There’s a lot of takes out there on Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Considering that Twitter has had a CEO before (Jack Dorsey) who shares most of Musk’s view of the world and a lot of his general attitude, I’m not sure this is going to be a huge difference in practice. I will leave if Trump returns—that would be bad for the platform and bad for the world. Otherwise, I’ll wait and see.
But if the waiting and seeing did convince me that the platform had become a place that I just couldn’t bear to be—I’ve felt that before about Twitter, and not always because of far-right ugliness and disinformation—then that doesn’t seem that big a deal to me. I understand that it feels differently if Twitter has become essential to the functioning of your own gig economy, but even in that case, there not only are alternatives, there will be.
Those of us who have lived the longue duree of the Internet—whose lives bridge the era of typewriters and personal computers—have digital autobiographies that span many platforms and apps, many communities and conversations.
I started with dial-up bulletin boards and Usenet. I used to spend time on GEnie’s Science Fiction Roundtable. I spent hours and hours in LambdaMOO and other MOOs and MUSHs.
When I started teaching at Swarthmore, I set up some relatively static webpages that included syllabi, but also included restaurant reviews, primarily for Delaware County recipes. My student Justin Hall introduced me to blogs (he practically started them!) and then took some time off to try and help the writer Howard Rheingold launch a new kind of digital community, Electric Minds. (I sometimes think about what might have been had it succeeded: it was a better vision of the kind of platform that Facebook eventually became, under wiser guidance.) He drew me in to Howard’s Brainstorms community, which was inspired by Electric Minds. Eventually he also inspired me to start a blog of my own.
I participated in group blogs—a historians’ blog called Cliopatria, a blog for game scholars called Terra Nova. I spent time on LiveJournal and MySpace. The Terra Nova writers started a guild on World of Warcraft. I hosted discussions on several blogs, hung out with various commentariats on others. I lurked elsewhere, hung on as a pseudonymous account in a gaming-focused community that went through multiple permutations.
I joined Facebook early. My friends’ networks included people I’d met in all those other contexts, from alt.society.generation-x right up to World of Warcraft. I waited about four years to join Twitter: I felt a bit over-involved in platforms but it still interested me. I put my books onto LibraryThing and I still look into it fairly often, though I rarely get into discussions there. I eventually got into Reddit, a bit. I did some Instagram and then I got shook loose for a while by not doing very many cellphone photographs. Maybe I’ll re-up there some. My colleague got me to do Snapchat for a little bit—she was going to write about it but I think she changed her mind. And, well, here I am on Substack. I’ve lurked on platforms that I had no intention of joining from 4chan to tumbler to YikYak.
Why am I thinking about all this now? Because I’m realizing that giving up a platform is in the end an easy thing to do. I’ve done it so many times, for so many reasons. I’ve done it in anger and wrath, I’ve done it out of boredom. I’ve fretted over a decision to leave and I’ve drifted away without ever deciding. I’ve let a single bad user chase me out and I’ve endured and ignored a host of awfulness. I’ve consciously put something on hiatus only to come back to it renewed and I’ve autopiloted for weeks through unfulfilling piles of noise without seeing any signal. I’ve seen new owners or sysops come piling into a well-established and successful community and absolutely destroy it with both malice and stupidity. I’ve seen communities blow themselves up without any help from above.
I feel nostalgia and affection for some of my former haunts. Others I can barely remember at all despite hours of time spent there. I can recall feeling distraught about some discussions that now seem quaint or innocent. I can remember some things said to me online as sharply and specifically as if they were being written this very moment even if they were written to me in emails over thirty years ago. And almost none of this is in an archive that I can access or that anyone else will ever see or find. It’s all gone.
That is no bad thing, for the most part. Maybe the newer platforms are more powerful, more permanent, more consequential, and thus harder to leave and more important to fight over. But for folks whose main online lives are more recent or less peripatetic, what Musk might do to Twitter may feel more weighty than it is simply because they haven’t lived out these migrations. He might blow it up, and that says some bad things about a society that lets a billionaire waste that kind of transformative money on whimsical irritation. He might give a monster back the attention he needs to blow up more than Twitter, and that says some worse things about this society. But maybe all he’ll do is puff on Twitter as if it were a dandelion and push many of us off on our next flight from one platform to the next, to doing culture work in some other corner of public life—or maybe offline entirely—leaving Twitter as one more dimly remembered pile of spent conversations.
Image credit: Photo by Chris J. Davis on Unsplash
Whatever he does, it’s without me. I tried Twitter, but it was too annoying to me. I just didn’t have the personal bandwidth to troll through it all the time. FB was bad enough but had better access to art. So I took myself off yesterday from a largely moribund account. Elon Musk is always a bridge too far for me.