eX-Twitter User

My addiction to speech and its provocations

By and large, I am an affable person, generally not prone to deliberate provocations. As a fiction writer, I am quite the opposite, but that’s irrelevant. Though I’d joined Twitter to promote my indie novels (silly me), I became a common speech junkie like all the rest.

As an eX-Twitter user, for my part, it was a mixed bag of reactionary impulses and assumed objectivity—attempted intellectual coolness.

But I’ve deactivated. More than free of it, I feel protected from it.

It’s essentially a spiteful platform and not because Musk has taken it over. It’s always been, whether one partisan army has control or the other. Although X seems freer than Twitter, more Wild West than communist China of the previous regime, both managerial styles produce hotheaded vengefulness in its users, and everyone knows this.

It’s a conversational framework without the conversation, vulnerable to misinterpretation, misreading, misanthropy. Amplification of bias is its primary mode of operation—and it’s a Barbie Dreamland for narcissists.

It’s like being on a reality show where the most intentional conflict gets the views. Like being in the house of a perpetual season of MTV’s The Real World, but there’s millions of people in the house, hiding behind doors, eavesdropping, plotting, ambushing you while you sip your morning coffee, or nip at a nipperkin of your preferred afternoon drink.

Of course, there are housemates you like, even love—you think. But even they are just as prone as you to the vagaries of human impulse, especially when there’s potentially thousands—millions of eyes watching your every move, hearing your most questionable confessions, straining for your most offensive whispers.

But it’s fun.

Or entertaining.

Obsessive. Compulsive.

Like an addiction.

In the end (as of yesterday), I was spending hours a day on it: posting, replying, reposting. First thing in the morning, I would pour my coffee, grab my phone and cigarettes, chain-smoke, and doom scroll.

In the evening—repeat. But with wine: a bottle, and a half, or two.

In short, eX-Twitter had mesmerized me into a co-dependent trance, needful of its pronouncements, opinions, barbs, and blather—its praise; and, in the process of my zombification, I’d exacerbated multiple addictions. So distracted by The Dialogue, I’d ignore just how many extinguished butts were in the tray, just how much wine I’d drunk.

Today is the first morning of an eX-Twitter user. Hardly a habit kicked. But with my coffee this AM, I’d only smoked two cigarettes instead of six or seven. I’ve selected the 12 month reactivation time-allotment, mostly because the longer I have, the more likely I will forget about it. Thirty days is too short a period for an addict to have to decide his fate.

More than smoking, I loved seeing the newest, wittiest takes from my favorite ironists, intellectuals-in-the-middle, sparring left and right (but mostly left), all of whom are liberals or liberally-minded in that classical sense that has been branded dangerous, but only because of their lethal capacity to mock the institutionally deranged for the disreputable status-clowns that they are.

As a former lefty, it was a joy to behold, or a rush, a high—a false euphoria.

I am a Xennial, born in 1978, neither as cool as older Gen-X, nor as self-assured as Millennials—somewhere in between, in the nether-lands of influence, just narcissistic enough to believe eX-Twitter could be a place to be seen, heard, and maybe, hopefully (God, I hope—pick me!) admired.

And there’s the rub: everyone is on there to be appreciated at least; praised, adored, worshipped at worst—the most talkative ones anyway. The quiet ones are a nebulous bunch. The psychopaths only speak when they want to dismember someone. Real dialogue is basically non-existent. Any long threads are monologues with approximate replies of “thanks!” and “you’re right” receiving grateful mere emojis from the author of the thread. The only time two users engage for longer is during an argument, a fight, or prolonged mutual slanders. Some have substance but rarely, exceptionally, and even then, you can sense the heat building, the rising temptation to ad hominem. It gets petty and vicious very quickly, and, we, the common users, the ones without much to lose, are most prone to this trap. It’s the street junkies who kill or maim each other most frequently, not the kingpins, although they, too, assassinate their rivals, any incisive threat to their hegemony.

Genuine, relationship-building exchange is virtually non-existent. I’d only met two of my eX-Twitter mutuals in real life. One, I’d hit it off with instantly; the other I’d met at a loud concert, and though I liked him just as well, it was hard to get a clearer sense of our social compatibility.

And it didn’t matter, ultimately. We all went back online and to our addiction to saying the things, liking the other things, decrying the debasement of the things. We live far apart in the real world but even farther apart online—all of us, I mean. Because it’s a flimsy substitute for communication. It is a solipsistic construct for social decline, a one-way street full of armored assault tanks, while most of us carry Nerf Blasters in hand.

When I wrote my vigilante thriller, No Winter Lasts Forever, back in 2019, I’d remembered a nightly newsmagazine segment from 2011-2012 that I had forgotten, but it obviously stayed with me, because it resurfaced with a powerfully instructive force, giving more focus to this novel about confronting the scourge of mass shootings. The segment showed young men—late teens to early twenties—who gathered in anonymous chat rooms where they’d pretended to be serial killers, pedophiles, rapists—all manner of psychopaths, and I used that online context as the meeting-ground for the killers and their sycophants in the novel. This is the worst of online communication, of course, but there is an aspect of what this sad situation illustrated to all of it—even within the well-intentioned niches—the platforms play on the pretend, the unreal, the virtual, the imaginary self, churning a cauldron of uncertain outcomes.

Social media is place of pretense, a place where otherwise subconscious drives are given full expression, no matter how artfully intoned—even when most passively consumed. The license to indulge unmitigated thoughts and feelings remains. Its potential to devolve into a life-sucking void of chaotic, unstructured humanity is too high. Online speech forums seem like a good idea; they seem like the best use of quick and effective modernity, but, for all the quickness, it’s hardly effective, if by effective we mean properly productive, supporting and ordering a civil society.

I will miss my wicked-smaht mutuals. I will miss the injection of their wits. I will miss their righteous bent. Their humor, their admirable detachment. I am sure it’s a pleasure and a privilege to know them. I imagine it is. I can only wish to have those kinds of friends in actual life.

But imagining identity, the escape to some superior notion of yourself, is the foundational insubstantiality of any addiction.