The worst possible version of myself
How Twitter makes good people bad and bad people truly awful.
A tumultuous on-again, off-again relationship is very much off again:
If you discovered this Substack via my Twitter account, welcome. I think it did generate a few new followers, and for that I am grateful.
But it’s just not worth it. There are better ways to spend a beautiful late-autumn weekend than arguing with strangers - who might very well be professional trolls posting from an office park on the outskirts of St. Petersburg1 - on social media.
Of course, I’ve quit Twitter in disgust many times before, only to rejoin a few months later when the FOMO becomes too much to bear. So many of my favorite commentators and celebrities use it, and the illusion that you can actually interact with them in real time is a powerful one. When someone you respect from afar actually does “like” or even respond to your tweet, the dopamine hit is off the charts.
But it’s kind of like playing the lottery. Maybe you’ll win big, but the odds are very much against you.
Twitter can be very funny, too. Brevity is the soul of wit, and many people have mastered the art of making a devastating and/or hilarious point within the 280-character limit.
…and that’s kind of the problem, too. It’s pretty much all snark, all the time. No one is really having a conversation, they’re just trying to one-up each other.
And that included me. In fact, what kind of made me take a step back was realizing what an awful person I could be when I was in tweeting mode.
I’m racking my brain, and I’m struggling to think of anything positive I posted to Twitter in the previous few weeks. Almost everything was meant to own teh libs or teh cons, depending on the circumstances. The retweets felt like high-fives, but they were all from people who already agreed with me.
Once in a while I tried to debate people more seriously, but that was a complete waste of time.
Despite my best efforts, I could not convince the (purportedly) Polish person Twitter user with whom I interacted on Saturday that mass deportations of Russians from the entire European continent would be a crime against humanity.2 One of my tweets about Kanye West, and how his long-evident antisemitism is being noticed now partly because people see an opportunity to score points at the expense of his political allies, was interpreted (in good faith, I'm sure) by some as a defense of antisemitism.
Ultimately, I had to ask myself a question: have I ever gone to Twitter and come away feeling better about myself and about the world?
It’s so strange. As Ewan MacGregor explained at length in Trainspotting, an addictive drug usually makes you feel really, really good, at least for a while. Twitter is like heroin without “the best orgasm you’ve ever had, [multiplied] by a thousand” but with even stronger hallucinations of dead babies crawling on the ceiling.
I’m a few days clean, and so far I feel great. And yet…I still find myself occasionally checking up on some of my favorite accounts, just to see what’s happening.
I’m cleaning up and I’m moving on, going straight and choosing life, but if I’m posting about my relapse a few months from now, don’t act all shocked about it.
Among the half-assed right-wing Twitter clones created in the past few years, we can now add a half-assed left-wing Twitter clone:
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