends, both with
smaller and significantly larger audiences, this seems to be an almost
universal experience.
It's extremely difficult to distinguish these two values and to really
understand what actual benefit you are gaining from sticking around on
a platform. A lot of it is going to be projection. And fantasies
will make it hard to quit. Don't think about the one time your work
was valued, think about the hundred times that your work felt ignored.
## Elon Musk is going to buy Twitter
~You may not like it, but it is going to happen~[^musk] (in fact I
took so long to edit this post that it already has[^musk2]. Elon Musk
is a sad, unremarkable little man who keeps failing his way to the top
because our society is set up to reward the son of an apartheid
business man while punishing anyone with actual talent, who didn't
have the common sense to be born rich.
I don't think Musk is particularly evil, he's not intelligent or
cunning enough for that. And he's not _especially_ bad in how he runs
his companies or how he exploits his employees (he's your _exceedingly
average_ union busting bastard). He's just another Billionaire.
Twitter has a lot of Elon Musks that all use it for their personal
gain. Twitter benefits from drama and have maintained it for years.
At this point I don't think anything is going to stop certain people
from leaving Twitter. No design changes to the platform did it,
Donald Trump didn't do it, and this acquisition by a wanna-be
intellectual entrepreneur (sounds like an oxymoron) won't do it either.
Personally I've had enough and don't want to make excuses anymore.
## In conclusion
I was in London at the beginning of October, watching the closing
performance of [The Prince] at the Southwark Playhouse. After the
play I walked around Elephant & Castle with a friend and we talked
about social media and the performances we all play for each other (in
line with the play, which you should definitely watch on or offline if
you have the chance). It was in that moment that I went "fuck it".
We only get so many years on this planet and the world is a truly
horrific and heart breaking place. And we are going to need all of
our collective strength to change things. If we even still can. One
thing I am certain of however: _social media is not going to help us_.
Corporate social media has been designed to keep us engaged to the
detriment of our mental health. Being informed of something happening
does not increase your agency over the situation. In most cases it is
going to remove your agency.
Delete your Twitter account. You can do it. I believe in you :)
## Aftermath
One _last_ thing I want to talk about is alternatives. I am still
online, I still talk to friends. I even, in a sense, still have a
public persona. I use [the fediverse] to advertise my work, and have
done so for years. In fact, every time I posted something on Twitter,
I also posted in on fedi. The differences in feedback were
astounding. It wasn't that _every_ post got a lot of attention, but
the ones I truly cared about did. Not only were they widely shared,
they created _conversation_... honest to god feedback, discussion, and
interest. Something practically unknown to me on Twitter.
Now... as a certain TV writer posted on mastodon.social back in 2017:
"I wonder if being on here during my twitter breaks is like when I
tried to quit smoking using cigars", and he might be right (love your
work Dan).
I think the crux of the issue is how you approach your use of
technology. And what kind of interactions that technology fosters. I
don't want to turn this article around in the afterword and incinuate
that any problematic relationship with social media is your own fault.
It isn't. _But_, I think you have more power over your habits that
you give yourself credit for.
I have three accounts on the fediverse: a public one, where I post
realistically the same stuff I posted on brand-Twitter before it made
me miserable, a semi-public one, where I share selfies, random things
I'm working on, and a sort of micro-blog, and a private one where I
talk to just close friends. The expectation to have multiple accounts
with varying degrees of publicness is ingrained into the fediverse in
a way that I've never really seen it on Twitter.
And yet, I wonder how much time I spend on the elephant website and
whether it is useful to my life. In the end everything is a balancing
act. And while I can still see a lot of good reasons to stick around
on the fediverse (imperfect as it may be[^mstd]), I can no
longer say the same for Twitter.
As Elon Musk buys Twitter and you find yourself wondering where to
take your online self, do consider to stop by the fediverse. But
please don't use a switch in platform as an excuse to not examine the
underlying relationships you have with _the online_.
[^nature]:
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-15004-0](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-15004-0)
[^sd]: Watch "The Social Dilemma (2020)". It's not a _great_
documentary in my opinion as it falls short in its analysis of
what social media and the manipulation of public opinion actually
means, outside of a very narrow "someone help me balance this, my
democracy is dying" but there are some insightful interviews in
there by people who have worked on various social media sites
talking about their own experiences with social media addiction.
[^salari]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HiNVQkamA4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HiNVQkamA4)
[^musk]: [https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/7/23391646/elon-musk-twitter-filings-acquisition-deposition-schedule](https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/7/23391646/elon-musk-twitter-filings-acquisition-deposition-schedule)
[^musk2]: [https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/elon-musk-completes-44-bln-acquisition-twitter-2022-10-28/](https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/elon-musk-completes-44-bln-acquisition-twitter-2022-10-28/)
[^mstd]: [https://sporks.space/2021/02/02/mastodon-really-is-crumbling-and-it-will-only-get-worse/](https://sporks.space/2021/02/02/mastodon-really-is-crumbling-and-it-will-only-get-worse/)
Write Preview
Loading…
Cancel
Save