There’s always a thing that tips you over. You might be in a relationship that’s not going well, a job you don’t like, a home with too many frictions or whatever. But a moment comes when you think ‘enough’. And you finally take the step away you’ve been contemplating for the longest time. It can feel daunting at first.
You remember when the thing you’re quitting was great. You wonder if you’ll find another thing that will also be great.
For a while, before you cut the tie, you wonder if it’s actually just you. You wonder if you’ll notice at some point that you’re just approaching it wrong. In which case you may be wiser just to hang in there for a bit longer.
But then you tip over into decision time and you quit.
So it was when I quit Twitter.
Quitting Twitter turns out to be a contender for the best thing I have done this year.
Just kidding. It is absolutely the best thing I have done this year. And 2020 has been a great year for me.
So why did I do it? After all, I was addicted and I was reasonably successful at it. In an age when we’re all meant to have a personal ‘brand’, I certainly built one. Being on Twitter all the time earned me money in the real world. I wasn’t paid to tweet but I did land a contract to help launch someone’s business because I was visible to him on there. And I got to give the keynote speech at an international conference on a topic I often tweeted about. So being on Twitter earned me around 25,000 euros, albeit indirectly.
That was an excuse I often used to justify maintaining a presence on Twitter. ‘I’m not just wasting time, you know. I get stuff out of it.’
I also had fond memories of Twitter as the most fun you can have online. Like you do when a relationship turns sour or runs its course, I kept thinking ‘maybe it can be like it was, again, if I only approach it differently.’
It was fun, quirky, entertaining, exciting, amusing, fascinating when I first signed up, in 2009. Back then I was No_such_user and my avatar was a photo I’d taken of that statue in Florence depicting Perseus holding up the decapitated head of Medusa. I felt that the ‘handle’ & ‘avi’ combo I’d chosen lent my Twitter persona an edgy and mysterious air. Suddenly I had an outlet to anonymously voice my thoughts and passions and I had lots of fun with it.
Eventually No_such_user would become a ‘side account’, for various purposes such as infiltrating echo chambers to which I didn’t belong. To keep an eye on the weirdnesses of people who would otherwise object to Mike Hind’s presence. These are stories for another day. Before that, I’d actually made some genuine friends in the real world as No_such_user (gig buddies and such, some of whom I remain in touch with more than a decade later).
My main account today started as a corporate persona, in a previous job. And when I left that job I renamed it and became MikeH_PR.
MikeH_PR was my attempt to build a ‘personal brand’ and it worked. Along came a blue tick and a follower count that reached 25k+ at one point. I was very proud to reach 25k while following under 3k. That was genuine ‘social proof’ (look it up).
I spent a lot of time promoting the thoughts of MikeH_PR and at one point I started a podcast that did OK for a while. A lot of the content was about Twitter and that’s where the podcast found its listener base.
But let’s not beat about the bush here. The paid gigs were just a series of happy accidents. A fortunate by-product. Because what I was really on there for was to boost my ego and supply an addictive personality with the dopamine hits that come from writing a post that lots of other people like. I was good at that.
I remember an interview with Paul McCartney once, where he said that he and Linda had needed a new swimming pool, so he wrote Mull of Kintyre. Sometimes I needed a little rush of excitement, so I’d write a good tweet which went viral. TBH I think Paul has the edge here.
The Twitter experience changed for me when the Brexit thing happened.
Suddenly Twitter was *serious*. It was about *campaigning*. It was about *influence*.
It wasn’t really, but that’s what thousands of us thought at the time. So we started *campaigning* and trying to *influence*.
Naturally, as I believe Brexit is a tangential answer to the wrong question, I was on the side of those who called themselves ‘pro-European’. Then Trump happened. Naturally, as I find Donald Trump vulgar, stupid and vapid, I was on the side of those who called themselves ‘anti-Trump’.
I now realise that this is where it started to go wrong.
For a long time I didn’t really notice that it was going wrong. I was in the thick of the emerging culture war and it was quite exciting. It was also fun. Sometimes. Not always. There was the time a tweet of mine sparked a hit job on me in Breitbart, which led to a tumult of angry middle-aged people from Britain’s seaside towns leaving one-star reviews on my Facebook business page. But that was all just part of the cut and thrust and I didn’t need the Facebook business page anyway, so I deleted it.
And sometimes it was just fun to one-up lying morons, like Brexit Party MEP Lance Forman.
Of course, fun like that is celebrated because it’s about attacking the ‘other side’.
But I was beginning to notice things about my own side too.
Long story short, I started out believing that the ‘other side’ was almost always speaking and acting in bad faith while mine was upholding ‘right’, ‘facts’, actually rational argument, as opposed to feeling-led invective, and generally being the good guys. I was wrong. It took a while to realise it, but eventually I noticed that ‘my side’ was just another cheek of the same arse.
I noticed that ‘my side’ had grown to look like the ‘other side’.
Whoever you are and whatever you stand for, what seems to happen on Twitter is that moral certitude breeds anger, frustration, attention-seeking, bullying and mindless chatter. My will to participate in this drama began to erode. But I am an addict. It’s amazing what you’ll put up with to get a fix. The rationalisation around your addiction is remarkable too. ‘It’s great for the nice stuff, like music, nature and all those great dogs I follow’, me and people like me insist. Yeah, right.
I kept thinking ‘Twitter is doing me no good and I really should take a break’.
Or ‘I need to find a way to be on this hellsite that doesn’t make me pissed off all the time’.
Then it happened and I just stopped. My excuse at the time was that I had something better to do for a few days, so I’d focus on that. Then I never went back. It was done.
For the record, what killed Twitter for me was the bloated smug moral certitude of my own bubble. And its authoritarian tendency to police any member who threatens to entertain notions that aren’t permitted.
It was what is mistakenly called ‘the left’. The social liberal zealots and their relentless post-rational proselytising. And their (yes, the right are right about this) virtue signalling.
Looking back, the gamechanger was one tiny incident that punctuated what had become a permanent intra-cerebral infusion of crowd-sourced stupidity.
It was when people began posting videos of books on fire. A work of fiction that almost no one had read yet, because it had only just been published. It was started by a onetime talent show duo who definitely hadn’t read the book, but saw a chance to become momentarily relevant by hopping a controversial bandwagon. The one that revolves around the woman who wrote the Harry Potter books being An Evil Person. That was the moment that cemented what I’d tried to ignore for the longest time. That Twitter makes people ill. It doesn’t matter that their hearts are in the right place and that all they want to do is express solidarity with a ‘marginalised’ group. They are ill.
Yes, in the end it wasn’t the alt right or the ‘actual fascists’ who drove me off Twitter to centre myself in more healthy ways. It was the libs.
The kind of people who nag in your mentions or even slide into your DMs the moment they suspect that you might be straying.
The journey away from their groupthink was kind of funny, in a way. At least it seemed so when I first noticed it happening. For the longest time I would join in with popular condemnations of widely hated ideas or figures and everyone would love my snarky takes. Then one day I realised I was joining in with popular condemnation of things I had never investigated at source. I was just bouncing off what people were saying about certain ideas and figures. And earning lots of approval.
A great example was when I noticed one day that I’d never actually investigated directly what Jordan Peterson thinks, says and does. So I mentioned that I intended to find out. And the moral gatekeepers arrived, within moments, to inform me that Jordan Peterson is a Very Bad Person with Evil Words & Thoughts. They were literally telling me not to do any of my own research. To trust the group. For the group knows what is right and what is wrong. One person even privately messaged that they ‘sincerely hoped’ that I wasn’t going to end up sucked down a right wing rabbithole. Simply by reading and watching Jordan Peterson for myself.
As it turned out I found him to be vaguely interesting on a few philosophical points, rambling, confused and lightweight on others. And often quite irresponsible. But that was for me to decide. And the bubble was afraid that I was even going there to find out.
I had some fun with it for a while, watching the followers disappear each time I questioned doctrine. That was a kind of tiny liberation in itself. Having once enjoyed watching the follower count rise, the more people flounced off the more I smiled. On a platform where value is measured by ‘reach’ I still had it, but I was more interested in reaching across the divide. And then even that urge dwindled as I realised that Twitter is structured in such a way that you cannot really escape your own bubble..
And I no longer wanted to be in that bubble because I knew something was fundamentally wrong. There is no room for curiosity among devotees of the religion of social liberalism.
There was no room for me among a faithful who believe that there is only good and evil, rather than ideas which intersect in myriad ways in a complex world.
This disease of conformity to a certain doctrine, on pain of social death, has come to be known as ‘wokeness’.
This entire post could be a list of the horrors of ‘wokeness’ and authoritarian social liberalism, but other people are writing solid analyses of that phenomenon already. So let’s cut to the benefits of escaping what now looks from the outside to be unmistakably a cult.
I made some notes, after ten days away from Twitter. So that if I were tempted to return at some point I would have a reference point against which to weigh the need for Twitter stimulation.
From those notes it’s clear that the break I took needed to become a full break-up.
Here’s what I noted, after a week or so off the platform.
My days are longer. Actually longer. I’m fitting more in, getting things done, finding there’s actually more time in an ordinary day than I remembered. Not monitoring what the ill-crowd thinks about anything has freed up a surprising amount of time. Not replying to reply guys, not composing my own lukewarm takes, abandoning my self-appointed role of advisor on assorted information quality topics, no longer checking the trending list, not forever refreshing the feed in case I missed something ‘important’ or diverting.
I’d had no idea how much time I was wasting with the ill-crowd until I absented myself. I didn’t even notice it happening at first. I just felt good about getting stuff done, catching up with more people and feeling in good spirits. I thought it was a spontaneously productive and sociable mood. It wasn’t. It just carried on. It was the absence of other people’s Very Strong Opinions compelling me to share my own Very Strong Opinions. That’s what felt so good. It still does.
My notes continued, every now and then…
My head is clearer. I am reading more. Not just snacking on the latest outrage. I can concentrate.
The illness is still there in the background. I notice the momentary urge to post a picture of what I’m cooking and then I notice why. I want the approval. And in that moment of noticing, the want disappears.
I don’t give a fuck what people think about what I cooked tonight.
I don’t give a fuck what they think about anything.
I don’t give a fuck whether they agree with me about anything or not. Because what I think and what they think doesn’t matter.
I like a lot of what I used to see on Twitter dot com and I miss that. There are people I feel that I vaguely ‘know’ there and some who I now have contact with off-site. But it’s not just about people being annoying. Twitter was making me into a moron.
Another of my notes reads…
Tracking Trump’s Covid via France24 & Associated Press. Glad to be absorbing facts, not feelings, about it. The kind of high intensity issue that makes you want to weigh in. Collective bearing of witness to history.
The notes become more celebratory each time…
Day 13. Close the Twitter tab as soon as I open Firefox & delete the Twitter app from my phone.
I go for a walk at dawn, to get a busy day going with some proper blood flow. I’d have spent that time in bed, drinking tea and tweeting, previously.
Food tastes better. I didn’t see that coming. I guess it’s because I would always skim Twitter while eating & Twitter is kind of all-consuming. That’s why an hour can pass by on Twitter without you really noticing it.
Day 20. Working more efficiently. No more ‘oh it’s PMQs, wonder what’s going on with that’ … and worse ‘I can’t resist looking at all the stupid people’s stupid takes about PMQs, so that I can post something contrary about the cloth-eared commentariat and their fans’. None of that nonsense any more.
Day 26. Being more creative. The lull between breakfast and the rest of the day always involves coffee. Drinking coffee while lying on the sofa swiping down a babbling timeline or flipping between lists of various other topics, when the timeline is either too dull or too febrile. Then often feeling compelled to share a thought which too often would turn into a thread of staggering insignificance. This morning I spent coffee time reviewing last night’s musical session.
Still noticing the fleeting urge to share a thought or an experience with the crowd. Examining that, I realise an occasional craving for connection. A thing shared can be a thing enhanced. But mostly things are great whether they’re shared or not.
Twitter instills bloated self-regard. Nobody cares what you think. Accept it.
Day 29: Accidentally see my timeline while looking for something via Google. Just one tweet from a person I always kind of liked. Creeping dread. There’s his uber sincere and weirdly familiar visage. He’s got an opinion on something and he wants everyone to know about it. The feeling is visceral. Just get me out of here. Getting out of there feels so good.
You get the idea.
I don’t know what day this is, in terms of post-Twitter life. I stopped keeping count, now that it has no hold on me.
I’ll probably never know whether it was Twitter that changed or me that changed. One of my pet theories is that it was all ruined in the end by the ‘normaltons’ jumping in to talk about Brexit and Trump. People who never really understood Twitter but quickly learned that being shouty and annoyed all the time is paradoxically satisfying, at least on a surface level. But something I do know for certain is that no longer being there has changed my life for the better.
I do actually miss the dogs, though. There are some great dogs on Twitter. And their humans are lovely too.
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Some recommended further reading:
I quit Twitter and I can’t believe how much it improved my life by Jeff Bercovici
The industry standard account of Twitter conversational dynamics by Venkatesh Rao — The Internet of Beefs (if you only ever read one thing on the hell of Twitter life, make it this one)
