An Elegy for Twitter

So yeah, billionaire edgelord Elon Musk bought Twitter, and now he’s in the process of wrecking his new toy. The rumors coming out of Twitter are wild right now, and remind me of the heyday of Trump breaking news: Elon had fired Trust & Safety! He’s fired the legal team! He’s going to make verified users pay $5/month, or $20/month, and maybe everyone can get verified, and the team has to do it in one week or else they’re fired!

That’s not even going into his stated intentions to free the platform of limitations on hate speech and misinformation, and his disturbingly pro-Russia, let’s-go-fascism attitudes of the last few months. Oh, sure, he’s told advertisers Twitter absolutely will not turn into a toxic hellscape! But as the joke goes, “My ‘Twitter won’t turn into a hellscape’ t-shirt is raising questions already answered by my t-shirt.” GM’s already pulled all of their advertising. It’s going to snowball.

There’s a little bit of schadenfreude going on, knowing that this puerile manbaby is about to burn billions of dollars of value over an open pit, and that he just might take down Tesla with it, since he’s tied their valuation together by leveraging his Twitter buyout with Tesla stock. Elon is going to learn a bunch of costly lessons the hardest way he can, and many of them boil down to, as Nilay Patel wrote, “the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems.”

Mosty, though, I’m just real sad.

Twitter has been very good to me these many years. I got on fairly early, found a modest platform, and made connections that turned into business deals and friendships and ideas that will blossom in my mind for decades to come. It’s shaped me as an artist and as a person. And it’s given me a reach I don’t think I could ever have found anywhere else.

It seems like it’s time to walk away from Twitter. And yet — it’s hard to walk away from that reach when it feels like I’ll be putting a bullet in my own career. When stupid Nazi-infested, racist, misogynist, transphobic, homophobic, toxic Twitter is the biggest, easiest, most productive way that readers and clients and creative colleagues can find me. It’s going to be more and more awful! There’s really no question! But… where do you go? And how do you find people there?

I already use Twitter vastly less than I once did. A lot of the more-personal stuff I used to Tweet about has hidden away in private Slacks. But now it seems like, even if I don’t choose to leave on my own this very minute, the days of its utility are numbered. Frankly, if the plan to fire 75% of staff is accurate, I doubt the site will even be stable enough to use by the end of the year — maybe not even the end of the week.

I’m trying a whole bunch of things and seeing what sticks. One is this: I’ve recommitted to my blog. I’m in the process of a redesign for the first time in like… seven years. I’m also trying to Tumblr, which I honestly never had the hang of to begin with. I’ve signed up on WT.social and found it impenetrable; I’ve asked to be added to Bluesky’s beta list.

And I’m starting up a private Slack for people who think they might want to hang out with people like me, and people who like me? You can join it if you want. You might be the first person there besides me! Feel free to invite your friends! (As long as they’re not Nazis, and I reserve the right to moderate and banhammer with caprice and speed because it’s my party and I’ll… you know.)

Will any of this be more than crickets in a month? Who knows! But it’s time to throw some stuff at the wall, because even if I don’t walk away on my own, the clock is ticking on Twitter. And we all need to be prepared for the moment its time runs out.

EDIT: An addendum — I didn’t include Mastodon in my list of places because the last time I tried it, it wasn’t really active, but omg it is hopping now, arguably more interesting than Twitter is now? So yeah, find me on Mastodon, too!