Twitter Blues

It was fun while it lasted.

Like the rest of my Very Online friends, I’ve been watching Elon Musk’s Great Twitter Takeover and ensuing chaos with much amusement. To those who have the gift of not being Very Online, it’s probably more bemusing than amusing. But for us who are a little too invested in this strange thing called Twitter, it’s been non-stop entertainment. As usual, I have Thoughts.

I’ll start with a small observation from my small corner of things: Some time ago, I did a rough Twitter straw poll to gauge how many of my Twitter followers were also following this Substack. I found there was surprisingly little overlap in my responding sample. That’s not to say I haven’t had people discover me through Twitter. Clearly, people have. But I think the Venn diagram intersection is small. I’m actually rather comforted by this, since it tells me Twitter isn’t quite the essential promotional tool I’d thought it was for the work that most matters to me. In the event that the whole thing goes down in flames, maybe there are enough other social channels through which it will continue to trickle. Every now and then, someone tells me that whole little blocs of off-Twitter people are sharing my work amongst themselves, e.g., pastors and seminarians. Perhaps, in future, that will be all of us! I see that Substack has a new “Chat” feature, with which I have done exactly nothing. If people have cool ideas, do share.

I also did a little poll asking followers whether I should pay Elon $8 a month and finally get that blue check by my name. I actually can’t remember if I ever finished trying to obtain this little status badge back in the Before Years when you had to be “notable in government, news, entertainment, or another designated category.” If I did, nothing ever came of it, even though I could prove I’d written X number of articles for a national outlet within whatever the designated window was. Anyway, I didn’t mind being a not-blue-check, as “blue-check” became a kind of insult. I knew good people who had one, but “the blue-check class,” broadly, was associated with elitism and the sneering dismissal of anyone outside their echo chamber—or, worse than dismissal, all-out attack on unverified “pajamas tweeters” who made them look bad. Of course, that would never have been me. Naturally, I would have been a People’s Blue-Check, taking it about as self-seriously as I take my Ph.D. (Which, to be clear, I worked bloody hard for and am proud to have. I just don’t think it gives me license to be an ass in public, that’s all. Though I could probably remember to mention it once in a while.)

All that said, as a sorting mechanism, the blue check did what sorting mechanisms do: it sorted. And while I never treated pronouncements from a blue check as carrying any special wisdom or authority by default, the badge did help direct my eye to “notable” trending commentary on things I might want to write about, whether that commentary was good, bad or ugly. My unverified friends were no doubt saying much wiser and more interesting things, but I needed a quick way to sort, and the check provided that. Plus, it was always nice to be able to confirm at a glance that hey, that blue-check guy I actually like is actually following me, for real for real! (By the way, in case you are reading this and you were following me @EstherOfReilly, I am now @BMcGrewvy, because old Twitter management kept suspending me over trans insanity. Which reminds me, why isn’t the Babylon Bee back yet? I thought that’s how this whole deal got started? I guess there still has to be a committee meeting for everything.)

Anyway, the blue checks: The thing is that by turning them into a subscription service ($8 a month), Elon robbed the blue-check crowd of its status symbol, but he also destroyed that neutrally useful sorting mechanism. Moreover, it was no longer clear what was now being “verified,” since it wasn’t as if Twitter users had to put real names in their bios in order to get the check. What did it mean that the user known as “@unicorn_farts123!” was now “verified?” It meant nothing, really, except that “@unicorn_farts123!” whoever he/she/they was/were, had $8 to spend on a blue tick. Which, ironically, seemed to trade one form of class division for another. Elon seemed to be reinforcing this strange irony when he said in a Twitter Space that people who didn’t pay would gradually see less engagement, as their tweets came to be regarded the way Gmail regards spam. Thus proving that a) Elon doesn’t actually understand what Twitter is, and b) One can never truly eliminate hierarchies. One can only relabel them.

Predictably, it took about five seconds for all hell to break loose as pranksters went wild with parody accounts, most notably sending Eli Lilly into a tailspin when it was “announced” that insulin is now free. Elon has now temporarily paused new subscriptions but plans to try again in about a week. So stay tuned, I guess. As I said: It’s been a mess, but as I saw someone put it, it’s been fun to see Twitter return to the energy of a startup, with all the hilarious “incidents” that will entail. I mean how can you not laugh at the spectacle of a sitting U. S. Senator angrily tagging Musk in an “I demand answers!” tweet, followed by Musk’s reply, “Perhaps it is because your real account sounds like a parody?” If this is the end, as some are predicting, it’s ending like the aborted fireworks show that accidentally sets everything off in one gloriously expensive 60-second burst. Some will call this good riddance for a host of reasons. They may not be wrong, particularly if Elon really does intend to forestall bankruptcy in part by monetizing “adult content.” (I have to love how the folks at Wired say this might “make sense” from “a business standpoint,” they’re just worried about execution. LOL, we’re so screwed. As it were.)

So where does all this leave people like me, who weren’t exactly fans of old Twitter but were still glad it existed—maybe too glad? On the one hand, I would miss it. On the other hand, it kind of scares me to think too hard about just how much I would miss it. The fact that I’m a writer gives me a nice excuse to more or less live on the app when I’m not working, because I can always tell myself I’m doing “research,” or composing that thread to “get my thoughts down” for what might be a longer piece later, and so on and so forth. Twitter DMs also give me a constant recharging trickle of instant give-and-take with like-minded friends on the app. Fortunately, that’s the easiest feature to recreate via some other messaging service.

My problem is that for all I do make excuses for scrolling the app when I’m getting nothing done and I just need to sleep, it is a legitimately invaluable tool to me as a writer. It really does function as a notepad for me to put a pin in things as I think through my fingers, something I need often, and something I will miss if we move towards a completely audiovisual public square. It really does instantly catch me up on all the people and current events I’m interested in, from my personally curated selection of trusted sources, which sometimes includes information that is very hard to find in one place elsewhere. It streamlines my professional networking with other writers, editors, and public intellectuals, including people who are otherwise impossible to get hold of. It keeps me on the bleeding edge of what intelligent folks in my circles are reading. And, importantly, it gives my readers easy access with their questions and feedback.

But beyond how it helps me as a professional writer, Twitter is just such a wonderfully, terrifyingly vast window on the world, from its absolute worst to its absolute best. It’s comic. It’s tragic. It’s tragicomic. It’s beautiful and ugly and innocent and twisted and kitschy and ennobling. One minute it shows me a viral tweet from a girl taking a selfie in the mom sweater her grandmother with Alzheimer’s gave her. Another minute, it shows me a Russian soldier desperately dodging grenades from a drone, from the drone’s perspective. In a single scroll, I might see a forgotten poem, a Trump meme, a clip of a baby elephant stepping on its own trunk, and a clip of a poor man in Canada who wants to apply for assisted dying. For a moment I will pause and wonder if my brain is supposed to process information this way. But I’m already scrolling to the next thing.

There are tangible good things Twitter has brought into the world that will outlast Twitter, things that wouldn’t have been born otherwise. There are couples who never would have met otherwise, including a couple whose coming together I facilitated by inspiring them to start chatting about singleness in my mentions (I’m not making this up). There are books that might never have been born too, like this just-released book of French World War I haikus whose translator I spotted wondering if anyone out there might be interested in helping him publish a weird WWI poetry project somewhere. I immediately tagged one or two of my poetry connections under his tweet. They promptly replied, and not long afterwards, he was set up with glowing blurbs and a contract at a well-regarded small Catholic press.

And for every such tangible good there is, of course, some tangible evil being born somewhere else. There always is. There always will be.

What’s next? I have no clue, truly. Maybe I will never really know what Twitter gave me, or what it took from me. But man. It was fun while it lasted.