My last tweet
#ClimateTwitter is not a movement. It’s a computer game.
This post goes out to anyone who ever followed or read me on Twitter: I’m sorry. Honestly, I apologize for contributing to the inhuman morass, the social train wreck, the cultural catastrophe that the platform has become. While I may have been far from the worst offender (and received my share of hostile fire), I am truly sorry for any suffering I caused to my fellow humans.
This hardly counts as earth-shaking news, but as I recently wrote to friends and colleagues, I’ve decided to stop tweeting — like, seriously — for reasons mentioned in various tweets (of course!) in the past week. This is something I’ve been considering for a long time, and what finally inspired me to call it quits was my climate-movement comrade Tim DeChristopher’s announcement that he’s leaving Twitter. I admire Tim’s decision, and what he says in his farewell thread resonates deeply with me, especially this:
“But the biggest factor, by far, is the way that twitter has colonized my mind, stifling my creativity with fear and self-consciousness. … I’ve had countless ideas that I wanted to try, and thoughts I wanted to share, but instead I swallowed and killed those ideas with an obsessive concern over how the hive mind of twitter would respond.”
That’s exactly it — or a very large part of it. As I tweeted in response to Tim, if I had to choose three words to describe Twitter and the culture it feeds, and feeds upon, “stifling,” “fear,” and “self-consciousness” (or absorption) would come pretty close. Indeed, it’s not only Twitter that I’ve wanted to quit. It’s our self-obsessed media culture as it currently exists.
I’ve known for a long time that I needed to liberate myself from this drain on my productivity and my mental/emotional health — and to stop contributing to the harm that’s being done. And I sense that this is an issue a lot of us in the climate and other movements — as well as the media generally — need to address. I’ve come to agree with those who believe that Twitter (and, yes, Facebook, though I don’t use it) is a drag on our social movements and, broadly speaking, a tragedy for political and cultural discourse. Yes, if you’re an activist and/or writer, it can be a useful communication tool — if the people you want to communicate with are like-minded — and yes, I’ve experienced those all-too-rare moments of genuine human connection that are possible even on Twitter. But we have to acknowledge that these benefits come with huge personal costs for a great many people, which then translate into collective costs. We need more and different forms of communication, including some of the old-fashioned, off-line ones that movements (and writers) have used for decades, even centuries. We could begin with a good bit more face-to-face, person-to-person interaction — and a lot more collective action.
All I know is, #ClimateTwitter is not a movement, it’s a computer game. And it’s one we’ll never win.
So, yes, I’ve written my last tweet — but that’s not all.
At the same time, I’ve finally (!) set up my own personal website, so that I’ll have a presence other than my Twitter profile. (Yes, it’s only 2019, and yes, I only started working as a web editor/producer back in 1995, when I co-created TheAtlantic.com, but this is my first personal site — and it ain’t much!). The site may well evolve over time. Who knows! For now, it’s simply a landing page with my bio and an ongoing archive of my work.
However… there is one particular part of the site I’d like to call attention to: I’ve also posted a curated selection of my essays, which I call “Learning to Live in the Dark,” the title of the long personal essay I wrote for Los Angeles Review of Books about reading Hannah Arendt in the time of Trump and climate catastrophe. Of course, if I were to publish this selection as a book (unlikely, but not entirely out of the question, I suppose), there are things I’d update and tweak in many of the essays, but for now I’m interested in how people respond to it as a selection.
In any case, I’m pretty certain I’m going to be more productive and active (as in, action) as a result of my decision to leave the tweeting to … here it comes … the birds.
Thanks for reading.
