Shit-posting and Doom-scrolling: Why I Tried to Quit Twitter, and Why In The End I’m Back

I’m posting this in the aftermath of a week-long Twitter detox, in which I spent an entire week NOT opening Twitter on any device. Ever. 

It was surprisingly easy, and, not surprisingly, a very positive experience for my mental health. My vision also improved – no more squinting for hours each day looking at Twitter on my phone – and those mid-day headaches have disappeared. And I would never ever go back were it not for the fact that my industry has decreed this to be a platform where influence is made or broken. As I’m not yet ready to retire or bury my career in the name of self-care, here I am.

The problem with Twitter is the same problem with all social media: the curse of Stewart Brands’ admonition “information wants to be free.” This simply stupid idea – tied up in the linguistic shortfallings of a language that uses the same word for “no cost” as it does for “no restrictions” – has bedeviled our industry since the dawn of the Internet. It will play out in spades this year as net neutrality and the banning of insurrectionists and their fellow-travelers from Twitter, Facebook, and others becomes itself a crucible for social upheaval.

Free, as in unrestricted, information has been an excuse for truly awful behavior as well as the foundation of a lot of great things. In a techno-driven perversion of the First Amendment, nothing was off limits in the early days of public social media – and when the law changed to absolve platform providers of any liability for the content on their sites, the free­-for-all accelerated.

It was once the case that the anonymity behind the internet – “on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog” – was used as a cover for this behavior. The pretense that a cover was even needed evaporated quickly, and many many good people on Twitter and other social media found themselves insulting, “owning”, cancelling, and otherwise violating even the pretext of social probity in the pursuit of.. clicks, likes, and influence, whatever the hell that even is. No anonymity needed or wanted.

I’m as guilty of this as anyone else. Guilty of being a jerk, with all its attendant characteristics. It was too easy, and it was frankly part of the game I was more eager to play than I’d like to admit. Back in the early days of this century I was part of an informal blogger group that in many ways mimicked what Twitter and other social media have become: it was a place where a lot of smart people gathered to discuss and debate issues, and along the way it often descended into name-calling, insults, threats, summary banishment, and sophomoric, tech-bro behavior (“Food Fight” was a common call when the debates denigrated to insults and innuendo.)

The irony that many of the people in this group were pioneers in the social media world has never ceased to amaze me. The fact that some of the women in this group quietly moved to the sidelines as the ad hominem attacks and other misbehavior grew was a prescient signal that toxic male tech-bro culture in social was a problem the tech world would someday have to reckon with. (And we’re still waiting, BTW, for a real reckoning.) The fact that I played along still embarrasses me. I eventually left about eight years ago and never looked back. I’m friends and colleagues with many if not most of them, and genuinely enjoy their company in person today.

This culture of laissez-fuck you was good preparation for what Twitter (and Facebook) became in the ensuring decade. Filtering the nasty in order to find the good became second nature, and as politics in this country became more polarized and Twitter became more of a political platform the misbehavior I saw in the blogger group’s microcosm exploded. As did the information and positive value too. I’ve learned a lot following a lot of smart and interesting people on Twitter. And I became adept at being self-righteously enraged at people’s stupidity, myopia, unpleasantness, deliberate insults, inadvertent insults, political grandstanding, scolding, and their temerity in contradicting me or the people I think are right.

This came to a head during the election, when I extended my Twitter participation as the social media guru for US Vote Foundation. Which meant I had to dive deeply into the flow of raw sewage traversing Twitterverse’s election discourse. It was impossible to ignore – humans, bots, and trolls regularly attacked in ways that only exacerbated the polarization of our society and served to be a constant source of adrenal-juicing, and eventually sapping, rage. But I had a job to do, and spent probably four hours a day looking for content to retweet on the foundation’s social media in addition to tweeting my own enterprise software content. And, yes, I again succumbed to the dark side of owning and cancelling and other misbehavior: I’d like to think I was more polite and thoughtful than in the past, but after wading in the effluence of Twitter it was too easy to get shit on my own boots as well.

By the time January 6 rolled around I was beyond depleted. But the train was still rolling down the track, and that day’s insurrection, fueled in no small part by Twitter’s indifference to the evident downsides of its platform, became another reason to stick that phone in my face for hours on end, doomscrolling the end of democracy.

By inauguration day I realized it was time to act. The social media effort for the foundation had wound down, so my efforts there could also wind down, and right on time: my fight-or-flight reactions had been numbed to a cold, vacant hum in my brain.

And so I went on Twitter detox, and didn’t touch Twitter once during seven whole days in which, as expected, nothing happened… Okay, lots of shit happened, but, amazingly, it happened whether I was on Twitter or not, and the world, and world, didn’t seem to miss my overly attentive gaze a whole lot.  

But I’m back, reluctantly, because my work demands it. I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that Twitter is an important measure of an analyst’s worth as an influencer, and that staying on the wagon and off Twitter would have professional consequences.  I’m not ready to hang up my hat, nor am I ready to squander whatever level of influence I’ve managed to achieve. There are mouths to feed, kids to educate, retirement plans to make – it’s not the time to take myself out of the influence market, even if the price I have to pay is much higher than I’d like.

Unfortunately, tech influencer programs have depended on social media in general and Twitter in particular as a measure of value without questioning the ethics of swimming in the same pool with people – and bots – that use these media to sow discord and destroy social cohesion. I’m reminded of the old days of EBay, when there were basically no controls over fraud and shopping at Ebay was the equivalent of going to a mall where, amidst the legitimate shops, gangs of marauding thieves roamed at will, with no effort to protect the unwitting buyers who dared to shop there. Twitter increasingly feels like this early version of Ebay, even as Twitter has begun a ridiculously late rear-guard campaign to fix the damage its negligence created.

I recognize that, without Twitter, there’s not a lot of choice: During my detox I quickly found that other than LinkedIn – which I think is basically a meh social platform, albeit a business-focused one – it was much harder to amplify my voice and make my thoughts known on topics I think would be of interest to the enterprise software community. I realized I had a lot of things to say, and no easy way to say them. That’s a problem I may try to remedy by blogging more, but in the end I’ll need to be active on Twitter in order to make sure whatever great and not so great ideas I have get heard.

So, here I go. I’m going to try to make sure that I don’t spend hours doom-scrolling and shit-posting, and focus on using Twitter for all the right reasons: making my voice heard as an industry influencer. I may weigh in on other issues I think are important: voting rights for all citizens, disability rights, LBGTQ rights, the rights of Blacks and other people of color, and immigrant rights. I learned from my parents to fight for what I think is right, but I’ll have to see how far into that fight I’m willing to go this time around: if I get sucked back into the laissez-fuck you culture and succumb to Twitter’s vice, it’s going to be a problem.

Too bad the choice has to be this stark. If only there was a better way.