When I first got on the Internet back in the 90’s, it felt like a cool underground rock concert. Later on, it seemed like a vast public library, maybe with a nice skate park nearby. Today it feels more like a shopping mall. The transition happened so gradually that I barely noticed it.
Hanging out with your friends at the mall can be fun. But it can also be tiring. You’re constantly surrounded by ads, cheery salespeople are trying to get you to buy stuff, and whatever you eat in the food court is probably not great for your health.
For the past few years, I’ve subsisted on a media diet that mostly came from Twitter, consisting of “snackable” news articles with catchy headlines, shareable content with wide appeal (baby koala cuddles baby cat, how cute!), and righteous outrage at whatever horrible political thing was happening that day.
Twitter was often the first thing I looked at when I picked up my phone in the morning, and the last thing I browsed late into the night, endlessly flicking my thumb over the feed in the hope that something good would pop up. The light of the smartphone was often the only thing illuminating my bedroom before I finally turned in (always much too late).
All of this content – cat pictures, articles, memes, political hysteria – came streaming into my eyeballs in a rapid and seemingly random order, forcing my brain to make sense of the noise, to find patterns in the data. It’s addictive.
But the passivity of it, and the endless searching for something good to watch, meant that for me Twitter had essentially become television. Browsing Twitter was no more edifying than flipping through channels. At the end of a long, multi-hour session of Twitter-surfing, I could barely recall a single thing I had read.
Social media as public performance
Twitter is unlike television in a few crucial aspects, though. First off, the content is algorithmically selected, so whatever I’m seeing is whatever Twitter has determined to be most likely to keep my eyes on the screen. It’s less like I’m surfing through channels and more like the TV is automatically flipping from channel to channel, reading my eye movement and facial expressions to decide what to show next.
Second, Twitter has become an inescapable part of my professional life. My eight thousand-odd Twitter followers are a badge of honor, the social proof that I am an important person in my field and worthy of admiration and attention. It also serves as a measure of my noteworthiness in comparison to others. If someone has more followers than me, then they’re clearly more important than I am, and if they have less, well then maybe they’re an up-and-comer, but they’re certainly not there yet.
(This last statement may sound crass. But any avid Twitter user who hasn’t sized someone up by their follower count is either lying to themselves, or is somehow immune to the deep social instincts that mark us as primates.)
For the kinds of professionals who go to conferences, give public talks, and write blog posts, Twitter serves as a sort of “Who’s Who,” except that everyone is ranked by a single number that gives you a broad notion of their influence and prominence.
I’m sure many of my friends from the conference and meetup scene will look at my announcement of deleting my Twitter account as a kind of career suicide. Clearly Nolan’s lost his mind. He’ll never get invited to a conference again, or at the very least he won’t be given top billing. (Conference websites usually list their speakers in descending order of Twitter followers. How else can you tell if a speaker is worth listening to, if you don’t know their follower count?)
Much of that is probably true. I used to get a lot of conference invites via Twitter DMs, and those definitely won’t be rolling in anymore. Also, anyone who wants to judge my influence by a single number is going to have a hard time: they’ll have to piece it together from blog posts and search results instead. Furthermore, my actual influence will be substantially reduced, as most of the hits to my blog currently come from Twitter.
Why I’m done with Twitter
Thing is, I just don’t care anymore. I’ve spent years pouring my intellectual and emotional labor into Twitter, and for countless reasons ranging from harassment to Nazis to user-hostile UI, platform, and algorithm choices, they’ve demonstrated that they don’t deserve it. I don’t want to add value to their platform anymore.
To me, the fact that Twitter is so deeply embedded into so many people’s professional lives is less a reason to resign myself to keep using it, and more a reason to question and resist its dominance. No single company should have the power to make or break someone’s career.
Twitter has turned a wide variety of public and quasi-public figures – from Taylor Swift to a dude who speaks at tech conferences – into brand ambassadors for Twitter, and that ought to worry us. Despite what it claims, Twitter is not a neutral platform. It’s an advertising company with a very specific set of values, which it expresses both in how it optimizes for its core constituents (advertisers) and how it implements its moderation policies (poorly).
Well, it may indeed be a bad career move for Taylor Swift to abandon her Twitter account, but for a (very) minor public figure like myself, it’s a small sacrifice to make to knock Twitter down a peg. My career will survive, and my mental health can only improve by spending less time flicking a smartphone screen into the late hours of the night.
That’s why I’m deleting my account rather than just signing out. I want my old tweets to disappear from threaded conversations, from embeds in blog posts – anything that’s served from twitter.com. I want to punch a hole in Twitter’s edifice, even if it’s a small one.
I’ve backed up my tweets so that anyone who wants to see them still can. I’m also still fairly active on Mastodon, and as always, folks can follow me via my blog’s RSS feed or contact me via email.
This isn’t me saying goodbye to the Internet – this is me saying goodbye to the shopping mall. But you can still find me at the rock concert, in the public library, and in the park.
Read the Tea Leaves 