Logging out
Let me tell you about a dream I had last night:
I was going to get a tattoo — I have over 30 tattoos, so this itself is not strange. I was walking to a studio that was above some shops on a street that could double for any American city; 2–3 story buildings crammed close together, the pavement broken, grey and brick everywhere. The street also seemed to be a rough place, full of violence. The few people that were on the street were either pursuing or being pursued, there were bodies on the sidewalk. As I approached the studio, a beast with a broad, blocky body and a wide mouth like a shark’s reached out of the window and snatched up a man below, swiftly and loudly biting him in half.
As it was a dream, I thought that won’t happen to me, and even though I heard some of the figures in the street around me telling me to turn back, I walked into the building and up the stairs. The tattoo studio looked like the bakery section of a small-town grocery; packaged breads and cakes with pink icing and frosted donuts next to a refrigerated section of milk and eggs and orange juice. The tattooer was an amalgam of other tattoers I’d had; a man, seething with irony and entitlement and condescension, but seeming calm and competent and no-nonsense. I had already decided on the design, and he put a stencil on the back of my upper arm that I could not see. He told me the design was a few things — maybe a dragon, something mythic and terrifying. Before he started, though, he reached down to my feet — bare, as they often are in dreams — and over the achilles tendon of my right foot tattooed a jagged shape, like the outline of a puzzle piece, but one that was all cruel edges. He showed me the one on the back of his foot, too, all his regulars had one, he said, this was how he identifies his best clients.
He started on the tattoo on my arm, and it didn’t hurt; but as he continued to work I noticed more and more how a grocery store aisle should not be a tattoo parlor, how this strange man wasn’t wearing gloves and brought his face too close to my arm, how the agent he rubbed into my skin looked less like Vaseline and more like shaving cream. But I didn’t back out; I had to get the tattoo, right? It would still look good. Everything would be fine. Everything seemed wrong, but everything would be fine. The needle kept going, until I woke up.
I’m telling you about that dream, because it was the first one I had after deciding to quit Twitter this week.
I was not an early adopter of Twitter, now X. I also never had that many followers, before I made my account private, I never saw engagement from people who weren’t already friends. Put more abstractly, the impact that Twitter — and the social media of the 2020s in general — had on me, or I on it, seemed negligible at best. It wasn’t a job, I don’t have a brand.
So I didn’t consider it to be particularly harmful when I would keep a tab open on my laptop, or when I would open my phone only to instinctively tap my thumb on the app, like idly opening the fridge every time I stepped into the kitchen. I didn’t think it was an issue, scrolling down the For You posts, past political ads, hot takes, genocide, thirst traps, threads on queer theory. I tried half-heartedly to curate by blocking accounts, muting words, but still I would open, scroll, refresh, get lost in threads and replies. For the most part it was hollow, meaningless tirades, I found them mildly entertaining, and after all didn’t everyone know what was going on? We all knew it was a hellsite. It can’t be a problem if you know it’s a problem.
There is an economy online that is fueled by reaction. The fastest response and re-figuring of a new meme, the strongest response to objectionable content. “Reaction videos” are a subset of all platforms that host video content, a cousin of the “Drama channels” of YouTube and TikTok. This is carbohydrate-rich gossip; a hearty bowl of macaroni with each click, the ease of taking in more and more information limited to the reach of a fingertip. It feels important to know all of the drama and events and jokes, the so-called “main character” of every day on Twitter, to be extremely online. To this moment I do not know why it is important, though I can sense an impulsive self-defense strategy to it; to be so up to speed on what makes a person the subject of online gossip and harassment that it will never happen to you. This justifies it, laughing and ogling the failures of others to avoid them ourselves. Sometimes we have a social justice angle, too: to know who to disavow and why so as not to be caught supporting them or, better yet, to be armed with information to use against those who still do.
All the while, of course, the people we are reading, reacting to, judging, and mythologizing are strangers. They exist on the other side of the screen as a collection of pixels and hold no real power. But that’s fine, it’s just a website, right?
Like many people, my experience of the months of March — June of 2020 was defined by the persistent erosion of my own mental health. The isolation felt in quarantine was part of it, as with it the reliance on social media as my window into the world. Most were gripped by panic, and the voices that rose to the top did so with the force of their own confidence, regardless of real expertise or consensus. Statements became more and more absolute, and more personalized: “If you are going outside, if you are visiting friends, if you aren’t disinfecting your groceries, wearing the right kind of mask, washing your hands, keeping your distance, not taking Covid seriously, you are a murderer.”
The hyperbole of it all didn’t matter. I was panicked, angry: I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I didn’t want to be on the wrong side. I didn’t want to be wrong. But I missed my family, my friends, my partner. I longed for them, and in turn felt guilty for longing, for even floating the idea of visiting someone’s home, or going to the grocery store. My value — my ability to be a good person — felt like it was in the hands of some anonymous chorus.
I understand now that, in many ways, the online actions that gave me so much stress were themselves the product of anxieties; that very few people were bad actors wanting to stir up frustrations. We were scared, and we are human. There is an instinct to see social upheaval as a lifeboat situation, where survival means both advocating for your own safety and justifying who to push overboard.
This is all working as intended: American Capitalism relies on putting self-interest over the community. It privileges the most selfish, those without privilege are left with so little else that they have no choice but to look out for their own interests first. Scarcity is not an invention of Twitter, it is a product of social and political cruelty. What happens on Twitter, I think, is something else: the conflation of circumstances with moral good and bad, what is wrongly called identity politics, political correctness.
Generally, speaking to the morality of actions or ideas is unproblematic and necessary. What happens online, though, is so far abstracted from humanity that it is something different: proselytizing, evangelical rhetoric. This, too, is American at its core: we are a nation of Puritans, in spirit if not by name. Every aspect of our lives: actions, ideas, community, likes and dislikes — must be held to a standard that, coincidentally, some stranger on the internet understands better than you. We are left to bear unrealistic expectations for ourselves: if I go see my parents in the spring of 2020, am I part of a genocide? If I vote to elect a Democrat to congress, am I a zionist? If I watch a movie, do I answer for the politics and actions of its producers, director, actors? If I go to Hawaii, am I a colonizer? If I defend the actors in a television show who are being harassed, and I a shill?
There’s a real your mileage may vary to the answers for all those questions, but I promise you they are not that hyperbolic, the slippery slope from action to ultimatum is baked in.
Being online in this day and age is waiting for the moment you hit the wrong tripwire and fuck up; as though you are not the person you think you are and at any moment the mask will slip. After all, so many horrible people go about their lives thinking they’re good; what if that’s you, too? Even in this moment, where I am proofreading this essay, I read the previous sentence and think: is this an admission of guilt? Is this what someone who would fuck up would say?
What finally got me to stop was November 6. The day after the election, I opened social media to find a chorus of diagnoses: what went wrong, who is to blame, what should be done next, who is going about it all wrong, who we should listen to, who we should not listen to, what will happen, what it all means. This is normal, after something like November 5, but what I felt, more than anything else, was an overwhelming air of superiority seeping through the screen — every person was tweeting from a place of expertise, of being right, of being the one who knew what was really going on. None were self-reflective, none considered what they could do better, nobody seemed interested in what anyone else had to say other than to correct them. Thousands of people clamoring to stay in the lifeboat, pushing others towards the edge.
Nobody knows that much. Nobody could possible wake up on November 6 with that much certainty in the future, the past, in what lies in the hearts of others.
I am a small person on the internet. I mean nothing to most people on these platforms, and that’s fine — my value should not be tied there. I have always said this, I have always known it, but now, at least in this week, I understood how wrong I was about myself. I was allowing myself to worry, to feel anger or frustration, over so many things that meant so little, and now — once again, in this terrible country — things are going to get worse and worse, and I had to decide if that platform, and everything that it flagged in my eyes from the moment I woke up to when I fell asleep, scrolling on my phone, would prepare me for anything. If it would make me kinder, more generous, more helpful.
This is not to say that the platform, or others like it, are worthless for social justice, or organizing, or sharing a common humanity. But, for the most part, those things need to be curated: they can be limited to friends, they are free from fake accounts and trending outrage and otherwise Dantean cacophony. Twitter — X — is no longer a useful place for doing good things, or feeling any sort of hope. At least not for me. In the three days since going cold turkey, I have slept better (even with those dreams), I have been online less, my head has felt clearer.
True, the space the app took up on my phone is still being reflexively tapped, but that will pass. I do not know if this change will lead to me being a better part of the world, if it will allow me to do everything that I possibly can for my community. But those are goals I must hold myself to, and I, unlike Twitter, am very much alive and real.
A post on X, unless you pay for premium, is 240 characters. Instagram posts are around 2,000 characters, plus 20 slides of square images. Stories last for a few seconds and need to be suitably brief.
Such inconsequential things, with so little detail, should only be minor aspects of our life, especially when it comes to understanding our own moral centers and politics. I realized, probably later than I should, that existing in such spaces did not make me a better person, nor did it make me worse. It made me terrified, and small, and sad. It hindered my mind in so many ways.
If you’re reading this and can’t relate, if you can use social media in a way that feels healthy and fulfilling and makes you whole, good. I am not asking anyone else to make a choice, I am only explaining mine, and offering thoughts on the State Of Things. This isn’t everything. Not even close.
