Over the back half of November, I chose to take a sabbatical from social media. It’s a routine I’ve done for a few years that has felt akin to detox. I don’t wish to diminish the struggles around more serious addictions, but you don’t realize the kind of hold the newsfeed has on you until you’re forced to step away and touch grass. You know, go for a walk and be forced to have a conversation that lasts more than two minutes. With each subsequent year, the sabbaticals have become more rewarding and enlightening. Even if this recent one wasn’t my longest (I spent the better part of six months off of Twitter in 2023), it was enough to lighten my post-election mood and make me optimistic for the future.
And yet there was something about returning that felt different this time. On the plus side, the need to grovel wasn’t immediately there. I wasn’t eager to get on my digital knees and ask everyone “Did you miss me?” while detailing every way that I was hurting. While I did acknowledge it to a small extent, I did my best to get back into the swing of things. However, where even a six month sabbatical gave me some confidence that everything would be waiting for me, I was seeing signs of rats fleeing ships even before I logged back on.
Part of this stemmed from ideas I had been exploring over the past few months. There’s the idea of “dead internet theory” and my belief that AI is part of the growing distrust of journalism. It’s the belief that Elon Musk has essentially turned Twitter into a circle jerk. Coming back, I was reminded of the various periods of anxiety I had when he took over and changed the website for the worst. It was there in the rollouts. It was there in that emergency meeting when Joe Biden’s Super Bowl quip earned more traffic than his. This was no longer about the fun of entertaining conversations. This was about the ubiquitous praise of a billionaire. Before you account that he has funded harmful agendas, including an alarming amount of transphobic rhetoric, there’s the simple fact that he’s about to become the head of a government agency with a name inspired by a bitcoin meme. Given that his administration has yet another member with their own social media platform in Truth Social, I have to believe this is all an attempt to control the narrative, removing reason in favor of messaging. Screw freedom of the press. If anything can be manipulated, the grounds for facts disappear. Opinions are our new overlord. Going viral is better than morality. It’s not a problem unique to Musk but given his billionaire status, it’s hard not to think he had the power to do something more productive with his resources.
Returning to Twitter, I immediately noticed small things were changing. More than the larger question as to whether it was ethical to be using the website in the first place, it was the time when I saw everyone’s forward address to Bluesky. As someone who has been around Twitter rounding two decades, the threat did lack a sting. Mastodon came and went. Threads, a.k.a. “The Twitter Killer™,” has basically become Facebook Jr. The only real advantage that Bluesky had was that it was: A. From the guy who made Twitter, and; B. Not Twitter. There wasn’t the stink (or, shall we say, musk). There was no Grok. There was no paying for blue checkmarks. It was a chance to start anew. For as much as I’m more keen to ask why Jack Dorsey didn’t just use his resources to improve Twitter in the first place, I guess he’s a good businessman. That’s what I’ve heard, anyway.
Bluesky is currently seen as a utopia compared to Twitter’s dystopia. I worry the latter will be too wrapped up in the modern political landscape. With a founder who is threatening to run smear campaigns against disloyal politicians, how can we trust the ethics of a “free speech” website? He started his tenure by claiming the website was free to everyone only to put it behind paywalls and censor everything for people not logged in. Part of my anxiety stems from this idea that I don’t want this man in charge (even tangentially) to America’s economy. The world feels less serious ever since he took over Twitter and every attempt to appear buddy-buddy with people he deems cool only makes him look more desperate. You know it’s bad when he paid for Stephen King’s blue checkmark and he still walked away.
To start shifting into something more personal, I’ve had a complicated relationship with social media especially in the past eight years. There was a time in my Mid-20s when I’d argue I was naïve enough to just exist on platforms without awareness of larger trends. I was in my own world and did not latch onto any meaningful conversation. The closest I’ve come to that since is my various rabbit holes onto TikTok where I spend more time with autistic and queer creators than whatever viral dance is going on. I’m somehow unlucky enough to not see a lot of the big talking points of the internet. I listen to Jamie Loftus’ Sixteenth Minute of Fame podcast and find myself baffled by these subjects that went viral within my lifetime. The most recent episode was about a Canadian arguing if Glinda the Good Witch was a princess. She claimed it went viral “all the time” and I had never once encountered it in the wild despite currently giving Wicked (2024) a very positive review. Somehow I use social media in ways that only introduces me to 10% of the mishigas, and that’s often long after the fact.
To some extent, it’s caused me to feel a bit more detached in the wake of the pandemic when I was a bit too codependent with online connections. I’ve since determined that this was a byproduct of desperation and loneliness. I needed validation and bought into the belief that working too hard was the answer. To date, 2020 marks the biggest exponential growth I’ve had on Twitter and I’ve met some excellent, caring people that I still talk to from then.
It also presented the symptoms for some serious personality disorder. Where a rational person could walk away and sleep at night, I was needing constant stimulation. It was an escape from the “scary world” of nurses freaking out over dying patients, of hospitals at 0% capacity, of California’s historic forest fires that covered the sky around my house, of a president who suggested we drink bleach and treated his own Covid-19 diagnosis like a spectator’s sport. 2020 was a traumatic year for me that also embodied a certain disbelief with the larger world. In some ways, I’m not strong enough to want to engage with any of it anymore. Knowing how people have only gotten empathetically worse makes me wonder why Musk would see that and just want to pile wood onto the fire.
Maybe that was why I turned towards my people pleasing tendencies. I latched onto strangers who had something interesting. In 2020, my goal was to see them happy and do my best not to annoy them. When I realized that these were the type of people prone to depression, it only made everything spiral out of control. I won’t go further other than to say that everyone’s life became more important than my own and I was disappointed that I couldn’t do a damn thing. All the hard work had left me empty inside, about to enter a three month period of terrible depression that is some of the scariest, numbest time of my life.
To begin tying everything back to 2024, I want to mention that when you’re dissociating, there is this sense that the world isn’t real. The closest I came to feeling “real” at the time was watching TikTok and seeing these strangers reaching out for company. While Twitter was more interactive and gave me the dopamine I craved, the reality was that I overthought everything. I had Zoom classes around this time and despite earning A’s across the board, I struggled to believe anyone I was talking to was real. It felt disillusioning because my idea of school was in person where I could tap a pen against a desk while looking at the overhead clock. In some ways, the uncertainty of the future in 2021 made everything worse. Did I even want to be in school despite it being my dream? I’m glad I stuck with it, but that first year was difficult.
Where Zoom had some reasonable doubt for its artificiality, Twitter felt worse. There was something bothersome about knowing that I had never heard most of these people’s voices. At some point I got so existential that I began to contemplate how I was being manipulated by code. I removed the human component so much that even the people I cared about began to seem like a mirage, a waste of time. This was like a computer game in the 80s where you inputted commands and expected certain results. I’m grateful to have never lost acceptance that these were people deserving of respect, but I have to believe that there were days where I was just a bit “off” and did what I used to do in my early 20s of saying random things solely to get a response. The responses were amusing, but they lacked emotional fulfillment. Outside of some genuinely helpful exchanges with people, I eventually figured out that the most important thing to do was step away and get back in touch with reality.
The practice has done me well and I think it’s done especially well over this past November. I returned happier and more willing to engage with the discussions of the day. In the short run, I realized that my old impulse was kicking in. A fear of being abandoned lead me to wonder why my follower count had gone down. Efforts to kickstart conversations mostly failed, or at least performed at lower numbers. The doomsday scenario that I had heard about Twitter was happening. One of my friends changed his profile name to “Tired of Musk” and admitted on Facebook that the website wasn’t fun anymore. Another that I talked to regularly in chat had navigated to Bluesky because Twitter was using their content to program AI. What I hadn’t considered was how stimulating the website was because of him. After awhile I’d conclude my amusement of the newsfeed and switch to the chat. Without that sidebar, I became more aware of how much downtime I spent seeing a poorly programmed algorithm give me the messages of strangers that I never cared to meet. These weren’t followers. These were just people minding their own business. At best I’d be like a jumbo jet flying over their feed trying to make sense of their ground level view.
At the same time, I have been trying to move everything over to Bluesky. What I didn’t expect was that after transitioning 150+ names onto the account how much it lifted Twitter’s hold on me. With each passing day, my Bluesky count grew. While it has yet to match the numbers I want, there’s been an impressive array of new faces. Not only that, but they’re people. Real people with real opinions. Maybe I’d find my new friends among them and start Bluesky on an even better note than Twitter.
To put it simply, I haven’t gotten what I wanted out of it yet. However, it did lead to some immediate revelations. I’ve been double-posting on both websites to see how the traffic differs. While the Bluesky engagement is much smaller, I feel more pride in it because I know that those people are real. There’s still some on Twitter, but I realized that the website has become something I feared and actively thought was a problem long before it actually was.
Elon Musk, the progenitor of empty promises, said that he would solve “the bot problem.” Simply put, Twitter has a notorious issue with fake accounts that exist for no other reason than to boost numbers. They’re usually sexy profile pictures that has one post. I’ve been good at weeding them out because most have one sole update from “July 22.” Why that date, I’ll never know. However, they have become more clever as I now have been bombarded by three or four questionable accounts of women from “Long Beach” who like all of my posts no matter how esoteric or self-deprecating. As someone who longs for authentic engagement, having to deal with these fake Long Beach accounts has been soul-crushing because they get my hopes up. While I still have friends on Twitter that will talk to me, they’re more often than not these bots. In the wake of my return, they have been especially active at lighting up my notifications… and it may be one of my biggest motivations for getting out.
Except for this one. I actually miss having theme accounts mess with you. Reminds me of a more innocent social media experience that unfortunately doesn’t exist anymore.
In an effort to determine what it is I would lose, I cut out the endless number of accounts I followed and didn’t engage with. I also took out celebrities that I rarely saw updates from and did my best to condense the newsfeed into people I regularly talked to. While it has greatly improved me experience – and I think got Twitter freaked out because they’re now showing me stuff I want – it also revealed some haunting truths.
I followed 700 accounts. I cut out 550 followers that I deemed inessential. While there’s immediate remorse for not supporting people with like-minded interests, the reality was that I was more than likely not going to miss them. Unless they tracked me down on Bluesky, I was awaiting the day they notice I unfollowed them and lower my now disproportionate Twitter following count to a more humble number. Then again, was I going to stick around and find out?
Also, I think the bigger, more soul crushing thing is that in my paranoia of getting caught up in the numbers game, I came to realize that I ultimately only had 20 or so people I talked to regularly. These are people who are casual enough friends that I’d willingly engage with whatever they said and feel like I was making their day less empty.
This isn’t a problem for no other reason than how much it undercuts everything. While 2020 was the year I worked too hard to get attention, Twitter as a larger platform was supposed to be the best way for me to launch my writing career. For almost 15 years now, I’ve used it as a place to share my opinion pieces and hope that anyone would respond. While I am grateful to have published a piece earlier this year about Emma Stone that went “viral” by my standards, overall I was reduced to these 20 people. I don’t even know if they read my essays. It’s the type of revelation that makes you ask… do I even have an audience anymore?
Given that being 35 has left me with a lot of existential questions about what I want out of life, knowing that my impact on Twitter is a lot smaller than what I had envisioned, I’m left freaking out. Will it be just as shallow on Bluesky? Maybe I could use it as a chance to remove the baggage of my messy past and try to be more focused and on brand. For as much as I don’t want to be a film critic anymore, I want to believe I have a future in media opinion pieces. Still, knowing that I’m close to 15 years doing this without much of an audience makes me wonder why I should even try.
Plain and simple, I am very confused right now. There’s a lot of small things that I’m still fond of regarding Twitter. It’s mostly memories that exist in this elephant’s graveyard. It’s the website where so much has happened, and yet its history has been reduced to a footnote. The controversy of AI and bots overpower the narrative. Eventually it’ll just be fake Long Beach girls talking to each other while their leader tanks the federal economy. Gone is the expectation for something revolutionary to happen.
I think it’s hard to fully move on because I realize that there are the few who have yet to make a Bluesky account. Moving on would mean never seeing them again. The fear of abandoning them is strong even if our relationship amounted to nothing more than recommending movies like Zone of Interest (2024) in private chat. Ironically, there’s a lot of trans women that I follow on Twitter that I’ve yet to find elsewhere. I’m left contemplating whether it’s worth letting them go, especially since our relationship is very small and inconsequential. Even then, I love their perspective and will miss their humanity as the next year looks to be hell.
That, and I have to wonder how different the conversations will be on both. I’ve yet to have a stimulating one on Bluesky and fear that jumping the gun will remove the agile perspectives. I’m at a transition where I notice that things could be better, but not without acknowledging that the past is done.
This past summer, my 14-year-old cat died. He had cancer and we had to put him down. It was painful and the memories have been difficult to process. However, it made me realize how much I sentimentalize “old things.” Old things are what connects me to who I was. It gives me a sense of progression. In a time where nothing feels built to last, I’m grateful for anything that makes it for a long time. Part of it, ironically, comes from the demise of Myspace and the foolish decision not to back up my files when I had the chance. Not having access to that time helps me lose a sense of self. My memory is malleable and it’s important not to mold it into something unfaithful. Twitter and its failed rebranding as X feels like the contemporary version of this narrative. Is it possible that I’ll stick around and watch my past corrode, where every last piece of goodwill disappears and all that’s left are the existential rants of an individual whose life has been made better because of Twitter, but not the Twitter we’re likely to know?
As I try to conclude this essay, I think of Dumb Money (2023). While I liked the film more than most, one detail made me cringe. There was a montage of memes while an actor discussed “stonks.” For as appalling as it is to watch finance become a joke like this, the thing that annoyed me was seeing Elon Musk being hailed as the king of wise investment. Even in his rickety animated form, he seemed like an annoying douchebag leading assholes into a ridiculous fad. Much like his new boss, I realized then that I have a dream of never seeing that guy’s face. I was happier before he seemed like a power-hungry tycoon. He’s not the reason Twitter has struggled to feel meaningful to me in recent years, but he’s definitely a symptom of the terminally online types who could do with stepping outside and just appreciating a breeze in your hair while sitting on a park bench, overlooking the lake and realizing that there is a life beyond your phone. Maybe slow down and realize it while you can.
As of this publication, I haven’t deleted anything. However, this may be the rationalization I needed to start taking those steps. Only time will tell.
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