The last New Year’s Eve party I went to was such a horrible experience that I resolved, at the age of 27, to spend the rest of my New Years on my own. The details are hazy—sometimes, we deal with bad memories by selectively forgetting bits—but the one I remember most is someone wanting to marry me. I was only at the party because I was visiting someone in New York, and a friend and I were their guests over the holidays. If you know anything about my work, you’ll know why the very idea and the fact that I was effectively trapped in this hideous situation revolted me. If you don’t: I hate marriage, and I have since the age of eight, for reasons that go far beyond personal antipathy. Being put in the uncomfortable position of having to be polite to some jerk who google-eyed me—and he wasn’t even that drunk—while some others just laughed as if it was all such fun—hardened my resolve: When this is over in a few hours: never again.
I kept my promise to myself and have only shared the evening with a friend a few times. As I grow older, I grow more resolved: I might someday be in Paris over the holidays and in a hotel room with a view of walls outside my window but I’ll still make sure to be inside, on my own, with a delicious and decadent dinner and perhaps a movie cued up. There are many things I loathe about New Year’s Eve, but most of all I hate the stench of desperation that slithers and slides everywhere. It’s a combination of “I hate being alone and only losers are alone on New Year’s” and “If I’m seen alone by anyone, on this night, my entire life will be meaningless and I’ll just disappear.”
A few years after that ghastly New Year’s Eve and sometime around Christmas, a friend and I were laughing about the fact that I planned to drive back to Chicago from Indiana (where I was staying with him) to make sure I would be alone for the upcoming night. He revealed that he’d made a similar resolution after a particularly miserable evening in his teenage years. He had driven from Boston to New York City with a group of friends and they were all determined to have, you know, the quintessential NYC NYE experience, the kind they’d seen in music videos and movies (we were very definitely Gen Xers, what can I say?) and somehow ended up outside one of the hot nightclubs to which someone may have promised access. Reality rained upon them, literally, in a sleety, snowy mixture as they stood for hours in the cold, waiting to get in. Eventually, my friend muttered, “This is stupid,” and went back to his warm hotel room.
I’m reminded of that anecdote as I watch droves of people making a huge show of leaving Twitter and floating back and forth between all the new platforms that have opened up. Everyone, it seems, is determined to get into the hottest new club and they’re all stuck outside in the rain. And when they do get in, it’s always a letdown: the music is crap, the DJ is bored, the “champagne” is some weird bubbly stuff, all the “cocktails” are just spiked fruit juice with names like “Passion,” and all of it is giving Sad Nineties vibes. You hope for sex to make up for your misery but even that proves elusive, the toilets are clogged, and by 2 a.m, you’re just trying to get a cab back home but that’s hard because it’s New Year’s and, seriously, what did you think, and now you have to wake your friend—the one who never goes out on this night—to come get you.
I’ve tried a couple of the supposed alternatives to Twitter, and left. I was on Discord for a few weeks but only because someone very kindly invited me to join a group devoted to one of my hobbies. After just a few days, I began to feel like I was stuck in a dark set of labyrinths, with entrances and exits that somehow moved both horizontally and vertically (the group was lovely, truly, and I wish I could have stayed). It was like a terrifying nightmare directed by Guillermo del Toro, and I dislike him and his pretentious style almost as much as I dislike marriage. As for Mastodon: the fact that it’s named after an extinct mammal seems apt and as a Mac person, I’m not keen on anything that requires me to have an engineering degree so that I can build my own server (or whatever the hell it is that I’m supposed to do). Bluesky requires an invite and seems most like the nightclubs everyone tries to get into: the fact that you have to score an invite is just silly (how old are we?). Judging by reports, it’s mostly filled with celebrities (or people who think they’re celebrities and have convinced the Gods of Bluesky that they’re Very Well Known) congratulating themselves for being on Not Twitter, and I’ve never been interested in knowing what Famous People Think and Talk About.
And then, of course, there’s Threads, owned by Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. Your Threads account is attached to your Instagram account. Should you decide to delete your Threads account, your Instagram account—over which you may have worked for years—will also be deleted.
Which just confirms everything I’ve always felt about Zuckerberg: that he is the kind of man who will force you to marry him, but not before compelling you to sign a truly horrific NDA and a prenup that gives you nothing even if he sires six of your children. With those Very Bad Boyfriend vibes, it won’t surprise me if Zuckerberg makes Threads mandatory for all Instagram account holders, just to boost his numbers and sponsorships across Meta platforms.
None of this is meant to validate Twitter, which can be a toxic pool of warmed over excrement laced with the bitter bile of millions of poisonous souls and peppered with some plain old-fashioned spite. I spent nearly two years researching a particularly heinous case where Twitter trolls (masquerading as Righteous Workers) tried to ruin lives and livelihoods—when I was done with that piece, “What Really Happened At Current Affairs?,” the cumulative exposure to all the lies and toxicity for such a long period of time drove me to my bed and very long showers for a couple of weeks, drained. And yet Twitter is also in some ways, at least in its imagined form, an example of perfect social media in that it is, dare we say, democratic (technically, anyone can join) and requires account holders to make their points in the pithiest possible ways. When Twitter works well, it’s a thing of beauty: ask a research question and experts, actual experts in a field, will generously share their resources. And it’s one of the funniest places on the internet, precisely because it forces people to make very quick, snippy points with a limited range of characters. I suspect that most of the authors of the wittiest Twitter takes that have gone viral couldn’t (and perhaps wouldn’t) write good, witty, sustained pieces longer than 300 characters, but they’re geniuses at the sharp, wry takedowns.
I don’t idealise Twitter. Unlike many others, I would never claim to have found “community” there, only some individuals with whom I’ve established a sense of trust and friendship. Twitter was always built on a tower of frozen acid, not on anything resembling actual networks and relationships: the current meltdown is just one sign that it was always someone’s plaything, a ball to be batted around until the player got bored. *The co-founder is Jack Dorsey who, with his carefully trimmed beard and and his tie-dye shirts and his talk about Twitter as a public square, mostly escapes criticism for the fact that he’s also deeply mired in all the Bitcoin bullshit: the kind of bullshit that creates actual economic harm. Elon Musk has the socially starved instincts of a three-year-old left alone in the playground because all the other kids’ moms took them out of range of his tantrums. There’s no real difference between them: neither one is a saviour or a creator.*
Will Twitter survive? It’s hard to say, but I’ll be surprised if it disappears entirely and even Musk may have to control himself. Of all the other platforms, Meta might look like the best alternative but its reach may never extend to Europe and while it’s in the honeymoon period, it’s easy for people to forget that Zuckerberg is hardly an ethical alternative to Musk (this New York Times podcast, with Natalie Kitroeff and Mike Isaac, is a good roundup of all the issues and histories leading up to Threads).
But who really needs Twitter, or Threads, or Mastodon, or Dinosaur, or Regurge, or whatever new social media entity is likely to emerge from this hellscape? For writers like me and for small, independent magazines like Current Affairs or Truthout or mid-sized publications like In These Times or even, really, Megasauruses like the New York Times, social media has become a mode of survival. Without it, we’re left flailing in the dark, desperately shooting out our “products” into the sky, hoping they’ll land somewhere, anywhere and maybe, just maybe get us new subscribers, more exposure, more of…whatever it is that we think social media can get us. But social media has also become a place for people who imagine themselves as writers, the writahs who are really just influencers who want to be seen as intellectuals of a sort, to carve out imagined careers as…what, exactly? I watch many of these people hop from platform to platform and it’s unclear what they plan to do with all the billions and billions (said in my best Carl Sagan voice) of followers they hope to accrue. What, I wonder, do you want to do, exactly, if you’re not actually writing but only talking a lot about writing?
In a better world, writers and publishers would have more support from the state, why, yes, I did say the state, and we wouldn’t all be competing for this piffly thing we call Influence. People—and by people I mean everyone who feels compelled to explain social media as a perfectly reasonable thing that exists in the world—like to say that human beings are on these always perilously toxic platforms because they like to connect with others. I mean, sure, maybe, whatever, and I love parts of it because it keeps me in touch with old childhood friends I once feared were lost to me forever. But I use social media in limited ways, and I think that’s true of many people. The problem is that the toxic minorities are also the loudest and that they get the most attention, often to very harmful effect, and that’s when we have to realise that, actually, a lot of people are on here because they’re vile, toxic people who love ruining lives because they have so little meaning and purpose in their own.
But here we are, and everyone’s leaving Twitter, oh, yes, they are, they are, they really, really are. Did you hear me, they scream as they head for the door, I’m leaving this dumpster filled with shit! And then they return the next week: I’m only back because someone told me someone was talking about something and that might be me. Which sounds a lot like that old trick, where you ring your ex’s doorbell because, You left your pen behind and I don’t want you coming to my door in the middle of the night looking for it, and I’m really done with you, you hear me? I mean, listen, did you hear me? I said: I’m done with you.
And then the next week: I’m back to tell you I found someone else who loves me more and better, and look at this, you coulda had all this, and I’m now going to leave you, you hear?
I mean, look: just leave already.
*Update: On July 12, I removed a reference to the Jonah Hill text message controversy (offered as proof of Twitter’s collective wit). I realised I don’t know enough about what happened, and I didn’t want to replicate the internet’s habit of jumping in with ill-informed opinions.
*On July 13, I added some clarifying points about Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk (see asterisked section).
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