When the Herd Gets Absurd
Reports of Twitter’s death are being greatly exaggerated.
As of this writing, discourse among the American social-media sodden millions is at a point of unique incoherence. At bedtime last night, the flock swerved in unison to demonstrate that it had absorbed the Latest Message: that Twitter was about to crash permanently in some sort of technological apocalypse, a righteous firestorm brought upon the apostate Elon Musk for his undefined sins.
So people were creating a new genre in a sort of anti-creativity based on state-of-the-art groupthink: the “last tweet,” which bundled together the conformist TV dinner tray combining hate of Musk, loathing of Twitter by extension, a white-washed nostalgia for the halcyon pre-Musk days of the platform, faith in the moment’s latest alarmist news story, and, above all, the frantic need to be seen as on the razor’s edge of acceptable thinking among the select.
There have been the usual sub-genres. Proclamations never to use Twitter again, either paradoxically done for likes and attention on Twitter, or in a bit of addictive jujitsu, to rally the herd to reconstruct the Twitter experience on another platform.
There has been the comical exodus to something called Mastodon, which apparently is going to rescue the Blue Tribe from the frothing, torch-bearing hordes of bigotry and violence that have taken residence in the Progressive imagination. There’s nothing like social media posts about the unusability of a new platform (whose only selling point is the Promised Land of all-like-thinking users) to lay bare a mind totally in thrall to both digital simulacrums and the invisible binky of life in the psychic herd.
The rot runs deep. How else to explain front-page headlines about all of this nonsense, other than that the laptop class truly feels that its navel-gazing obsessions are the stuff of flesh-and-blood crisis? How else to watch emotive declarations that they are truly done with Twitter, written on Twitter, updated by the hour to take in the latest non-development?
Want to be done with Twitter? Delete it. Permanently. Never go back and check on how it’s doing. Don’t use your job as an excuse for scrolling. Free yourself from the daily think pieces on Musk and his doings. Unwire your mind from the limbic jacking-in.
Think that’s going to happen? If not, how is it that Twitter is going to “die”? Will anyone even remember today’s hysteria when the next Latest Thing relegates it to the memory hole? Are we ever going to be serious about anything again?
