I joined Twitter in the spring of 2008.
Everyone was talking about social media then. Very few people really understood what that even was or what the implications were.
That was the exciting thing about it. It felt like a big sandbox or pile of LEGO.
It felt like we, the participants, were defining it, building it, together. We had high hopes.
For me, those hopes were largely realized in the next few years.
I am a pretty big music fan. It even says so in my bio.
It was through Twitter that I successfully promoted my music blog, thedeletebin.com, as I grew my craft and my audience.
Through that effort I connected with musicians I admire. I even had conversations with them. Some even followed me back, inexplicably.
This made me feel, for a time, that Twitter was a great leveler.
For a time, it really felt as if good ideas were a valued currency no matter who had them, and that good information shared between people could weave very the fabric of a changing culture.
Sometimes, it was all just for shits ’n’ giggles.
The jokes. The flirts. The sharing of YouTube clips to favourite songs, favourite movie scenes, or the perfect GIF for the moment to make someone laugh, even if you didn’t know them well.
It was all important.
I met my partner on Twitter in part because of this environment and what it allowed. And ours is not the only such story.
Twitter as social infrastructure
This isn’t just about my emotional, subjective experience of Twitter — although even if it is, what’s wrong with that?
Twitter helped communities gather together in a way that was impossible before.
It enabled people to share information and respond together in real time when needed; breaking news, school closures, traffic issues, local festivals, storm warnings, heat domes, town hall meetings, COVID vaccine information and best practices, election day results.
The list goes on.
This doesn’t even consider the global impact of #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and any number of sea change movements over the last decade in which Twitter played an essential role.
Twitter became integral to 21st century living.
It became a borderless hub for people to become connected and informed — and even transformed — because of the personal stories that users were able to share without platform constraints.
Twitter empowered communities created by users.
It helped artists, writers, podcasters, and activists to organically gather audiences. It helped people organize real time, real life events, big and small.
It became social infrastructure.
Twitter had value without profitability
Here comes the kicker, though.
Twitter also became something that’s unforgiveable in our current neoliberal world.
It became socially valuable while remaining unprofitable.
Twitter changed culture.
But it did not rake in the lucre. It still doesn’t.
So, what had to happen in light of that?
It had to get worse for the people who made it, which is users.
Twitter account holders had no financial skin in the game for over a decade. It was a free platform where they could build a community and an audience — for free.
It certainly didn’t matter to the average user whether shareholders got the returns to which they are entitled.
When a billionaire bought Twitter in October 2022 as it if it were a flat of mayonnaise from Costco, the mandate was clear.
The means to achieve it wasn’t and still isn’t, apparently.
Beyond that, there are theories about why things have unfolded the way they have. I certainly have my own.
None of it matters.
That level playing field which Twitter once presented is gone.
Without a dominant profit motive, capitalism and neoliberal structures would not suffer it as it was.
Conquered territory
Some things remain.
Twitter, by any other name, is nothing without user content.
But not my content. Not anymore.
I do not wish to participate in whatever Twitter is becoming, guided by narrow, petulant whims that seem to change by the day to the benefit its owners and not its users.
Also: it’s no longer a safe place.
Its owner quietly removed protections for trans people. Tolerance of white supremacy has seemingly been let off of its already too-long leash.
Account security is weak.
There is a worrying preponderance of disinformation on the platform.
Many of these have been issues for a while. They are longstanding internet problems. They are, in particular, social media problems.
Yet on Twitter, all bets seem to be off in trying to solve them. Rather, it seems like Twitter, again by any other name, is now conquered territory.
The social infrastructure and community empowerment we found in Twitter when it started in the late 2000s and for many years in the following decade have been cast off.
They’ve been replaced by benefit-less subscription models and cultural vandalism.
And that is why I found it necessary to disinvolve myself in its story.
Tell us how you really feel
Do I feel self-righteous about this? Do I feel some sense of moral superiority over others who have decided to remain and continue nurturing what they’ve built as best they can?
The actual truth of it is this.
I feel shitty about it.
Just shitty. That’s it.
That’s fifteen years of my life.
During that time, I built a rapport with people in my town whom I otherwise never would have met.
I nurtured relationships with people far away whom I’ve not met personally but still consider friends.
And (yes), I reveled in chances to talk to one of my favourite songwriters Ron Sexsmith about how much I love his music (and his puns) while enjoying frequent responses from him.
Right now, I am in mourning.
That sounds pretty dramatic, I know.
What’s the big deal? Just join another social media platform and start over.
They’re a dime-a-dozen these days.
But they are more than the sum of their parts in the same way a neighbourhood is more than just collection of houses and stores and parks.
The neighbourhoods we cherish attach themselves to us for life. They help shape the way that we perceive our lives. They become emotional geography as much as they are, or were, physical.
They feel like home.
When the single-minded forces of commerce bulldoze them and erect a swath of beige McMansions, that has an emotional impact on us.
How could it not?
Sure, those neighbourhoods will live on in our memories and nothing lasts forever and all that (especially when you knock things down and drag away the remains …).
But their erasure feels like violence.
The way we measure value
Community is essential to a healthy society.
Coming together as groups with diverse experiences and perspectives, and with stories to tell each other that have the power to encourage, challenge, ultimately draw us together and change our lives for the better is what helps us to grow as people and as a civilization.
There is tremendous value in that which cannot be measured.
Perhaps, in a world where everything must be quantified to register as being worth preserving, this is why that which connects us the most meaningfully is also the easiest to unravel and undo.
