Twitter, now irretrievably devalued and set on a course to imminent or eventual obsolescence by the whims of a lousy billionaire with delusions of grandeur, was my social platform of choice. It wasn’t a “hell site,” though as a white cis man in an affluent country, it wouldn’t be (for me). It didn’t give me a writing career (as it did, seemingly, for so many of the tweeps I followed and admired) and may have actively destroyed one (given how much more time I spent crafting 140-character, and eventually 280-character, missives than I did on any actual, substantive writing). But it was my entire vibe, for the better part of 14 years. It was a window on the world throughout that time, and perhaps never more so than in the awful couple of years when there were no other ones. It was an endlessly renewable opportunity crack wise and be an asshole. It was a community.
The potential replacements don’t feel right, and didn’t, long before it became clear that this month was the end of Twitter’s road. It remains an orders-of-magnitude surprise, to me, that I never krommed TikTok (or Vine, which sent up a test balloon on this issue), given how much of my formative years seemed tailor-made for short-form video content. But I feel uncomfortable on there, and have no idea how to create something that I’d feel like sharing, so it’s mostly just loud noises happening on a screen in front of me. Instagram… well, my friends like it, and I like seeing my friends on there. Facebook outlived its usefulness a decade ago. Mastodon is too complicated, the other text-based chatworlds too small. Tumblr’s back, I guess? I liked it before I left it; but also, I left it.
Which raises the nervous but undeniable possibility that I walk away from all of it, and if you guys want to find out what’s going on with me you come to tederick.com as though it were 2002, and if I want to find out what’s going on with you, I figure it out through some methodology that would likely be individually unique to various people or groups of people. Sounds complicated, but also, I’m sure the human race got along just fine that way for most of recorded history so, probably within my means.
It just feels like I’d be missing out on a lot of stuff. Not in a FOMO kind of way (except literally); just, that random-access information and recommendation flow from 750 or so trusted advisors just has no corollary in the post-Twitter world. I got more value out of sifting and surfing that flow than just about anything else in the 21st century. It was as close to being plugged into the Matrix, or being one with the Cosmic Force, as I was ever gonna come in this “real” “world.” There will be another version of it in some capacity at some point, I’m sure, because having built that width of access into all of our psyches, I don’t think we can do without it anymore (even if I have strenuously argued, in the past, that doing so may have been to our detriment). But who knows. Everything evolves rapidly, and not rapidly at all. Prognostication is useless at this point, not just because of Twitter but because of where we are in the year, where we are in the pandemic, where we are in the body politic, where we are in our energy cycles. Spring feels like a better time, and it’s a ways away. A breather, to sit together on a hill and watch the fires consuming Musktown while contemplating our next moves, might be in all of our best interests.