Long live Twitter, the wonderful site that sucks ass.
A eulogy for the miserable website that I owe everything to.
Hello and welcome to REPLY ALT, Earth’s greatest music newsletter. I’ve been working on some music-related stuff that I’ll bring to you soon, I promise. I have something new to add to my store next week. It’s truly the stupidest fucking idea I’ve ever turned into reality, so I’m sure it will also be the most lucrative thing I’ve ever made. Let’s see, what else is new? Oh, this morning I received a box full of Spanish language copies of SELLOUT, which apparently translates to VENDIDO. Grab one here if you’d like to read it en Espanol. Oh, and Jim Ruland, who has a new novel out this week called Make It Stop, convinced me to read a short story about my dumbass little feelings in public next week. So if you’re in the Los Angeles area make sure to steer clear of that. Oh and I shot the cover of the new Worriers album, Warm Blanket, which is pretty cool if you ask me. Anyway, I’ll get back to music stuff real soon but I wanted to take a minute today to exorcise some thoughts about a website I truly despise which has also given me everything I have.
Twitter is full of chuds. Let’s just get that out there right away. Always has been. For as long as the site has been around, it’s been populated by cranks excessively complaining about minor social offenses, contrarians shouting absolute dogshit opinions on any given topic from Scorsese movies to hot dogs, hordes of rabid fanbases eager to publicly scalp those who dare criticize their celebrity saviors, and your run-of-the-mill racists, bigots, and goons.
A common use of Twitter since its inception has been to complain about Twitter, the very site you’re using to complain. But I think the nature of the complaining was different before last year. It used to be that when people complained that Twitter sucked, they were complaining that Twitter was too close of a reflection of the annoying truths of real life, which also sucked. The world really was full of cranks who complained about minor social offenses and contrarians with dogshit opinions and rabid fanbases and racists and bigots and goons. Twitter just allowed them to assemble and amplify their voices. To hate Twitter was to hate the world around you.
I could spend days complaining about Twitter and the absolute freakshows the site has introduced me to over the 13+ years I’ve been using it. But I don’t want to complain about it today. I want to celebrate it. Or at least celebrate it in the way you would a family member you didn’t like very much after they died. Sure, they were generally unpleasant to be around and you hated them most times and they owed you 50 bucks which is probably gone forever now, but you were related so at least you had that bond.
So here’s a nice story about Twitter I offer as its eulogy. I graduated college a few years before Twitter was launched. I wanted to be a writer then, but I gave up on that dream pretty soon after receiving my diploma. I didn’t have any industry connections or much relevant experience or parents who could buy my way onto some fancy Condé Nast job and it became immediately apparent that I needed at least one of those things to get anywhere. I was all desire and no resources. So I gave up and settled into a normal career, the way people do. This career path was ~*fine*~, but there wasn’t much creativity involved so I killed a lot of time on this new app called Twitter. It was just dicking around at first—tweeting stale 140-character Jack Handey knockoff jokes or posting updates on what kind of bagel I was eating that day, but you know, in a funny way.
But then I began using it in a more useful way. I guess you could say a more professional way. I started following people with desirable jobs. I tracked editors at publications to see what kinds of subjects they were interested in and what kinds of things they published. This had previously been something of a mystery. Editors had historically just been names on a masthead. Now I knew exactly who they were and what they liked and what kind of bagels they were eating that day. Twitter was part Rolodex, part LexisNexis, part LinkedIn, part binoculars I looked through to stalk notable people from the internet bushes. I made connections, I networked, I landed gigs. It’s no stretch to say that a few successful DMs probably paid off more than four years of college.
Twitter helped me get writing opportunities that I never would have gotten without it. Eventually those opportunities helped me quit my job and land a new job where I got paid to write full time. And ultimately it afforded me enough of an audience that I could leave that job and write for myself. Twitter helped me change careers. Twitter changed my life. It’s crazy to say that, but it’s true. The dumb, stupid hellsite for idiots—which coined phrases like goop on ya grinch and I know it smell crazy in there and covfefe, the site where professional lunatics openly admit to not knowing how to make a simple cup of coffee, the site where people are anointed Bean Dad and Shrimp Cinnamon Toast Guy, the site where Senators watch porn on 9/11 and celebrities search for sex gifs—changed my life.
I’m one of many, and probably not even one of the more successful ones. Plenty of people have used Twitter to leverage book deals, land TV writing gigs, and open doors to countless other previously unattainable opportunities. People have used Twitter and social media to circumvent traditional industry gatekeepers and get paid for their work or get their feet in the door. Some people’s entire careers have been launched by Twitter. Look at Rob Delaney. Really, look at him. He’s a very pleasant man to look at. He was just a hairy avatar in a Speedo tweeting about testicles and toilets. He still does that, but now his resume is full of TV shows and bestselling books and I think he even appeared in one of those awful Deadpool movies. Desus and Mero were two guys from the Bronx who cracked jokes on Twitter and within a couple of years they were interviewing the President of the United States on their Showtime talk show. That is, as they say, quite the glow up. And it happened solely because of Twitter.
Yes, Twitter has also been a pox upon the world. It’s where the most obnoxious vernacular and cultural conversations have originated. It’s gotten people doxxed. It’s where fascist creeps have gained followings by pandering to the weakest losers. It’s where Eric Alper repeats the same fucking prompt every day asking people what band they wish they could have seen in concert. Oh my god shut the fuck up dude but also Fugazi. But maybe it could be argued that, in the grand scheme of things, the promise outweighed the peril. In any case, those doors that Twitter opened for talented unknowns have been closing over the last few years. Tech VCs and incompetent CEOs have been running media companies into the ground with some version of dril’s candles tweet. (See, who said Twitter never gave us anything useful!) A combination of clueless mismanagement and corporate greed have doomed longstanding publications, websites, streaming services, and TV networks. There are fewer and fewer hopes of landing a staff job these days, and paying opportunities are disappearing at a rapid clip.
But us creative types have been resourceful. We’re like cockroaches surviving the media apocalypse. Even under mounting layoffs and closures, we’ve adapted and have figured out ways to take money directly from consumers through services like Patreon and Substack (hey thanks for subscribing to REPLY ALT, music’s greatest newsletter!). I’ve not considered the OnlyFans route yet, but I’m also not above it. Let’s see how my next book sells.
It’s impressive when you think about it. Even in this late-capitalist nightmare landscape, people have managed to navigate the “gig economy” in their favor and eke out something resembling an income. It’s been a decent Plan B as the old world dissolves. But now one man is fucking that up for everyone too. I don’t feel like going through the ins and outs of how badly The Space Moron has run Twitter into the ground during his brief reign as owner. For non-Twitter users, it’s terribly boring to be guided through the weeds of it, and active Twitter users already know the deal. But let me see if I can sum it up as succinctly and plainly as possible. Basically, he’s taken all the good things about the site and made them very bad. How’s that? He invented problems that didn’t exist and “fixed” them in the most comically disastrous fashion. He has punished the service’s most notable users who brought any value or credibility to it and replaced them with hateful, insecure rubes willing to pay him money in exchange for a false sense of superiority. The site is upside down now, and it won’t survive at this pace.
I said earlier that Twitter used to be awful because it was a reflection of real life. Now it’s awful because it’s the opposite—a fantasyland populated by anonymous bottomfeeders. A private chatroom for delusional freaks. I can barely tolerate it anymore and I consider myself to be a Reasonably Online Person. I can’t imagine what the normie Twitter user who logs in once a year to do a Super Bowl tweet must think while flipping through a site where all recognizable names have been entirely drowned out by verified crypto nobodies whose primary use of the site is to complain about having their visibility throttled by shadowy unknown forces. And on top of that, from a functionality standpoint, the site is absolute garbaggio now. It’s clunky and glitchy and basic elements no longer work properly, but that’s another story.
This all sucks, obviously. It sucks because the futures of the people smart enough to have made anything of value on Twitter are at the mercy of the misguided whims and petty vindictiveness of the richest and most talentless tech overlords. It sucks because a valuable lifeboat for creatives is being deflated in the most demeaning and frustrating way possible. And most of all, it sucks because it’s emblematic of a larger cultural problem: that art is not only being devalued, it’s being replaced with… nothing. The future is a crying laughing emoji looking into an infinity mirror. It’s a QR code on the Mona Lisa.
I might be OK in all of this. Maybe. If I’m lucky. I’m fortunate enough to have given my writing career enough of a head start during the internet’s “good times” that I can keep making things for a while and people will still care (for now). But when young people ask for advice on how to map out a career in media or the arts I don’t know what to tell them. My instinct is to break it to them that the door has already closed and they’re fucked. But I bite my tongue because creative people will always find workarounds. They adapt. New opportunities and mediums will pop up. It will just be a matter of utilizing them before the rich assholes find them and sink their claws in.
As for the future of Twitter itself, I don’t know. I doubt most people care what happens to it. I think the average person believes Twitter reached its logical conclusion back in 2014 when Ellen posted that selfie with all those celebrities that got a million likes. Like Twitter was a silly little video game and we’d beaten it so they could move on to Fruit Ninja.
I personally am no longer interested in sharing my work or even anything that might remotely hold any value there. If anything, I want the opposite. I want to purposefully tank the site into the ground. I want to use my account to post daily pictures of overflowing porta potties to my 40,000 followers. I want to retweet Teletubby porn all day. I want my account to be the Twitter equivalent of a dead rat with its eyes Xed out. There is no bottom here. I hope this motherfucker loses every dime of the $44 billion he put into it. He deserves whatever hell awaits. I will probably ride it out to the end, just to see. The place has been on fire since this fuckface bought it. Might as well watch him get engulfed in flames like one of his shitty rockets.
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