Twitter

Deleted it late last year.

I just couldn’t with the stupidity anymore – its own, that of Donald Trump’s so-called culture (and his moment), my own – and got rid of it. He kinda ruined it, much like he does and did everything during his twice-impeached (assault on the) presidency.

Much like Facebook, Twitter ultimately added zero value to my life, and its double standard recently got most extra-grating to me. Suspend me once, I welcome the break and try to understand. Suspend me twice (and besmirch my tweet-history), shame on me, alright.

Censuring we the people, but not affording the same courtesy to the so-called POTUS, a known grifter and America’s literal and figurative orange hemorrhoid, now you’re asking for too much, Twitter. And the proof was in the Jan. 6 pudding.

Tweet little, tweet late.

It was fun for a while to craft pithy tweets that worked in words like “badonkadonk” into the conversation, and a thrill to get retweets or Likes from, say, Goldie Hawn or Daniel Franzese, in those pre-branding-takeover early tweetin’ days. Fun fact: I learned about the platform at a movie theater in Coconut Grove, from an old colleague I’d invited to an Iron Man press screening, who explained to me how he could let a bunch of people who weren’t there know where he was, with a pic attached, but not via email, and how these people would get this information on account of their interest in my colleague (because of the whole following hashtag thing).

Neat.

Obviously I joined. And at first, it was fun to develop different voices for different needs: mine, a magazine’s, a branding campaign’s, and funner still to get people to “join the conversation.” Looking back on it now it was kinda like peddling a drug. Then, everyone wanted to get into the live tweeting game, and the whole #FOMO thing kicked into overdrive. And then, the shit got mean. And politically polarized, but like…willfully. And weird.

Like with everything, there were dangers lurking in every RT, but also plenty of graces (Demi Moore assisted getting a suicidal person help once upon a time, if memory serves). And, what, 10 years ago, the platform empowered the people of Egypt to communicate in real time during the Arab Spring, an evident communal plus echoed by just about every community since, again, for better or for worse.

Twitter’s shiny but thin coat of joy belied a truer, more visceral reflection of ourselves waiting to be revealed, and provoked, and unfortunately, as a private company seemingly without a firm grasp on modern – or developed with nuance – company values, Twitter doesn’t appear to be in a hurry to move the needle toward equality and equity (not even gonna say a thing about Facebook, the MySpace of its generation). 

For all its potential for good, Twitter has failed to develop an identity and meaningfully contribute to the health of our common human experience, to say nothing of an enforceable standard. For sure, it helped us connect around the world with immediacy, but until it begins to encourage critical thinking and empathy, it is doomed to cause more destruction.

How nutty that something that was so meant to like, replace the phonebook, got so the wrong kinda of scary, wouldn’t you tweet?