There are few things less cool than a “I’m quitting social media” post, but it’s going around.
By the time Elon Musk, both the current world’s richest man and record holder for most net worth lost ever, bought Twitter, it was already showing its cracks. Ever since Jan 6, 2021, when the old owners finally banned Trump from the platform, it’s been in severe decline. For four years, one of the most popular Twitter users was also the world’s most powerful man. Journalists and politicians alike used the platform for information gathering and announcements. Often Trump would use it instead of official channels to announce policy, like a twisted modern version of FDR’s fireside chats. Once he was gone, the platform slowly went back to being just another social media.
At least that’s the popular narrative, but Twitter hasn’t had much resemblance to the others since at least the early 2010s. Facebook and Instagram went into video around that time and put as much distance between them and chronological feeds as they could. Reddit is more like a bunch of enthusiast forums strung together with a vaguely shared culture. Tumblr got too weird too fast. Tiktok didn’t exist yet. Twitter served as the only text based platform and the only one where it was still common for celebrities to run their accounts, instead of their PR teams. This meant that people who got famous there couldn’t have gotten famous on the other ones. On Instagram you could be pretty, on Reddit you could be knowledgeable, but on Twitter you were judged by your ability to post whatever garbage your brain thought was funny. And anyone could post garbage.
That’s not to downplay the serious parts. Twitter was a huge boost for organization during the Ferguson riots. Under Obama’s administration, the rank excess of American policing played out before our eyes, unfiltered by credulous and ineffective corporate media. The Arab Spring saw entire governments toppled with the help of Twitter organizing. Fires, floods, elections, scandals, kidnappings, anything that happened to humans with internet popped up on Twitter first. There were times where it seemed like the only thing mainstream news was good for was repeating whatever was happening on Twitter. Even screenshot memes tended to be sourced from Twitter. Trends sparked, developed, and fizzled before they even made it to Instagram.
But capital comes for us all. The usual shareholders and tech barons wanted in. Eventually Twitter’s inability to consistently gain users made the owners look for greener pastures. As Biden took office and the Jan 6 trials started, it became clear that the culture wars had selected Twitter as a target, the last social media with a liberal image. The right wing had fled from app to app, banished after years of flaunting the TOS, while the left languished, boiling its own in in-fighting and “discourse” cycles. Yet the site powered on, refusing to surrender its place as “the town square of the internet” the last place a nobody in Omaha could directly tell billionaires to eat their ass. Enter Elon Musk.
Musk’s amazingly short attention span briefly flicked over the idea of buying Twitter after something unimportant happened that the increasingly right wing billionaire didn’t like. He proposed a ludicrously “high” price for the struggling company, his supporters howled in glee, and the shareholders licked their chops. The almost a year since has been filled with “will he? Won’t he?” until the only way he could save face was by following through, giving a huge payday to the previous owners and putting a massive hole in his and his companies net worth. He made up the difference with Saudi money. Once the deal was complete, the only news on Twitter was it’s own death throes, the users brutally mocking the new owner as Musk began tearing out chunks and rearranging them, gripped by the mania of the recently swindled.
Honestly, it’s a miracle it still exists. For something so insanely complex, and with such deep archives, it’s still trucking. It’s gonna be a shame if the right cable ever gets unplugged. Almost two decades of a culture that shook the world and got a POTUS elected could vanish. Dust to dust.
So why am I quitting now? Frankly it’s never been harder to look away. There are countless things happening right now basically unremarked on by corporate media sources. Police are waging war on the citizens of Atlanta. Florida is falling under the thumb of a former Gitmo torturer. A coordinated effort by C-tier reactionaries has created a blizzard of anti-LGBTQ+ (particularly anti-Transgender for the moment) legislation that are easy wins for a rudderless right wing but devastating to an entire demographic (at less than 1% of the population they can’t fight back on their own, easy targets for monsters.) Covid is still running wild. The liberal establishment is beginning to get bored of war mongering with Russia and is eyeing China. And all of this is happening in a country where the biggest banks are a group chat text away from being handed billions to cover their own losses.
And I just can’t take it anymore.
It’s a hard habit to break, for a long time now, any time I’ve had a weird thought that I would either shove down in public or only really say to a close friend, I’ve thrown it up on Twitter. Navigating the character limit was a fantastic way to avoid things like this huge slab of text. At first I thought of it like a small blog, only read by the two dozen or so people I knew who were also active on the site. But after a while they dwindled and only one or two people kept following me. So it became my most unhinged social media presence. The place where I could vent all about politics and petty frustrations. Many thank yous to the few people who stuck around and reinforced my nonsense.
But steps have to be taken. The doomscrolling has to stop. The domain has been blocked.
I was considering replacing it with something else. I went through the typical Twitter replacements, Mastodon, Cohost, even Pillowfort, but none of it stuck. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to seriously engage with Facebook again, Insta is…Fine? But I don’t like taking selfies so I’ll never really thrive there. Now there’s talk of banning Tiktok (for like the third time) for the sin of competing with billionaires while not being American. The Chinese thing is an excuse, none of the other apps are shy about surveilling us just as much and all that information is already for sale. Sorry, that’s the 21st century so far. We let Silicon Valley invent Big Brother and now we all have to deal with it. I don’t have the stamina or reflex to use Tiktok as a generative thing, so for now it’s just another feed.
This place is my last resort. I don’t expect to build a following or anything here, but I do have an RSS feed if you’re as old fashioned as me. There’s also always bookmarks and I’m considering making some sort of email version if I can find something automated enough. For now, this is where Wheeler’s Notebook of Thoughts is gonna live. I’m bringing my scary art and opinions with me. I’m tired of running from app to website to app to website, away from the encroachment of the endless growth machine. This is a means of production I can sort of own, so maybe I have a shot here.
Be good to each other, give a homeless person ten dollars, and don’t let the bastards see you cry.
Wheeler's Place 