Tag Archives: Twitter

A Year of Starting Over Digitally

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Logged into my oldest email account which I no longer use, and apparently everything was deleted: drafts, sents, everything. Well then.

Yahoo deleting my oldest email inbox (and possibly my late aunt’s) just really caps off how I’ve felt about the last year. Clearing out a long digital history from earlier in my life pre-college, partly because of circumstances outside of my control.

Facebook because of Zuckerberg. Twitter because of Musk. Yahoo because I was not told that Yahoo deletes your inbox contents after 12 months of inactivity.

LinkedIn, at least, was fully in my control.

I didn’t need any of it. But I regret that so much was deleted without my consent.

Deleting Facebook and Twitter at 38

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I turned 38 on February 5.

I have had a Facebook account since November 2005, which I created while I was a freshman at Oglethorpe University, when college classmates were encouraging each other to create a Facebook profile to converse with each other, back when smartphones weren’t a thing yet, back when most computers on campus were connected using DSL.

In 2016-2017, I deactivated that account, in which so many of the “friends” from earlier in my life, from Warner Robins and Macon State and Oglethorpe were not too keen on my increasingly “political” posts, and created this account. 

What has transpired over the last month should not have been the impetus for me to do this, and I know that I should have done this years ago. 

I am now about to delete this account, that previous account, and maybe two other accounts. Not merely deactivate, but delete them entirely. No more of me on here.

This month, I’ve marked three Twitter accounts, two Instagram, two Threads, and four Facebook profiles for deletion, which should finish by the beginning of March.

This will be a new experience for me. Taking greater charge of the data I write about myself, of downloading and backing up what I can take, even of deleting what Facebook won’t let me download (i.e., group posts). I’ve spent some of this week deleting groups and pages I’ve created over the years, and there were several of them, at least until Facebook ran into “problems” with deleting groups of which I am admin. 

The last year has shown me a bit about what and who I will have to cut myself off from, with what and whom I have to burn bridges and live without. And now, so are many of you. Funny how that works. 

And Facebook has long shown its age, and its demographic is aging hard. So has Twitter.

So I will no longer age with them, and vice versa. Separately, but not together.

None of you have to age with a centralized silo like this, one which keeps so much of your data and connections hostage. 

This is an act of one taking more control over their life, one with potential ramifications for one’s future as a human being but which can also slowly free oneself from what someone once called “poaster’s madness” (yes, they spelled it “poaster’s” with an “a”). 

This is not a heroic thing to do. This is the least I should do at this moment. This is basic mental health in a time when madness is rewarded with misguided catharsis, a time which I am sure will get worse before a (dis)proportionate reaction comes around. 

I apologize to the 1.4k Facebook friends I had from my recent profile, to the many more friends I made along the way, as well as to the many political individuals whom I first met over Facebook since 2005.

I also apologize to many of my college friends, of whom I made far more through Middle Georgia State (formerly Macon State) and the Warner Robins campus of Central Georgia Tech (formerly Middle Georgia Tech). I also apologize to those who I’ve made through the odd jobs I’ve done for them: candidate and issue campaigns, website design, and more.

Erasing Oneself from the Narrative

I feel that healing the rot caused by the roots of the housing supply crisis, which social media silos like Facebook and Twitter have only inflamed, is a mass, interpersonal struggle, not merely a personal trifle. 

Wresting control over one’s attention and self-awareness away from car-brain and (for-profit) social media brain is crucial for where we end up next in our politics. 

I see both of these mentalities emanating from the same alienating, atomizing root, in which one can live in the “wealthiest, most powerful nation-state in the history of the human species”(™) and find oneself increasingly isolated in exurbs and isolated alongside 3 billion others on Facebook. 

And we wonder why radicalization toward misanthropic, illiberal politics has increased in purchase. 

But if the single-family, car-centric zoning of housing is a crisis facilitated by its design toward consumption of land, can that be linked to the design of not only the social media algorithms feeding posts and ads to users’ eyeballs, but also the functional design of continuous scrolling?

It is time to allow ourselves to densify our housing and build inward, build more apartments closer to public transit, build more public transit, build away from the Sunbelt, and build away from wildland-urban interfaces. 

Similarly, it is time to choose media which respects our autonomy and right to self-moderate, respects our attention and does not continually feed us more content without our deliberation, allows us to retain and relocate our data and identity, allows us more control in how we wish to present ourselves, allows us to seek more consensus rather than contention in the projection of reality, allows us to refuse a platform to the misanthropic. 

The status quo that we have right now does none of those things. 

Therefore, as I have fed into this status quo for nearly 20 years of my life, as part of the West Coast burns, as the federal administrative state is set on fire from inside the White House, I erase myself from this narrative. I deny this beast any more of what I’ve fed it, and reclaim my time. I begin the healing process which I’ve denied myself all of these years. And I will try to actually blog long-form more often.

Dear reader, I hope you do, too.

I am now thinking frequently about these lyrics from Philippa Soo’s performance as Eliza in Hamilton:

“I’m erasing myself from the narrative

Let future historians wonder

How Eliza reacted when you broke her heart

You have torn it all apart

I’m watching it

Burn

Watching it burn

The world has no right to my heart

The world has no place in our bed

They don’t get to know what I said

I’m burning the memories

Burning the letters that might have redeemed you

You forfeit all rights to my heart

You forfeit the place in our bed

You sleep in your office instead

With only the memories

Of when you were mine

I hope that you burn”

Social Networking Without Purpose

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At the very least, I can respect that LinkedIn is assigned a purpose for the social networking which it facilitates: doing business.

Everything within and about it is constructed for the purpose of companies and talents to communicate with each other. All brand pages are mandated to be just that: pages for companies. Group forums must exist for the purpose of networking among professionals and businesses. Profiles are designed as resumes. Very transparently corporate and capitalist.

What purpose do Facebook, Twitter, BlueSky, etc all serve?

They have none. These sites of the Big Tech variety are all expensive tech demos, playing at a pastiche of “community”. And look where that has taken their owners and users. Look where it has taken whole countries.

I no longer believe that a social networking site should exist without a purpose or target audience.

And now far-right types are winning the propaganda war and bending these purposeless social networking sites to the purpose of reverting every liberalizing political development of the last century.

Progressive, solidarity-oriented political types are on the backfoot because they found each other through these purposeless sites and did not expect/were not prepared for the possibility that their relationships or priorities would be threatened when oppositional powers gained the access to give these sites a contrary purpose.

Now these purposeless sites have given up on moderation, or have even reversed themselves entirely to satisfy the reactionary, authoritarian politics which have gained ascendancy since the 2010s.

Those who are disturbed by these developments are encouraging each other to dump Twitter for BlueSky, or even to give up on social networking altogether in favor of meatspace meetings.

Even after all of this, I’m not too keen on the idea of giving up on social networking entirely. But I am very keen on giving up on this social networking which has no theme, no purpose, no general focus.

I also want to give up on microblogging as a social networking exercise. The nearly two decades of attempts to create a distributed, decentralized, FOSS answer to Twitter or Facebook have not addressed the behavioral question at the heart of social microblogging: when does a microblog post or its authoring account cross the line from free expression into anti-social behavior, and how can it be successfully, sustainably moderated?

In April, it will have been 20 years since “microblog” or “tumblelog” were first identified as a format of blogging. The moderation of social microblogging has increasingly degraded with the number of features added to microblogging sites.

Lemmy is, at least in theory, a better application of the ActivityPub protocol than Mastodon/Misskey/etc. At the very least, Lemmy has some hierarchy to its moderation, in which the owners of the website can at least pretend to delegate discretion and moderation to topics of their own interest, while the microblogging apps like Mastodon struggle to scale moderation to every user.

Microblogging, on the other hand, should be returned to the generality of the blog, divorced from the industrialization of frictionless posting to a shared, common interface. Facebook and Twitter both integrating a common interface for posting and viewing posts, incapacitating the ability to design one’s own profile, was a massive progenitor of the downward social media spiral, one that, to an extent, Tumblr managed to avoid with its customizable blog profiles.

So:

  • Progressive-minded people should learn to love the blog again, in its own right.
  • progressives should also learn how to discuss in shared forums again, especially in distributed link aggregators like Lemmy
  • Blogging and discussion hosts should have a purpose and theme for their existence;
  • Wikipedia remains undefeated and unshittified.

Twitter/Medium/Blogger co-founder Evan Williams told NYT that he’s sorry if Trump wouldn’t be president without having a Twitter account. His profile in the NYT dwells a lot on how the promise of mass media freedom offered by the largest corporate-owned social media/microblogging sites turned quickly into the toxicity we now know of.

I don’t know if the tech is to blame, since there are an insane number of factors which play roles in how this transition happened. I can cite how the ability to share posts allows users to irresponsibly traffic content which appeal to our base emotions. I can cite how corporate, centralized social networks – driven by advertisement-based profit motives – are the primary couriers of such disinformation and misinformation. I can cite how privacy and self-protection tools have not caught up with the exponential growth of these services.

The opinion from Cliff Watson in the article that these micro/blogging tools, even Williams’s current venture Medium, are relics from the apex of the Obama era, and are not ready for the post-Obama world, is a sign of the transition from the content freedom which was embraced for the last decade to an era of content responsibility to protect ourselves from psyops and abuse.

That “#Ni**erNavy” Meme

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That hashtag based on a mistake by Yahoo Finance was saved by Black Twitter, but only Black Twitter can touch it with humorous pincers, like it’s a radioactive substance.

I think we’re damaged enough by our past exposure that it doesn’t hurt us as much when we hold it and treat it this way. In the hands of non-Black people, it’s either a nuclear fallout waiting to happen or a weapon of mass destruction to be used with extreme prejudice.

Most of the stuff under that hashtag are cultural references which relate specifically to the Black Southern-descended ex-slave working class experience. I volunteer that they are cultural references which non-Black people with more privilege would find objectionable or distasteful when done by their own people (e.g., “redneck culture” and it’s distaste among more privileged, urbane White people).

There are references to chitlins and collard greens as MREs! Why would non-Black Southern-descended ex-slave working class people celebrate that (IMHO) nasty-ass shit? That’s as real as it gets!

This is why the hashtag is heavily self-policed. For classist reasons, nobody really wants to esteem or positively support any of the contents of this hashtag in another culture.