The People vs David Hundeyin: A Story About Social Media in 2019
By David Hundeyin
It all started with that tweet.
And now the Clane app is my new safe space because Twitter clearly isn’t that anymore.
Normally I do not make reference to my divorce on any of my social media because I sense that it is still very much a taboo topic. In fact, I was initially so paranoid about being known as “the divorced guy” back in October, that a friend of mine had to sit me down and take me through a list of successful Nigerian men who have gone through separation and divorce. That helped a bit, but not much.
Then something started happening on Twitter. Maybe it was after I had done a few heavy-hitting columns for Business Day and The Scoop, and suddenly my opinion became a ‘thing.’ I was the same as I ever was, but suddenly people found me interesting. You could take a cross section of my tweets from 2015 and put them next to those from last week, and they look exactly the same, discussing the same topics in the same language. But now, courtesy of the inscrutable gods of Twitter, I would tweet the same “Buhari is a rubbish president” tweet from 2016, and 100, 200, 1,000 people would retweet it for no goddamn reason like…
I think the least attractive term in the entire English lexicon is “influencer.” I loathe that word and every bit of self-important Nigerian cultural baggage attached to it. That horrible label, used to describe the entire spectrum of everything I find awful about Nigerian Twitter, from Japheth Omojuwa to catfish accounts posting photos of big-breasted South African ladies captioned “Sco pa tu mana?” is everything I could never be. So how could I deal with this unexpected following without becoming that thing I hated so much?
The One-Man Band Man
A few weeks ago, I sat down for a one-on-one coaching and strategy session with an old friend who now runs corporate communications for some of the biggest fish in Nigeria. The main purpose of the session was to outline how to bring the two halves of my career together without scraping each other. On the one hand, I write extremely serious, technical, research-heavy stuff for a number of clients, some of whom I am contractually forbidden from naming because they apparently are that important. On the other hand, I’m also a free-spirited pop-culture commentator who swears like a merry sailor and tries to tweet-shame Vector Tha Viper into listening to an instrumental I made for him a year ago.
Serious David writes for Business Day and pays the bills and oversees a small real estate portfolio, while Funny Dave doesn’t do deadlines, loves Liverpool FC like a woman, and can be a bit of an ass, except for the fact that the stuff he creates is so much goddamn fun. Back when I was a writer on The Other News, Serious David and Funny Dave could coexist because Funny Dave’s output was bringing home a good half a million Naira worth of bread every month. Since I left Channels TV, Serious Dave had to pick up the slack and replace that income with lots of newsy, analytical stuff, while Funny Dave just makes music on FL Studio, does lots of “LOL” tweets and watches a ton of Netflix at night when Serious David should be working.
Over brunch at Orchid Bistro, my friend-turned-mentor advised me to cut out Funny Dave’s antics on Twitter because Serious David’s clients inside the boardroom don’t like entrusting their content development strategy to a loose cannon who curses people out and shows his full ass on the internet. Regardless of how brilliant David is, she said, David is replaceable. So I would need to find a way to remain genuine and original without, you know…being genuine and original. Like that was ever gonna happen.
The Brilliant Idea And What Happened Next
It worked for a while. Funny Dave even made a cameo inside one of Serious David’s Business Day columns, comparing President Buhari to Thanos (haq haq haq haq) in what was a genuine political and economic analysis, but otherwise was an inside joke (it was so damn funny as well). I was able to comment on serious conversations and switch between both personas seamlessly, without getting any backlash from a stern-faced corporate client.
And then I saw a video of some American dude being assaulted by his ex-girlfriend and I quoted it randomly like, “LOL this reminds me of…” You know how that tweet ended. Some guy replied saying he could relate, and we had a nice little back and forth. No biggie, just two dudes sharing a man hug on a low-traffic Twitter thread that nobody would see anyway. Five, maybe 10 retweets tops.
Instead, what happened was that after I went away to work on something for about an hour, I came back and met my Twitter mentions on fire. Said thread now had 500+ retweets and counting. What are you doing? Why are you retweeting this?! Stop retweeting! It’s gonna look like I’m using my platform to settle scores with my ex-wife! Oh my god, what is wrong with you people?! 700 retweets? Oh sh*t a blue tick just quoted the tweet with a ‘shocked’ emoji. How far has this thing gone?! If I delete it, it’s gonna make me look worse, and people will have screenshots anyway. Lemme check the analytics…80,000 impressions! Laaaaakullilahi! What have I done?! Sweet Black Jesus what are they saying in my mentions?
“Are you a pig?”
“I would want to stab you too!”
“No wonder she left you! Animal!”
“I feel like stabbing you right now!”
“OMG an entire pig, Jesus send help!”
“Wait, are some people actually saying he deserved it?! What is wrong
with you people?!”
“These feminists are just bitter men-haters and this thread proves it.”
“She what?! Thank God you got out in one piece!”
“Men really are the worst. Look at this pig!”
“I’m holding myself from talking, but David is no victim.”
“I’m the mother of the girl in question-”
*block, don’t finish reading*
“He’s controlling the narrative. We haven’t heard her side.”
I wasn’t sure how to react, so I muted the thread and went to sleep. It’s just Twitter after all, so when everyone wakes up they will move on to another topic. At the end of the day, it’s really not that deep. When you people get tired of talking, you’ll go to sleep. When you wake up, Buhari will still be your president (haq haq haq haq).
You can imagine what happened of course. I didn’t even wake up to a storm because my phone actually rang to wake me up. An old friend in the UK whom I haven’t spoken to in over a year was on the phone. Was I OK, he wanted to know. He saw something with my name and photo on Instablog.
Instablog? THE Instablog? Oh my…what even is going on?
Sure enough, there was my “rant,” edited and stripped of context. Some lady jumped into my Twitter inbox and asked me to defend myself because they said that I married for my career, so I never actually loved her. She could easily have looked at the tweet herself, but hey, “they said” whatever it was that they said. The narrative uber alles.
At this point I had an epiphany.
Twitter is Craiglist or Backpage.com With Retweets and Blue Ticks
It doesn’t actually matter whether Serious David is having a conversation on his latest opinion editorial about the CBN’s unsustainable monetary policy, or whether Funny Dave is replying “haq haq haq haq, eventuarry”to a question about when the president will name his cabinet. Nobody actually cares. Those of us designated as “somebodies” on social media are merely the internet’s version of hookers for hire on Backpage or Craiglist. People come to our pages, they look around, they like what they see, they take a ride in our mentions and quotes, drop a like, retweet or comment as ‘payment,’, and they go back to their lives. No ‘conversation’ on Twitter is going to change anybody’s position on anything.
Everyone has taken sides on whatever issue the ‘conversation’ is, so if I imagine I am “shaking Nigerian table,” it’s just me suffering from malaria fever apparently.
Since nobody is actually listening to anything on Twitter anyway, I realised there is no point participating in conversations there. From today on, the only place for Funny Dave to exist in all his glorious impishness is right here on the Clane App. My Twitter handle is henceforth going to be a “links and retweets” handle. Whoever really wants my thoughts and takes badly enough can shoot me an email and I will respond — if I’m in the mood.
This will be the place to read my daily musings from here on in. If social media must still have its pound of clout from me, at least I’ll be getting paid for it this time.
