I deleted my Twitter and became a cunt. Conventional wisdom suggests the opposite should be true. Twitter is a toxic place full of toxic people posting toxically; these people, it’s widely remarked, are cunts: they are mean; they are judgmental; in their words, they are haters. But most people on Twitter are not haters. They neither hate Twitter nor most of the things they claim to hate in their tweets — generally, when you hate something, you don’t do it, but these people do Twitter and much more besides: they watch shows they hate; they listen to music they hate; they talk to people they hate; it’s true they don’t read books they hate, but that’s less because they hate them and more just they don’t read. A few of them do present as writers, and at least based on our working theory of hating, they do actually seem to hate writing because outside of their tweets, they don’t really do it, and if they do, well, love wins: these people are capable of stretching their tweets into articles, reviews, essays, “pieces,” even novels, even scholarly works of criticism. When you write for Twitter, the intended genre does not matter: it will always end up Phone.
A common phenomenon one can observe on Twitter is that of the “hit dog hollering.” For those with an aversion to understanding the world through the lens of American idiom, allow me to explain: when I (cunt) say something disrespectful about an abstract category of person (Twitter user), and a specific Twitter user (fragile) reacts by thinking I am specifically talking about them, they then feel the need to defend themselves, usually offensively, usually by attacking me, an easy target, admittedly. This voluntary self-owning is the lifeblood of Twitter, and when I was unwell and terminally online, I made the following meme to argue this:
This is to say, I speak to you now with the zeal of a convert: what I am doing with this essay is trying to set both my past online self and the various social and professional bridges I built online (real) on fire in the hopes that at least one other person comes to actually believe something they no doubt already know: that every single second spent on that atrocious website is a second wasted — there are good parts of Twitter, but nothing you couldn’t find or create for yourself offline.
Of course, I use the name Twitter, and not X, because I believe the atrociousness of the website long precedes its acquisition by Elon Musk, which is also why I am letting you know that I am (dialectically) using the name Twitter to refer to other text-based, infinite scroll social media websites like Bluesky, Substack’s Notes, Mastodon, etc. — I’ll leave Instagram and TikTok to the visual arts girlies, but I suspect many of the things I am saying about Twitter apply there too. Anywho, at this point in the essay, I have all but exhausted the appeal of this calculatedly bitchy literary persona — if not for you, then certainly for me — so let me (sweetie, generally) make one more demand: if you are a writer, and you are on Twitter, and you are in any way taking the project of being on Twitter seriously — which, unless you are acclaimed American writer and genuinely peerless poster Joyce Carol Oates, you almost certainly are — then I invite you to consider the following: the work is supposed to speak for itself; Joyce Carol Oates’ does, which is why she posts like that; does yours?
As you noodle on that one, let’s move on to close reading. My favorite piece of internet culture is the following paragraph of text, which was originally part of the oral tradition, in the sense that it was a series of voice notes, but has since become what is known as a “copypasta,” or something that people share a lot in different contexts. The original context is that this is a response to someone replying to the speaker’s Instagram story and asking where he got a meal, to which he replies:
i find mfs like u really interesting bro. i ain’t gon lie this spot is kinda like a personal thing to me you get what i’m saying. it’s just like a personal vibe u feel me. what’s really crazy is you wouldn’t even wanted this if u ain’t see me post it u get what i’m saving. i don’t even think u really hungry like that tbh bro. so go ahead find yourself something to eat bro go open your fridge bro this not the fridge this the internet u get what i’m saying. this shit taste insane though shit wild seafood pasta uk what i’m saying this shit market price u feel me shit i wish i could put u on but its really a personal vibe u know. i bring my loved ones here so u know what i’m saying u be easy bro
Let’s go line by line.
i find mfs like u really interesting bro.
Amazing opening. What I love about this, of course, is that he says “mfs” plural. Here he has both subsumed the specific mf annoying him into a larger genre of people and also, by doing only this, denied them any of their individuality, thus obliterating this specific person’s humanity, as surely much of the work of being human is found in the negotiation between our abstract group identities and our own concrete particularity.
i ain’t gon lie this spot is kinda like a personal thing to me you get what i’m saying.
Amazing follow up. You, he had said earlier, are only generic, whereas I, he says here, am also concrete and particular — I have personal things.
it’s just like a personal vibe u feel me.
They were already dead, diva! The double tap! Insane!
what’s really crazy is you wouldn’t even wanted this if u ain’t see me post it u get what i’m saving.
Here he grabs hold of the crux of the matter: the internet, as a cultural and social space, runs on mimesis. You see someone else do something; you want to be the kind of person that does those things; you either do the literal thing they do, or — if you have some artistic ambition — you try to become them in a different context. (The latter maneuver is fine. It’s good. It’s literally how being a person works. You just see a lot of people on the internet who are really bad at it.)
i don’t even think u really hungry like that tbh bro.
I logged off right when people started saying “truth nuke” a lot. Is this a truth nuke? The reality of the situation is that if they were hungry like that, they would simply not be doing whatever it is that they are doing now — see, for example, those who claim they want nothing more in life than to be a Serious Literary Writer, and yet their daily screen time is a number of hours that, were it the age of a person, would suggest that person is entering puberty.
so go ahead find yourself something to eat bro go open your fridge bro this not the fridge this the internet u get what i’m saying.
Literally the most important piece of advice you can give anyone on the internet: please, please, please — please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please — decide what to do with your life based on the concrete particulars of the real actual life you are really actually living. Look in your fridge. Look! In! Your! Fridge! You cannot cook a meal with ingredients you do not have. You cannot eat food you cannot touch. Life is sacred: please live your life trying to do the things you can actually do. You can do much more than you think you can. But there are things you cannot do. Being an adult is figuring out what these are. And while I’m here, let’s talk about the single most annoying aspect of Twitter, and that is the culture of learned helplessness that pervades it: if you use Twitter, you have encountered this in so many different forms: a Twitter user will make a criticism that suggests someone needs to do something, literally anything, differently, and another Twitter user will come up with a reason they cannot do literally anything in their life differently. For example, you should probably clean your room sometimes, but maybe you, like me, are quite mentally ill (not a joke; I do have serious diagnoses). Therefore, it is ableist to ask you to clean your room, and you are politically entitled not to do it. As another example, you, like I once was, are an aspiring novelist, and thus you need to write novels. But that pesky capitalist publishing industry refuses to give you (who has never written a novel) a six figure advance, despite the manifest literary brilliance blazing through your tweets, so you have to go get another job, something which might keep you fairly busy. Here though, we do have to get a little more concrete. If you are a single mother of two working two exhausting jobs to put a roof over your lovely family’s head, and thus do not have time for novels, I am very sympathetic; if you are a childless yuppie working a remote job in a large metropolitan area, and you are also logging screen time that, were it the age of a person, would suggest that that person is eligible to be Bar or Bat Mitzvah’d (around 13, for you non-Jews), well! The reason a culture of learned helplessness pervades Twitter is that ultimately, if you spend a lot of time on your phone, the things you think about the world — regardless of how much you claim to hate spending time on your phone — will be warped by the need to, one way or another, justify the project of spending a lot of time on your phone. Look: you can do much more with your life than you think you can. I promise you this is the case, and the fact that you have not done it does not make you “ontologically evil;” it is not an occasion to feel shame or guilt; it is not a reason to want to go kill yourself. It is an opportunity to improve your own life and the life of all of those around you. You can do this through hard work, and if you are also doing good work, you will feel better about yourself and your life because you will be doing good work. And you’ll know when you’re doing good work. You will feel it. I promise. I really do.
this shit taste insane though shit wild seafood pasta uk what i’m saying this shit market price u feel me shit i wish i could put u on but its really a personal vibe u know.
Flex on them! Market price! I feel you! Ahhhhhh: beautiful. Love it. This guy was cooking!
i bring my loved ones here so u know what i’m saying u be easy bro
And that’s so true and real and tea and facts and also all, folks: love wins. Love! Wins!