splashing around in the radioactive waste of twitter dot com
we're having fun and that's what matters
Toward the end of the 2018 science fiction book Severance by Ling Ma, we find our protagonist Candace at an abandoned shopping mall with a group of others who have also survived the incurable pandemic that kills people who inhale toxic microscopic spores, but not before sending them into a zombie-esque cycle of repeatedly performing familiar tasks. It is that vision of an eerily apocalyptic, empty wasteland of a mall that reminds me of the experience of being on Twitter today. However, unlike the survivor group of Severance that very much seemed to be wishing for death, I am having a blast.
I first joined Twitter in 2009, back when you had to send a text to 40404 to tweet. I didn’t even have Twitter on my phone—I had a dumbphone, in the days even before my iPhone, before my BlackBerry. I don’t even know what thoughts I had to tweet about. AP calc homework? Bright Eyes lyrics? I followed the group of other 14-18 year old pals I had amassed from other social networks — Xanga, MySpace, Tumblr. It was not cool to have internet friends then.
I went to college in 2010 and my professors were like, “social media is bad—whatever you tweet will live with you forever.” And then a year later they were like, “the Arab Spring shows us the importance and necessity of citizen journalism and Twitter.” And then a year after THAT they were like, “hm. Actually, having a personal brand is so important, so you MUST be on Twitter. Be yourself. But also, not too much.” I grew a modest following of a couple thousand people in college, despite most of my tweets being sent at 1:30 am, in the wee hours of a Saturday morning while I was in line to check out at the Kimmel food court Taco Bell. I used Twitter to follow journalists who had good tweets and also were good writers, people who I wanted to model an eventual journalism career after. I took a one-credit class on social media with a total hack of a professor who graded us based on our Klout scores and made us livetweet through all of our classes, including the class that had the unfortunate timing of occurring during the Boston Marathon bombing. I think he believed in the Science and Power of Klout and didn’t know you could game it like anything else online. After my Klout score overtook his during the course of the semester, I tweeted at him to let him know and he promptly unfollowed me. He believed Google+ was going to be the next big thing. He no longer teaches at my alma mater.
I graduated with a post-grad internship and moved to New York and started meeting people from Twitter in person. I don’t think all my tweets during this time were good, sometimes I could be mean or snarky or just dumb online. I made a lot of friends who I met on Twitter. I also met some people who were better at tweeting than they were at being good company in person. I laughed at the concept of a “DM slide,” and then I got DM slid and ended up in a complicated, fraught and ultimately pretty bad relationship. I was naive and overextended myself and had a tendency to be too polite, too patient, too nice to strangers online, because until that point I had only had good experiences meeting friends online, people who shared common interests, political beliefs, senses of humor. Then one time in 2017 I retweeted an event for a literary magazine I was going to attend, and then I got there, and this strange guy who seemed to recognize me and was there alone hovered a few feet away from me and my friends all night. Eventually he introduced himself as someone who followed me from Twitter. There was an open bar and he was indulging himself gratuitously. It became apparent he had showed up there to see me, but I never indicated I had wanted him to do that—I didn’t even really know him, though I recognized him—I had just liked a couple of his replies to my tweets in the days before the party and responded kindly to his DMs before that night. The whole thing kind of scared me. I left the party and I felt sad and uncomfortable for the rest of the week. I didn’t know how to articulate why that sucked so much. I don’t tweet my location or any indications of where I’m going to be anymore.
Twitter has also been a source of joy and community. I met one of my best friends, Emma, when she messaged me on Twitter in 2017. We met in person a few months later. I got my job after being laid off and tweeting that I was available for work, when my now-boss Matt DMed me and asked if I wanted to meet up to discuss a job opening at his firm. I started a media happy hour and invited everyone I knew from Twitter who worked in journalism to the first event in January 2018 and inadvertently ran an East Village dive bar out of Miller High Life when 130 journalists crowded into the bar one Tuesday night.
I met Chase in 2020 the week I moved to Fort Greene. We matched on Hinge. He looked cute, and I had not gone on a date with a new person in months. He was in the park with his friends Ben and Katherine, trying to write an opening message that indicated that he knew who I was because he followed me on Twitter after reading a story I wrote about Texas Instruments graphing calculators (still my favorite story I’ve ever written). Instead of closing out of my profile on Hinge, however, Ben, who does not know how dating apps work, accidentally unliked my profile from Chase’s Hinge app. Then, in an ultimate move of shooting one’s shot, Chase messaged me on Twitter, explaining this whole thing and asking if I wanted to go for a walk in Fort Greene Park. I had a Summer Friday. I wasn’t doing much anyway. I was both amused and moved by the lengths someone had to go to land themselves in the position of DMing me to ask me on a date at the height of a global pandemic after a dating app missed connection. I said yes. The rest is history.
I’ve been on enough social networks in their dying days to know I’ll take my favorite group of people from Twitter with me to the next thing if Twitter does eventually just like, stop working one day, even if the next thing is just this newsletter or Instagram, because it’s less about the platform than the people. But until Twitter does die, I’ll be there, watching Elon Musk fail to tweet his way into likability, constantly getting fact-checked by the website he inherited, terrifying corporate advertisers and messing up stock prices for drug manufacturers with the whole verification mess. I can’t think of a better way for it all to end.
This unexpectedly made me pretty sad last night! Thanks for nothing, Maya!