Tomorrow marks a day that in theory I knew was coming but in some respects didn’t think ever would. On Friday the 13th 2024, I am going to submit my application to deactivate my Twitter account. While I have been vocal about my desire to move away from the website, there was still some part of me that was pushing against it. I was making excuses for why I was overreacting and would regret everything. Even as of this day, there are people who I talk to regularly which make me worry that I’ll never see them again – or even in the same way. While Bluesky has real “grass is greener” vibes right now, I don’t know if people have created the instinct to write over there as freely. It hasn’t formed a callus on my finger that tells me “this is where I write now.” All I have is this strange honeymoon period telling me that, yes, Twitter is over. I need to deal with it.
Part of this essay seems recognizably absurd. I know that mourning a self-inflicted loss of a social media page is low on the list of things you’d ever want to throw a funeral for. I was never a meaningful account. Outside of very few conversations, I don’t know that I ever achieved the greater dream of “going viral” or having a thousand followers. I was just another user thriving to connect with people and extend my brand. While that journey has been waylaid by mental health struggles and a move towards less digital proclivities, there was still the hope that whatever I contributed over the 15 years on Twitter meant something. As I’ve downloaded my archives and searched through old files, I realized how much is already lost. So many conversations are dead links to accounts that left long ago. They’re people who are now a ghost, an abstraction of which to assume where their lives have taken them. I’m realizing that for all the sentiments, it already feels like the ground is eroding. The bots are becoming my only friends. I’m better to strike out on Bluesky where my interactions are at least better moderated by real people.
But I think the big reason that this was a difficult decision was because of what happened to Myspace. Without getting too personal, I will say that it was the most symbolic website of my high school years. The majority of my interactions could be traced back to message boards on there where I goofed around and experienced the world of a teenager. I think of it the way most later generations probably think of other websites like, I assume, Instagram. And yet, shortly after I left in 2009, the Myspace server had a crash so notorious that it wiped out most of the old users’ history. Even if I’m aware that my account might’ve been deleted just due to inactivity, knowing that it was gone beyond a shadow of the doubt sent a shiver down my spine. Gone were the archives. While I realized I was smart enough to back-up my blog, most everything else is now suffering in the memory hole.
Since that time, the act of archiving has meant a lot to me. I need to have some proof that I existed throughout the decades. Even if I don’t revisit, I welcome the comfort of knowing it’s there allowing me to look back on days when I’m lacking direction. There have been times when I read old journals and I feel better about myself because an idea will inspire recognition. There is a connection to a larger sense of self that I will be straying away from. It reminds me to stay the course on my journey and that I’ve had bad days before. Good days will come again. I just need to keep trying.
I find comfort in documentation and few things felt as symbolic of that as Twitter. While my final account “@Optigrab” has been active since 2012, it was also my fourth or fifth try at the website. I can’t remember why, but I was too wishy washy to stay consistent. At the time I was bare bones, only posting basic opinions and links to my work – most of which no longer work because the URL changed. However, just reading the headlines takes me back to where I was in March 2012. Adam Yauch of The Beastie Boys had just died. Girls was premiering on HBO. In hindsight, that year was one of the most formative in my life. Removing that connection would be bittersweet.
And yet, I have to wonder what is gained by keeping it up. For a long time, Twitter was just a place to promote my work. It wasn’t until around 2015 when I began to be more personal and connect with people. From then, you are more likely to notice me having more engagement. I was also suffering from more outbursts that existed for no other reason than I demanded attention. In general, Twitter’s pros and cons is that I have been impulsive and wanted attention. It’s my outlet to express odd ideas that don’t have any rhyme or reason. At times I have been unstable and even needlessly cruel. While a lot has been deleted when I’ve felt like I’ve gone “too far,” some of it remains as a symbol of how I’ve changed as a person. Mostly, the one thing I’ve noticed is that my insecurities are able to be expressed in more direct language. I’ve evolved and found a community that makes me feel respected and able to grow as a person. While I’ve worried that my various breakdowns and depression periods have turned off a “marketable” crowd, I have been humbled by the followers who have withstood those episodes and helped me grow. My writing has become stronger and while I’m not the niche writer I used to be, I want to believe I’ve expanded my potential going forward.
I don’t know that this is the most encouraging way of describing my time on Twitter. There have been a lot of memorable encounters that I’d consider great memories. I’ve met a lot of movie people who introduced me to some great oddities. There’s been queer creators who have made me feel more comfortable with exploring my identity. While I’ve failed to feel connected to a literary community, I have been appreciative of people talking about an array of subjects that hopefully keeps my mind open. To me, social media’s greatest gift is that I can discover something life changing any day. While I’ve come to only seek this in moderation, there is still something about being globally connected that is beautiful… provided you’re trying not to censor.
A major reason for jumping ship also stems from my general disagreement with Elon Musk. While I was ignorant to whatever actions you can lobby at Jack Dorsey’s era, there has been something grating about the past few years. Even as I’ve found people that make me feel better about the world, I have to deal with Musk camouflaging his bigotry with this message of “town square of free speech.” As I figured out in college, free speech is only free in the sense that you are allowed to express ideals that won’t actively harm an innocent person. While I have used AdBlock and missed the full Twitter experience, I am aware that there’s been a lot of garbage ads. He’s promoted a lot of transphobic rhetoric including the disownment of his own child and a harmful documentary that was prominently displayed on the news tab. He’s encouraged the rise of AI and disinformation. There’s also the fact that he’s making a government agency that’s named after a Bitcoin meme. I get some could see this as playful, but it feels disrespectful to the larger American government.
This is where the crossroads get interesting. Over the past few years, I’ve noticed people complaining more and more about Twitter becoming a dump. The way it functions is terrible. Listening to every farewell message from friends didn’t feel bittersweet so much as make me nod and say “I understand.” It’s the type of thing where you don’t know why you’re still there. There are those people keeping you company, but there’s fewer of them. You can also find them on other platforms. There’s no chokehold incentive to be found… save for that 10% you haven’t located elsewhere. Can you deal with never seeing them again, let alone potentially forgetting that they exist reduced to “that person” as their new name? As it stands, many conversations being reduced to unnamed accounts makes it difficult to form any fondness to people who used to be my reason for signing on.
The hesitation is reminiscent of Myspace because once it’s gone, it’s gone. That’s 12 years of my life now removed. For as much as people like to tell me that the internet is a permanent documentation, I don’t know how much of this will be around once the deactivation goes through. I will be gone and whatever I thought seven years ago will be a mystery to most. Then again, when was the last time I thought about December 13, 2017? Maybe it was a significant day, but it’s not like I’m as sentimental as I think I am.
Then again, the difference between Myspace’s server error and this Twitter decision is that I am in control. Now that I’m looking at something tangible on my private OneDrive, I know that I will have something reminiscent of the time. I’m not at the hands of a corporation holding me back from connecting to my past. I have most of what I need, or at least can retrieve at this point. For as much as I’m sure a lot will slip through the cracks, I have to ask… how much will I really miss? There is a point where I’m irrationally holding myself from moving forward, selfishly holding onto sand pouring through my fingers as I see that there’s nothing left but bots, where I’m left reading the same 30 posts over and over because the update feature is interminable. I’m left in a whirlpool of the past where the future barely pokes through and sometimes it will be days before I see things that I wanted right now.
It's true that Twitter is not what it used to be. It used to be the social media hub where history was made. We’ve had presidents attempt to start wars in the dead of night on there. There’s been so many moments that have brought us joy and fear. Now it feels like nothing means anything on there. To me, this feels like a byproduct of Musk’s backwards contribution to the “fake news” movement. By making it hard to trust official resources, where AI accounts drown out the reality, where two people involved with the next administration own social media websites, where dead internet theory threaten human ingenuity, what is there to be there for? I’m convinced that the next few years are doomed to more agenda-pushing and even more dysfunctional features. AI will manipulate the truth until I’m talking to a cable plugged into a wall. I don’t care about cables. I want people with the flaws of everyday life. To me, Twitter is a reminder of the joyless potential of being more in awe of technology than the people who use it.
So while this isn’t the farewell piece that I wanted to give, it’s the one that I feel speaks to how the website feels to me now. As I read about people who have been happier since leaving, I can’t wait to be one of them. My anxiety has been much worse over the past few years because Musk gets off on celebrating trolls and threatening small communities trying to live their lives. I also feel the symbolism of being at the hands of a billionaire obsessed with stupid Bitcoin memes is too much for me. Twitter used to be fun. The fact that I have to go through the website everyday and see more people complain doesn’t thrill me. I want to go. Bluesky hasn’t had the “musk” yet. For as much as I question why Dorsey didn’t just pull resources together to better Twitter, he at least won the long game. He’s a tad more relevant than Threads or Mastodon. I’ll give him that much.
As I think about how much loss I stand to experience as a result, I think of something else that happened to me. Back in August, my cat died. Looking at photographs from a year ago, I’m now realizing that he was suffering from cancer much longer than my memory remembered. For as uncomfortable as that made the months in between, I loved that cat and only wanted to see him happy. I did what I could for as long as I could, but the cancer is unbearable. You have a lot of complicated feelings around it. I don’t care how much you love them. It impacts you emotionally. The choice to put him down was difficult, but at the same time you realized that he was feeble. He wouldn’t have much longer of tolerable health or a body that worked enough to keep him safe. In some ways I feel like wanting to prolong that period would be selfish. However, no matter what happened, I would be sad. The question was just for how much longer did I want to do it with the uncertainty.
We are coming up on four months since he passed, and there’s still a lot of guilt around that day. For as much as cancer took away his vitality, I still hold onto memories and am trying to reconstruct years of when he was the cat I believed him to be for 14 years. He had a long, good life and brought a lot of joy. However, he was reaching that point when the pain was too much for both of us. The sacrifice risked him turning incontinent and unable to move. The optimism of things turning around were gone. I could love him for as long as humanly possible, but how much worse would the cancer get?
I don’t wish to say that leaving Twitter is on the level of losing my cat. However, I think it speaks to how I feel about making difficult decisions. On the one hand, I could stay and watch what happens, but I will always be chasing what I used to have. Everything is eroding and losing its authenticity. While the spark is still there, I don’t know that it’s the naïve pleasure that I had when I was 19 messing around doing stupid stuff. I may not have that connection to the past, but it's not necessarily gone. I do have memories on my OneDrive that will always be there. As much as I want to reach out and relive some of them, the beauty of time is that I can move on and find new things to cherish and embrace.
As sad as it is, the reality is that life moves on. Sometimes it’s what you need in order to remember what it means to be human. You can hold onto the things that brought you joy until they’re a mangled corpse, or you can recognize the humanity and end it with a sense of peace. While the years that Twitter took from me have their meaning, it’s better to not feel trapped in chasing that high. When most of my interactions anymore are with bots, what’s really waiting for me? It’s better to get to the point where I’m just thinking back on those days and laughing instead of dreading potential propaganda filling my feed in a little bit shy of a month’s time. I need to find reason to live, to be happy. I need to take risks and live with the consequences.
And that is why I’m leaving Twitter. I apologize to those I won’t ever be able to reach again. Hopefully you’ll exist somewhere fondly in my memory. Thank you for everything and I wish you the best going forward. I hope our paths cross somewhere. I don’t know where, but keep me in mind when you arrive.
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